Investigating timelines
Animations require some kind of timing mechanism that is responsible for updating the relevant property values at the right time. In WPF, this timing mechanism is catered for by the abstract Timeline
class, which in short, represents a period of time. All of the available animation classes extend this class and add their own animation functionality.
When a Timeline
class is used for animations, an internal copy is made and frozen, so that it is immutable. Additionally, a Clock
object is created to preserve the runtime timing state of the Timeline
object and is responsible for the actual timing of the animated property updates. The Timeline
object itself does little other than define the relevant period of time.
The Clock
object will be automatically created for us when we define a Storyboard
object, or call one of the Animatable.BeginAnimation
methods. Note that we do not typically need to concern ourselves with these Clock
objects directly, but it can be helpful to...