Creating animations

Animations are one of the most powerful ways to create a sense of smoothness in your applications. Animations shouldn't be abused, and you should use them carefully, to avoid overloading your applications with effects that, in the end, will just slow down the user workflow. However, when they are used in the right way, they can really enhance the user experience and make your application stand out from the others.

In Chapter 2, The Windows App SDK for a Windows Forms Developer, we have already seen a way to implement animations using storyboards. WinUI still supports storyboards, but it also includes a new and powerful animation engine, called Composition APIs. These APIs interact with a special layer called the visual layer, which is placed between the XAML layer and the native DirectX one, and gives you much more power compared to traditional animations. Animations executed on this visual layer, in fact, don't run on the UI thread, but on an independent...