Chapter 18. Graphics and effects
This chapter covers
- Creating basic shapes and geometries
- Painting with brushes
- Working with effects
- Creating pixel shader effects
In previous chapters, you’ve seen interesting controls that include text, rectangles, and sometimes even more complex shapes. Even the lowly button, for example, has text, a couple of rectangles, and a gradient background. Controls such as the popup ChildWindow control have drop shadows to enhance their appearance and help them stand out in the eyes of the user. Those buttons and other controls use vector graphics, brushes, and effects.
Graphics within Silverlight are vector-based; they’re mathematically based objects. They’re ideal for Internet distribution because vector-based graphics can be condensed to a smaller file size than their raster counterparts for images larger than a thumbnail.
Vector-based graphics are more than eye candy—they’re an extension to accessibility. In traditional application environments, users with diminished eyesight generally have to squint to absorb visual content such as text and icons. Through scalability, these same users can fully enjoy your application with ease. Vector graphics retain full fidelity when scaled up, something you can’t say about bitmap images. Vectors actually improve in quality when scaled up.