.net - Simple animation in WinForms

Question

Imagine you want to animate some object on a WinForm. You setup a timer to update the state or model, and override the paint event of the Form. But from there, what's the best way to continually repaint the Form for the animation?

• Invalidate the Form as soon as you are done drawing?
• Setup a second timer and invalidate the form on a regular interval?
• Perhaps there is a common pattern for this thing?
• Are there any useful .NET classes to help out?

Each time I need to do this I discover a new method with a new drawback. What are the experiences and recommendations from the SO community?

Answer 1

I've created a library that might help with this. It's called Transitions, and can be found here: https://github.com/UweKeim/dot-net-transitions. Available on nuget as the dot-net-transitions package

It uses timers running on a background thread to animate the objects. The library is open-source, so if it is any use to you, you can look at the code to see what it's doing.