Working with animation in Expression Blend

This is a short refresher tutorial that I have wanted to put out there for some time now regarding how easy it is to create animations in Expression Blend. The System.Windows.Media.Animation namespace provides quite a number of animation classes that can be confusing to a novice user.

Another issue to point out from the beginning is that there are many types of animations, and you can literally use them almost anywhere, including in styles and control templates. Also animations don’t have to be visuals; you can animate objects that are not part of the UI as long as they meet certain criteria. This is where Expression Blend comes into play! Expression Blend makes the process of figuring out the “what use” or “when to use what” simple and easy!

Create a basic animation project

Let’s create a simple basic animation in Expression Blend and then look behind the covers to see what Blend figured out for us!

    Start Expression Blend (Start –>All Programs–>Microsoft Expression–>Microsoft Expression
    Blend 4).
    Create a new project (File–>New Project, or from the Welcome screen, click New Project).
    On the New Project dialog box under Project Types, click select WPF as the project type then click WPF Application.
    Under Name, give the project a name, for instance “SimpleAnimation”
    Next choose a Location or go with the default, and also select C# as the development language.
    Click OK to create the project.
    Add an ellipse with no Fill.

Tip: use the Properties Inspector to remove the Fill.

8. With the ellipse object still selected convert the ellipse to a Path. Right click the ellipse object, then select Path, and click Convert to Path:

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