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Source: Dot Net Curry

This control is especially used for show progress on automated operations e.g. File Copy, Installation etc. In this short article, I will explain how to make use of the Progress Bar control for simulating file copy operation from source to the destination path.

Source: Alex Yakhnin's Blog

If you have seen the demo of the sample application "USGA Shot Tracker" that was created by the UX and design team at Microsoft to demonstrate the principles of the UX on WP7 platform, you have probably noticed how the app is displaying a splash screen with an animated progress bar. The problem is that the SplashScreenImage.jpg which is used in the WP7 applications is just a static image and a few people are wondering how this functionality could be achieved. I don't know how exactly it was done in this application, but this what I came up with.

The ProgressBar template for Silverlight that is built into the Windows Phone today looks beautiful but comes at a cost to performance in indeterminate mode (the animating dots that often indicate loading during an operation of unknown time).

Here I offer a workaround which is identical in looks, but with excellent performance. It uses the render thread exclusively for animation, instead of the UI (user interface) thread. I’ve touched on this previously in a post of performance and frame rate counters for the Windows Phone.

Introduction

Recently I have been working on a project, where a certain task's completion needs to be visually indicated in some graphic way. I settled on creating a style for the ProgressBar control, with a changing background color depending on the current value of the ProgressBar.

 HSV (Hue-Saturation-Value)

From Wikipedia :

"HSL and HSV are the two most common cylindrical-coordinate representations of points in an RGB color model, which rearrange the geometry of RGB in an attempt to be more perceptually relevant than the cartesian representation."

HSV is a different way of representing a color (as opposed to RGB, where R indicates a value from 0 to 255 that "controls the amount of red", G for green and B for Blue). Have a look at the link above for an in-depth discussion.

 The Databinding feature in Microsoft Expression Blend 3 allows this interaction without the need to write one of code.

We will take the design of our progress bar and set it’s width equal to the position of the video’s current position. To make this dynamic and without needing to write any code we will use the concept of Binding.

With the release of the Release Candidate version of Silverlight 2 three long awaited controls were presented - the PasswordTextBox, the ComboBox and the ProgressBar. Since the need of such controls were pretty big, a lot of custom controls were created and the existing ones have been extended in order to fill that need. Probably you've already read a couple of tutorials about creating your own ProgressBar control. We have also developed our own simple progress bar for the Voting control and I was ready to show it off in a separate article, but that's not necessary now. Instead of this we are going to take a look at the ProgressBar control that came with the release candidate and show some of its basic features.

Download source code