Silverlight 4: how to highlight control on mouse over - silverlight

My aim is to get fine control "animation" when it is mouse-over-ed. For example, I have a "map" of controls (game map that represent different type of terrain), each of them is an image with trees/rocks/hills on the green grass or water (lake or see) image of blue/cyan color. When user point any image with mouse it should get shiny: either get more bright background or get a shiny border.
It is hard to say what exactly I want to have (either background change or border), I would like to try each of them and see what is the most appropriate for me.
I am going to have a custom control (MapTile) that will represent a map tile. I know how to catch MouseEnter/MouseLeave events, but not sure how to change control style and if it is a good idea to work with control style in CodeBehind, probably there are better XAML-based solutions.
Could you please help with a solution that provide few goals:
Goal1: Add highlighted border around the control (it will be squares/rectangles, or circles; use what is easier) on mouse enter, remove border on move leave;
Goal2: Change some properties of my CustomControl (for example, background color).
Thank you very much!
1. How to han

You might find it easiest to get hold of Expression Blend and use it to create a custom template for your control.
The Learn Expression Blend page would be a good place to start. Look for tutorials on customising buttons and this is the same sort of thing that you want to do.

You need to use an attached behavior on your control. You don't need to learn Blend for this.
Check this one as an example, but you can search the site for Mouse Over for other examples.
http://gallery.expression.microsoft.com/en-us/MouseOver3D

Related

Change border brush from skyblue in wizard control of extended wpf toolkit

I'm using Wizard control of Extended wpf toolkit package.
I would like to change color of the border. See sky blue in image below:
I tried set broder brush\background to wizard\wizard page\window controls, but it failed.
Anybody know how to change it?
Your assistance is appreciated!
Now that you have provided more info, I can see that your question title does not match what you asking to change. You are not asking to change the color of the border of the Wizard Control, you are asking to change the color of the WPF Window.
It takes some time to get things right, and I highly discourage doing this if you app will be used by people with disabilities, who need high contrast, who customized their desktop to a certain color because of color blindness, and the list goes on...Microsoft has worked very hard to address such issues with the defaults.
BUT...you can change this by restyling your Window Style. You can find plenty of code examples.
Here are two:
Can i set the window border color in WPF?
How can I style the border and title bar of a window in WPF?

Image glimmer or sparkle animation

I've been searching for awhile, but haven't been able to find anything. I'd like to be able to add kind of a glimmer or sparkly animation on an image element in wpf.
Essentially the effect here I'm after here is the same that you get with trading cards that are "foil's".
I'd like to have an image, and then be able to add this animation to it at will. I'm thinking maybe some kind of user control, or template possibly. Hopefully generic enough that I can just toss an image at it and it will just overlay the image and run.
Any ideas?
A simple construction that easily can be turned into a control is by nesting the image in a Grid and adding a second Grid (on top) as a sibling.
De second grid can be given a linear gradient brush that is primarily transparent but does contain a white glimmer.
This brush can be animated; you could move it and change the opacity of the grid/brush.
This way you do not change the image.

Winforms semi-transparent PNG over semi-transparent PNG

I think I must be missing something obvious, but I'm unable to find this after several hours of searching. Is there no way to use a PictureBox or other control to contain an image with partial transparent/alpha-blended pixels, and place that over another image and have the blending be based on the image under it?
For example, this produces the results I want:
Place a panel on a form.
Add an OnPaint handler.
In the OnPaint handler draw 1 PNG, then draw another PNG over it, using Graphics.DrawImage for both.
This does not:
Place a PictureBox on a form and set it to a PNG.
Place another PictureBox on the form and set it to a PNG.
Place the 2nd picture box over the first.
...even if the 2nd picture box is just empty and has a background color of Transparent, it still covers the picture below it.
I've read this stems from all winform controls being windows, so by nature they aren't transparent.
...but even the 15 year old platform I'm migrating from, Borland's VCL, had several windowless controls, so it's hard to imaging winforms doesn't at least have some easy solution?
My first example above is one answer, true, but that adds a lot of work when you can only use one big panel and draw all of your "controls" inside of it. Much nicer if you can have separate controls with separate mouse events/etc. Even if not an image control, and a control I have to draw myself, that would be fine, as long as I can just put one image in each control. In VCL they called this a "paint box", just a rectangle area you could place on a form and draw whatever you want on it. Has it's own mouse events, Bounds, etc. If you don't draw anything in it, it is like it's not even there (100% transparent) other than the fact it still gets mouse events, so can be used as a "hot spot" or "target" as well.
The PictureBox control supports transparency well, just set its BackColor property to Transparent. Which will make the pixels of its Parent visible as the background.
The rub is that the designer won't let you make the 2nd picture box a child of the 1st one. All you need is a wee bit of code in the constructor to re-parent it. And give it a new Location since that is relative from the parent. Like this:
public Form1() {
InitializeComponent();
pictureBox1.Controls.Add(pictureBox2);
pictureBox2.Location = new Point(0, 0);
pictureBox2.BackColor = Color.Transparent;
}
Don't hesitate to use OnPaint() btw.
Sorry, I just found this... once I decided to Google for "winforms transparent panel" instead of the searches I was doing before, the TransPictureBox example show seems to do exactly what I need:
Transparency Problem by Overlapped PictureBox's at C#
Looks like there are 2 parts to it:
Set WS_EX_TRANSPARENT for the window style
Override the "draw background" method (or optionally could probably make the control style Opaque).

WPF: Changing the look of a Surface Listbox "click-effect"

I'm changing the look of some Controls that I use in my Microsoft Surface Application at the moment. And today I'm working on a SurfaceListBox.
I have the template for it and already changed background and borders and other stuff.
But I really cannot find where I can change the color of the rectangle that appears on the ListBoxItem when you touch the ListBox. At the moment it's just white and I want to change that.
It's not something like the effect that you can see when the item is selected. I already found that and changed that so my selected item now appears in a different color. But the effect in the second when you touch the item stays white.
So where can I change this effect?
If you mean the bright, white highlight that happens when you press your finger against an item you should look into the SurfaceShadowChrome. It's used by (almost) all surface controls to give feedback when the user is pressing on a control.
It does have a Color property that you can modify to suit your needs. Apart from the color, and the tweaking of corner radius and shadow offset, it's not a very flexible decorator. But hopefully, you'll be able to make it do what you need.

Is this a good case for use of RoutedCommand?

I have a WPF page that has 2 ContentControls on it. Both of the ContentControls have an image, one being much smaller than the other. When mouse over the larger image I want to show a zoomed in view on the smaller image. Something very similar to this: http://www.trekbikes.com/us/en/bikes/urban/soho/soho/.
I think I want the larger image control to send out something that actually contains an image - which the smaller image control would pick up and display. Would this be a good place to take advantage of RoutedCommands? Can I pass along an image like that?
RoutedCommands seem a bit misplaced in this case... you'll want the mouse to respond smoothly and the last thing you want are commands to be fired off here and there.
You're probably better off using a VisualBrush. While Ian Griffith's example here is a magnifying glass (an early canonical VisualBrush example in WPF) you could easily adapt it to show a portion of your image.

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