Animations: Sliding & Fading controls on a C# form (winforms)

Question

I'm trying to implement a way to animate (translate, fade) controls around (more than one at the same time possibly) elegantly. For example, lets say I had a picture in the top left corner, and a textbox in the bottom right corner, I'd like to be able to have them smoothly slide across the window and switch places. I've been working for awhile but have not come up with anything that achieves this smoothly or easily.

Answer 1

Check out the dot-net-transitions project on Google Code. There's now a clone on Github here. It's also available on nuget as dot-net-transitions. It supports a variety of linear/non-linear transitions including composite transitions that can be used for more complex effects such as ripple.

Here is a working sample that demonstrates your desired behavior:

var pictureBox = new PictureBox
    {
        ImageLocation = "http://icons2.iconarchive.com/icons/klukeart/summer/128/hamburger-icon.png",
        SizeMode = PictureBoxSizeMode.AutoSize
    };
var textBox = new TextBox
    {
        Text = "Hello World",
        Location = new Point(140, 140)
    };
var form = new Form
    {
        Controls =
        {
            textBox,
            pictureBox
        }
    };
form.Click += (sender, e) =>
    {
        // swap the Left and Top properties using a transition
        var t = new Transition(new TransitionType_EaseInEaseOut(1000));
        t.add(pictureBox, "Left", textBox.Left);
        t.add(pictureBox, "Top", textBox.Top);
        t.add(textBox, "Left", pictureBox.Left);
        t.add(textBox, "Top", pictureBox.Top);
        t.run();
    };
form.ShowDialog();

Answer 2

I recommend that you switch to WPF; that would make it far easier.

It is completely impossible to fade controls in WinForms; Windows controls cannot have opacity.
The closest you can get would be to render the control and its area on the form to a pair of bitmaps, then crossfade the bitmaps in a PictureBox using a ColorMatrix.

To slide controls in WinForms, you can use a Timer to gradually change the Top and/or Left properties of the controls and move them across the form. However, you'll get an annoying flicker, which is (AFAIK) impossible to remove.