C# - Winforms - Animated Slideshow

Question

Well i am developing an application whose interface requires an animated slide show

and by animated slide show i means UI components placed together change their positions after regular intervals in a sliding (animated) fashion. Let me illustrate my idea with the following image,

_{(source: deviantart.com)}

in the image above there are three columns of UI components that i want to slide, what i could do is simply write a module to change x,y coordinates of the components that would give the animated slide effect but that does not work fine, because it is heave takes time in processing and all plus the coding will be complex and layer adjustment and all.

is there any slide show component on which instead of image i can place UI components

What are the other options i have or what is the right way to do it. Please need help.

Answer 1

Sounds like are looking for a carousel feature for you component. Winforms were not intended to be animated. Fortunately some companies have worked on products that support animaiton in this area but most are moving to the Silverlight and WPF platforms for those updated features. As a reader of MSDN Magazine I often come accross some interesting advertisements of Winform components that are quite interesting. Please take a look at this link. The cost of the product is quite high. Telerik Sample Applications using Carousel feature in Win Forms

Answer 2

In this scenerio it could also be possible to embed a flash player with a flash animation, using one of the many (commercial and free) xml-based slideshows avaible for flash. This one for example http://www.flshow.net/.

Answer 3

Also check out the following link to MSDN. It explains how you can reference the silverlight component as a COM object.

Using Silverlight in a Windows based application using COM