WPF makes it easy to animate numbers, colors, sizes, and a host of other properties. Unfortunately, it isn't easy to animate an ImageSource property, which is what we're usually looking for when implementing a flip book animation. The closest we get out of the box is ObjectAnimationUsingKeyFrames, which works, but it's very tedious to set up all of the individual key frame times. ... Read more

Using custom icons can be a little tricky in WPF. It's simple enough if you want to use your application's main icon or an icon file that you can refer to using a pack URI - so long as you do that, everything just works. ... Read more

There are times when you need an icon file, but all you have is an icon resource embedded in a PE (executable) file. Getting at these is a little tricky, since icon files aren't stored as a simple blob in the PE file. In fact, they're split up into a number of different entries. Fortunately, it isn't very hard to combine these entries into an ICO-format data blob which you can then save to file or pass to an API that expects it. ... Read more

Most native applications make extensive use of Win32 resources. While the .NET Framework provides a far more useful resource API, it's sometimes necessary to access the old style Win32 resources. Fortunately, this isn't very difficult. ... Read more

Windowed (fake) fullscreen is probably my favorite graphics option ever when it comes to PC games. It lets me have my nice fullscreen game, but doesn't lock me out of using my other monitor, and any programs running behind the game are an instant ALT+TAB away. Games that can go from fully windowed to fake-fullscreened in an instant are also super cool, and not all that difficult to write. So how does one implement such a thing? ... Read more