I have been pretty quite for a little while, been flat out with some projects but I just wanted to quickly post about a little trick I worked out recently. An easy way to put a little loading animation on your Silverlight applications.

The way I have done it is a very broken down simple way to do it, if you want to get a little more complex in your approach check out Silverlight.net

But as for now, let’s do this.

Ok so you have already made your sweet little app but there is still something missing, that final touch instead of the normal Silverlight loader to make the application consistent.

First step is to make a new loading animation. Open blend or Visual Studio and create a new project. I find a nice little spinning animation or something works well, and make sure you repeat it so that it continues to play until the project is fully loaded.

Alright, once you have the animation the way you like it, build it and in the project file, navigate to the output folder. ProjectFolder/ProjectName/Bin/Debug > in there you should find your newly created Splash Screen.

You need to grab the .dll and the .xap file from there and throw it into the “debug” folder on the application you want the loader to appear on.

Next step is to link it all together. This is pretty easy.

First thing is to open the .html file in notepad or your editing program and add this line with all the other param lines.

<param name=”splashscreensource” value=”ProjectName.xap”/>

But obviously changing the projectname.xap to correspond with your splash screen animation name.

The only other change you need to make to your project is in the AppManifest.xaml file.

Open it up with a HTML editor/notepad, and add this line next to the other AssemblyPart.

<AssemblyPart x:Name=”splashscreenanimation” Source=”ProjectName.dll” />

If all goes to plan, you should have nice loading screen that will show up while the project loads.

You might not be able to test it very well on your local machine because the project loads so fast, but it should look sweet on-line!

Hope this has helped a little.

Alex.