Lesson 30 - Animations in C# .NET - Storyboard, Basic & Frame Animations

In the last lesson, WPF - Templates , we learned how to create a ControlTemplate and DataTemplate and we showed simple examples of their use.

WPF provides a powerful set of graphical features that we can use to "tune" our applications and give them a nice look. One option is to use animations. In a few lessons we'll gradually explain:

• how to define animations
• where to define animations
• how to run animations

WPF Animations And C# Properties

Before we start creating animations, we must say that animations in WPF work on the principle of animating property values. This means that we change a value of some property over time. The property must meet the following conditions:

• It must be a Dependency Property
• It must belong to a class that inherits from DependencyObject and implements the IAnimatable interface

How to define animations - Storyboard

Animations are realized using scenarios (Storyboard). It's a time container that contains information about which element an animation applies to, what its property we animate and, of course, the definition of its animation.

Storyboard Example

Here is an example of such a scenario. It's very basic, but we'll show a complete demonstration in a moment. An animation scenario might look like this:

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