Creating everyday animations

After covering the wide range of animations that WPF provides, we can see that many of them were designed to enable us to perform animations that emulate real-world situations, rather than to animate form fields in a standard business application. As such, some of the techniques discussed in this chapter are inappropriate for use in our application framework.

However, this does not mean that we cannot create animations to use in our everyday applications. As long as we remember that less is more when it comes to animations in business applications, we can certainly build simple animations into our application framework. One of the best ways to encapsulate these basic animations in our framework is to write one or more custom-animated panels. Let's look at a simple example of an animated StackPanel.

using System; 
using System.Windows; 
using System.Windows.Controls; 
using System.Windows.Media; 
using System.Windows.Media.Animation; 
 ...