Applying Animation

You may wish to consider applying some animation effects to your user interface to give it a bit of additional flair. Animations, such as page transitions, can add pizzazz to your application and add to its “wow” factor.

However, you should use animations sparingly, so you do not distract users from their primary task when using your application. Animation can impress the user the first couple of times but can quickly become an annoyance. You must be particularly aware of this issue when developing business applications, as users will often spend considerable time in their working day with the application, and poorly implemented animations get old quickly. Transition animations should be fast and should not slow the user's interaction with the application.

Animations use storyboards to define the times at which various parts of the animation start and stop. Silverlight then handles the process of getting from one frame to another between the animation's start and stop times.

Creating animations is a huge topic and beyond the scope of this book, although we will take another brief look at them when we create a Wait Indicator custom control in Chapter 13. If you are creating animations, Expression Blend is an essential tool to help you with this task, as it provides a lot of functionality geared toward designing animations.