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Pete Blois has posted two very cool loading animations.

The approach that I put together is a custom control (StoryboardedProgressControl) which is a subclass of ProgressBar, but uses an Storyboard to represent the loading progress. To use it you just create an animation of what the loading progress should look like and it just seeks to the appropriate time. This way you can represent progress in anything which can be animated- colors, paths, etc.

Normally in a series you start with a simple example and article. For this series I need to start with a level 300-400 example because this article and code is for the Development Tools Ecosystem Summit presentation that Mark Boulter and I did. The presentation was on how to write a design-time assembly that could be shared between WPF and Silverlight custom controls. Part I of this post covers Feedback and Rating control, design-time assembly discovery, loading and metadata creation.

Kevin Dockx discusses a problem with collection properties being shared with all instances of your controls.

Last week, I was helping out one of our clients with their Silverlight application.  An application which uses custom controls.  One of which contained a collection that seemed to behave as a singleton instead of on an instance level…  I remembered the problems I faced with this before, already thinking we wouldn’t find a solution to keep this collection dynamic.  However, I started searching around again, and lo and behold, it wasn’t long before I found this page on MSDN, describing the exact problem we were facing AND offering a reason and solution. 

For his recent visualization, Matthias Shapiro creates a custom control in Silverlight that animates the color of a Path every time a “Fill” property on the control is changed.

First thing I learned was that you cannot use TemplateBinding in a Storyboard (I think). I asked this question on Stack Overflow and I haven’t gotten an answer. But I’m pretty sure that in Silverlight you cannot use TemplateBinding to attach a property to a KeyFrame value. This means that you have to have a pointer in the control code the allows access to the KeyFrame so you can update the value. I’ll walk through the conceptual part of animating a property in a Custom Control in Sivlerlight and then walk through the code to it.

There are basically five steps in creating a PART. I think you can actually do it in less, but I’m trying to follow what I think is proper coding practice. In this tutorial, we’re going create parts out of a Button and also a Storyboard (partly because there are different ways to assign a PART if it is in located in the control resources like a Storyboard is).

Although you can not animate between Brushes during different States, this tutorial demonstrates how to animate Colors to create a similar effect.

Over the next few posts, I’d like to occasionally share my thoughts on this topic, and whatever tips seem pertinent at the time of posting.

I do admit that there’s a lot of flexibility in control development, so I’ll be basing a lot of my tips on both official and unofficial practices on the Silverlight Toolkit team. And I understand if you don’t agree with everything I have to say. But I do hope this information will be useful!

In some cases, especially when developing rich UI application developer need to identify which control were clicked or under mouse pointer at some point of time or just under some coordinate at the UI. For those purposes Silverlight provides “FindElementsInHostCoordinates” function in VisualTreeHelper class.

The function gets the Point (coordinate on the screen) or Rect (rectangular area) and UIElement which will be checked recursively to have any visual child's in desired coordinate/area. The function returns IEnumerable<UIElement>. 

Imran Shaik demonstrates how to use TemplateVisualState attributes to allow manipulation of visual states in your controls.

In Silverlight 2.0/Expression Blend 2 SP1 creating a new VSM state was pretty straight forward, either for a UserControl or Custom Control a new Visual State could have been created by just clicking on create a new Visual state group, similarly XAML could have been manually editing the XAML.

In Blend 3.0/Silverlight 3.0 you can still create visual states the old way for UserControls but for custom controls this option becomes disabled/unavailable.