Question

I’m looking at the ComboBox template.

I have a StoryBoard that I’m creating in code, and I want to animate something in the ComboBox with it. It works fine if I just want to do a property, like “Background”, but what is the right way to animate a template part like, for instance, the Rectangle named Highlight?

I’ve tried setting the property path to (ComboBox).(Highlight).(Rectangle.Fill).(SolidBrush.Color) but that gives me an error saying it can’t resolve that on the given object.

edit: It looks like WPF has some overloads on StoryBoard.Begin() that make this easy, but I don’t see anything like that for Silverlight 4

edit2: and to clarify, I’m trying to do this on a default Silverlight ControlTemplate, not one I’m defining myself (I’d like to avoid copying that template into my codebase)

Answer 1

Override the OnApplyTemplate method and see if you can attach the storyboard programmatically to the actual template part at that time. You use GetTemplateChild to retrieve the template parts.