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

Answer 1

You could do this in WinForms, with a great deal of effort, so I would have to second the recommendations to use WPF (which is essentially built for exactly this kind of thing).

Your main obstacle to doing this in WinForms is the fact that a control location is specified by integer, which means you can't set a control's Left property to 45.3425, for example. This basically makes smooth animation of controls (assuming you want movement that changes speeds and directions) completely impossible - you will get an unavoidable jerkiness of movement this way (I've tried, so I know).

As SLaks suggested, the only way to do this in WinForms would be to "fake" it by taking "snapshots" of each control. Basically, you would start with an invisible Bitmap the size of your form, drawn with the form's BackColor. You would then create the "snapshots" by calling DrawToBitmap() on each control you wish to animate, and create the movement effect by drawing the snapshots onto the canvas (System.Drawing can draw images with floating-point coordinates, avoiding the jerkiness of integer locations).

This is too much damn work, though. Just use WPF. :)

Edit: I should mention that it's actually easy to do something like this in WinForms, as long as you don't mind it looking awful and jerky and amateurish. My above comments refer to the difficulties of doing this well.