Question

I’m animating something in my Windows 8 app from code behind. I have a collection of animation objects, each containing a DoubleAnimation. I call a method which iterates over this collection, creates new Storyboard objects for each one and begins them. Regardless of whether I set BeginTime on the storyboard, DoubleAnimation or both, they all start and run at the same time.

How do I delay an animation by a set number of milliseconds?

  foreach (AnimationObject a in queue)
  {
      Storyboard sb = new Storyboard();
      sb.Duration = a.DoubleAnimation.Duration;
      sb.BeginTime = a.DoubleAnimation.BeginTime;
      sb.Children.Add(a.DoubleAnimation);
      Storyboard.SetTarget(a.DoubleAnimation, a.Target);
      Storyboard.SetTargetProperty(a.animation, a.TargetProperty);
      sb.Begin();
  }

I wrote a queue instead which uses await Task.Delay(a.BeginTime) and this works, so I know I’m setting BeginTime correctly. However the Task Delay approach doesn’t seem very efficient

Answer 1

My issue was that later Storyboards targeting the same Target were overriding previous ones. I re-engineered my queue to use DoubleAnimationUsingKeyFrames ìnstead, and to add keyframes to an existing Storyboard where one was present. All working perfectly now!