Transitions in WPF

Question

I really want to make rich applications which also include transitions, this way I can fit more on one window by fading out parts that I don't need and fading in parts I do.

But I don't know how to achieve this, I have read some tutorials on the net but they are quite hard to understand.

Maybe the great Stackoverflow community can provide an easy method which will allow me to achieve this?

I am using Expression Blend 3 and VS2010 RC for all my development, but will mainly be focusing on Blend for everything apart from advanced coding.

Thanks

Answer 1

If you're into Blend (I am, good choice!) I would recommend Visual State Manager over various transition presenters (in Transitionals, FluidKit, Bag-O-Tricks, etc). VSM is supported by Blend natively and it is quite easy to design transitions in there.

The difference is that transition presenters fit more nicely into MVVM style of programming - you're flipping the ViewModel, and the presenter automatically does the switching the UI, animating the process as a side effect. With VSM, transitions are more the primary goal than a side effect.

Answer 2

The easy way to do this would be to use a library like Transitionals. It provides a content control that you can just set your content, and when you change the content (manually or via data binding), it does the transition for you.

If you want to see how it works, I'd look at the source code - since it's open source, you have full access to see (at least this) one approach.

Answer 3

You might also want to look at transition effects which ship as part of Blend SDK. You can also build custom TransitionControl, here is a good post.