Extending the User Interface

Abstract

We’ve covered a lot of ground so far, but now it’s time to pull our focus back from the details of the supporting infrastructure and revisit building user interfaces in Silverlight. Silverlight provides a rich set of classes to perform 2D drawing, including lines, Bezier curves, and various geometrical figures such as ellipses and rectangles. Next, we’ll take a look at the newly introduced perspective transformation for developing 3D effects, pixel shaders, and brushes, both of which provide a great deal of control in how elements are presented on an interface. Any element inheriting from UIElement can have a transform applied to it—you can create some interesting video presentations, for example, by skewing or growing/shrinking a video. You can use specific brushes to fill surfaces with images or video and other effects such as gradients. We will end the chapter with Silverlight 3 Save File dialog box, the Accordion control, and the Silverlight Child Window template to develop richer and simplified user interface and functionality.