Animating Silverlight controls

Silverlight provides many built-in controls. It also empowers the developers to create their own controls – so called custom controls. Even the built-in Silverlight controls can be fully re-styled with all of their visual parts replaced by the designer. In the following sections, you will see how to use the VisualStateManager concept in order to provide custom animations for a built-in Silverlight button and later for a custom button-like control.

Tools for animating controls

Here is some bad news and good news for the WPF developers: the bad news – Silverlight does not have a built-in property or data triggers to trigger a visual change within a style or a template; the good news – the MS Expression Blend SDK functionality to a large degree mitigates this deficiency by providing classes to replace missing triggers. DataTriggers can detect a change of property within a control and fire, for example, ChangePropertyAction – which can trigger some visual property...