Fading out an image with transparency in WinForms UI (.NET3.5)

Question

The application: I am writing a little game that would teach the user to read music notes. The game play is very simple. The app displayes a note and my little daughter (target user) should hit the emulated keyboard key on the WinForm GUI matching to the note. She has 1 minute to get as many good hits a she can. Successes and failures are counted.

The task: As she hits a good/bad keyboard key, I want to confirm immediately if she was right or wrong without interrupting the play. My plan is to show an OK or a FAILED bitmap that fades out gradually and becomes completely transparent within ~2 seconds. Fading the bitmap out is a nice way to encourage the user to concentrate on the next note and not to bother about the previous result anymore.

The technical question: How can I display a bitmap on a Windows Form with transparency? Or do you have alternative non-intrusive, easy-to-implement ideas on letting the user know of the current good/bad choice?

Answer 1

As dylantblack says, WPF gives you better tools to do this. If you choose to use Windows forms, here's a simple approach using a timer that fades the image out. Set up a timer with whatever frequency you like. Start the timer, increment alpha every time through, and draw white or whatever your form color is with increasing alpha channel value.

int alpha = 0;

...

private void timer1_Tick(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
    if (alpha++ < 255)
    {
        Image image = pictureBox1.Image;
        using (Graphics g = Graphics.FromImage(image))
        {
            Pen pen = new Pen(Color.FromArgb(alpha, 255, 255, 255), image.Width);
            g.DrawLine(pen, -1, -1, image.Width, image.Height);
            g.Save();
        }
        pictureBox1.Image = image;
    }
    else
    {
        timer1.Stop();
    }
}

Answer 2

In WinForms you'd need to use timers or something to animate the opacity of the OK or FAILED control to make it fade out, or do something similar using GDI+ to draw it manually.

If you're using .NET 3.5 anyway, I'd recommend using WPF, which is much easier for doing that sort of thing.

As an example, you can have a look at Scott Hanselman's Baby Smash app, which is open source and has a similar concept of fading things in and out.