Some Silverlight effects libraries

While you can do a lot within Silverlight with effects, as demonstrated by techniques used like seen in Shine Draw, you may also want some helping hands to implement these.  It’s not always fun to write some code for when you just want to be able to drop in an effect on your application.  You want to concentrate on your application logic and get assistance in creating some of the visual effects.

If you didn’t know, there are some libraries out there that can help.  I’ll highlight two of them here (if you know of more, please post in the comments).

SvLite Effects from Cellbi

This library from Cellbi provides various effects in their library that you can see on their demo site.  Included are:

• Carousel
• Wipe effects
• Tweens (easing, bounce)
• and some bonus effects/controls (modal window for example)

They are pretty interesting and you should check them out.

Silverlight.FX from Nikhil

Don’t know who Nikhil is?  Well for one he’s wicked smart.  He’s a principal architect at Microsoft working on a lot of different things and his work is seen in a lot of ASP.NET.  He’s implemented some effects into a library he calls Silverlight.FX.  Included effects/transitions are:

• Fade
• Highlight
• Shake
• Pulse
• Spin
• Resize
• Move
• Composite
• Cross-fade
• Blinds
• Slide
• Flip

You can view these in action on Nikhil’s sample page and read about the framework as well as download it here.  I’m always amazed at the stuff he comes up with.

So two pretty good effects libraries you can play around with.  Have fun!