Entries tagged with animation - Channel 9

Expert to Expert: Inside Bling - A C#-based library to simplify WPF programming

Charles — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 21:45:00 GMT

Bling is a C#-based library for easily programming images, animations, interactions, and visualizations on Microsoft's WPF/.NET. Bling is oriented towards design technologists, i.e., designers who sometimes program, to aid in the rapid prototyping of rich UI design ideas. Students, artists, researchers, and hobbyists will also find Bling useful as a tool for quickly expressing ideas or visualizations. Bling's APIs and constructs are optimized for the fast programming of throw away code as opposed to the careful programming of production code.

Some features of Bling:

Declarative constraints that maintain dynamic relationships in the UI without the need for complex event handling. For example, button.Width = 100 - slider.Value causes button to shrink as the slider thumb is moved to the right, or grow as it is moved to the left. Constraints have many benefits: they allow rich custom layouts to be expressed with very little code, they are easy animate, and they support UIs with lots of dynamic behavior.

Simplified animation with one line of code. For example, button.Left.Animate.Duration(500).To = label.Right will cause button to move to the right of label in 500 milliseconds.

Pixel shader effects without the need to write HLSL code or boilerplate code! For example, canvas.CustomEffect = (input, uv) => new ColorBl(new Point3DBl(1,1,1) - input[uv].ScRGB, input[uv].ScA); defines and installs a pixel shader on a canvas that inverts the canvas's colors. Pixel shading in Bling takes advantage of your graphics card to create rich, pixel-level effects.

Support for multi-pass bitmap effects such as diffuse lighting.

An experimental UI physics engine for integrating physics into user interfaces! The physics supported by Bling is flexible, controllable, and easy to program.

Support for 2.5D lighting.

A rich library of geometry routines; e.g., finding where two lines intersect, the base of a triangle, the area of triangle, or a point on Bezier curve. These routines are compatible with all of Bling's features; e.g., they can be used in express constraints, pixel shaders, or physical constraints. Bling also provides a rich API for manipulating angles in both degrees and radians.

And many smaller things; e.g., a frame-based background animation manager and slide presentation system.

As a lightweight wrapper around WPF, Bling code is completely compatible with conventional WPF code written in C#, XAML, or other .NET languages.

Sounds very interesting. Well, Erik and I wanted to find out more about Bling (Is it a library or a DSL? Is WPF programming really that hard? How is Bling designed and what makes it a simplified abstraction over a full featured platform technology like WPF?). It just so happened that Bling creator and software developer Sean McDirmid was in town recently (he works at Microsof's Advanced Technology Center located in Beijing, China). Tune in to see how the latest E2E unfolded (you must realize by now that we never really plan anything and E2Es just happen as you see them - it's just part of the game we play). Bling is an interesting idea with potential. Simplifying complexity is an important goal.

Enjoy.

Motion Capture Viewer in Silverlight

Adam Kinney — Tue, 26 May 2009 20:20:00 GMT

Nikola Mihaylov has posted a sample of his Silverlight-based Motion Capture Viewer. Its reading a traditional .BHV file for the movement and it looks pretty good. Source code is available too, if you want to see how he's doing it.

Druckbetankung - Die Show :: Silverlight 3 Teil IV

Jan Schenk — Thu, 14 May 2009 08:16:00 GMT

Im vierten Teil unserer Staffel Silverlight 3 der Serie "Druckbetankung - Die Show" erklären Oliver Scheer und ich das Thema Animation und Storyboarding in Expression Blend 3. Ausserdem kommt das Thema "Easing Functions" zur Sprache. Easing Functions erleichtern dank vorgegebener Bewegungsabläufe die natürliche Animation von Objektbewegungen.

Inside Windows 7: Animation Manager Deep Dive and Tutorial

Yochay Kiriaty — Fri, 08 May 2009 14:01:00 GMT

Smooth animations are fundamental to many graphical UI applications. Windows 7 introduces a native animation framework for managing the scheduling and execution of animations. The animation framework supplies a library of useful mathematical functions for specifying behavior over time and lets developers provide their own behavior functions. The framework supports sophisticated resolution of conflicts when multiple animations attempt to manipulate the same value simultaneously. An application can specify that one animation must be completed before another can begin and can force completion within a set time. The new framework also helps animations determine appropriate durations.

Watch Paul Kwiatkowski and Paul Gildea as they explain the programming model of the Windows Animation Manager and walk though some code demos that showcase the power of the Animation platform.

This is the second video in a series of videos about the Windows Animation Manager. The first video was Windows Scenic Animation Overview. Since then, we dropped “Scenic” from the name.

Windows Scenic Animation Overview

Yochay Kiriaty — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 17:28:00 GMT

Smooth animations are fundamental to many graphical UI applications, and Windows 7 introduces a native animation framework for managing the scheduling and execution of animations. The animation framework supplies a library of useful mathematical functions for specifying behavior over time and also lets developers provide their own behavior functions. The framework supports sophisticated resolution of conflicts when multiple animations attempt to manipulate the same value simultaneously. An application can specify that one animation must be completed before another can begin and can force completion within a set time. The new framework also helps animations determine appropriate durations

Watch Yochay Kiriaty, Windows 7 Technical Evangelist, and Windows Ribbon Scenic Animation product team members Paul Kwiatkowski and Paul Gildea as we explain Windows Scenic Animation, why we need it, and which components of Windows use this amazing technology. Paul also has few cool demos that show the real power of this technology.

For more technical content on Windows 7 and few cool code samples, go to the Windows 7 Blog for Developers.

Animation Using Expression Blend: How to make an animation follow a path

Jennifer Marsman — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 11:45:00 GMT

In Part 3 of the "Animation Using Expression Blend" series, Jennifer Marsman creates a spotlight animation that traverses in a slow circle using the Expression Blend tool.

Animation Using Expression Blend: How to start animations on events

Jennifer Marsman — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 04:45:00 GMT

In Part 2 of the "Animation Using Expression Blend" series, Jennifer Marsman walks through wiring up animations to start based on events using the Expression Blend tool.

Animation Using Expression Blend: How to create an animation

Jennifer Marsman — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 00:12:00 GMT

In Part 1 of the "Animation Using Expression Blend" series, Jennifer Marsman walks through creating DoubleAnimations and ColorAnimations using the Expression Blend tool.