Graphics

Abstract

We’ve covered a lot of ground so far demonstrating Silverlight’s capabilities to build rich user interfaces. 2D and 3D graphics play a vital role in developing rich user interfaces providing different effects. Silverlight provides a rich set of classes to perform 2D drawing, including lines, Bezier curves, and various geometrical figures such as ellipses and rectangles. We’ll take a look at transformations 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 or a composite transform (introduced in Silverlight 4) applied to it—you can create some interesting video presentations, for example, by skewing or growing/shrinking a video. Silverlight 3 introduced development of 3D effects using perspective transforms. We’ll also take a look at the support for brushes in Silverlight. You can use specific brushes to fill surfaces with images or video and other effects such as gradients.