Introduction to Blend: Animation - Page 4
       by kirupa  |  2 June 2007

In the previous page, you learned how to apply all of your work from the first two pages into creating a working animation. In this page, I will cover some details that, while not relevant to what was done in this tutorial, will come in handy when you are creating your own animations.

Loose Ends
When providing instructions, there are certain details that I did not emphasize in the main tutorial. This section contains some of those details that you may find useful.

Leaving and Entering the Recording Mode
In Blend, when modifying your timeline, you are known to be in the Timeline recording mode. You already know about the timeline that magically appears in your Timeline and Objects panel, and you may also have noticed a red box outlining your Artboard with the text "Timeline recording is on" surrounding your Artboard:

[ the Timeline recording indicator ]

You got into this mode when you decided to create a new timeline by pressing the plus button representing the action for creating a new timeline. If you want to leave the Recording mode, go back to your Objects and Timeline panel and click on the timeline drop-down menu to select the Default timeline:

[ selecting the Default timeline exits the Recording mode ]

When you select the Default timeline, you will no longer be in recording mode, but instead, be back in your default editing view. Likewise, to go back to the recording mode, you can either create a new timeline like you did in the previous page, or you can click on the same timeline drop-down menu and select the timeline you are interested in re-visiting.

Adding a Label Control without Specifying Size
Earlier, when you were adding the Label control, you drew a rectangle that set the boundaries of your label. When the text you were adding was larger than the space afforded by the Label control, your text would get cut off. I suggested resizing the control to make the text fully appear, but you really do not have to that.

You can actually draw a default sized Label control that automatically adjusts its dimensions based on the size of the text contained inside it. First, select the Label control like you did earlier:

[ select your Label control ]

After you have selected the Label control, your toolbox will now display the Label as one of the recently selected controls.

[ double click on the control to add it to your Artboard at the default size ]

You can double click on the Label control directly from the Toolbox. This time, the width and height of your control varies depending on the content inside it. This trick is not just limited to Labels, so feel free to use this approach on other controls as you see fit.

Conclusion
This introductory tutorial should provide you with the basic skills needed to create animations in WPF using Blend. There is a lot more to animation that was not covered in this tutorial, but subsequent tutorials will dig deeper into some more animation techniques that you will need to know.

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