Monday, November 28, 2011

How to Create a Simple Splash Screen in WPF

I have posted on this topic before, but I thought I would re-post with a step by step tutorial for those who are very new to wpf. Sorry to those of you who are more veterans. I will post more advanced topics soon, but this one’s for the newbies.

Here goes…

WPF makes creating a splash screen fairly simple. All you need to do is embed an image file into your project and change the Build Action on it.

Here is a step-by-step tutorial on how to do this.

Step 1) Create your application.
Here is the xaml for my very complicated application:

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Step 2) Add an image file to your application. PNG files with transparent backgrounds are supported and are often a good choice for splash screens. Here is the image I created in Photoshop… nice huh?

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Step 3) Right click on the image file in the solution explorer and click on Properties

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Step 4) Set the Build Action to SplashScreen in the Properties panel

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Step 5) Build and run the application.

 

You should now see your image splash before the application is loaded. I managed to get a screenshot as the splash screen was fading out and my application was starting to fade in.

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That’s all there is to it. It is very simple. There are other ways to show and hide your splashcreen in code, but I won’t get into that in this post. I just wanted to keep it simple for those of you new to SplashScreens in wpf. Happy Splash Screening!