Excellent site, especially for those getting started with Silverlight (like me!). I found the perfect use for the "Sand Effect Control", and downloaded the full demo example. However, VS2010 seems to be looking for a reference to "Liquid.Sandmania", but I cannot find it for the life of me... I was able to find the dlls for the controls on the "Silverlight Controls Demo", however. Any help will be greatly appreciated.

Hi,

In the demo Zip you downloaded the Liquid.Sandmania.dll can be found in the SandmaniaControl/Bin/Debug/ folder of the download.

Thanks!

Really appreciate your reply, Dan. I was able to get it to work after resolving the issues with SL3 vs SL4. Now that I can finally get to the XAML and code behind, how do i control the speed of the Hourglass? My application requires synchronization between the hourglass and other controls. Is this something I can do by changing parameters, or does it require modification to the dll? I'll be willing to pay for your development time if it requires a special version of the control.  

Hi again,

The control is a generic simulation of sand, based on the game Sandmania.  The hourglass example is one of its possible uses.  Speed is at this time controlled within the dll, it is currently moving the sand down at 1px per frame and it runs at 60 frames per second to create a smooth effect.  Due to performance issues the effect is done at a pixel level, as such all movement is performed on solid pixel boundaries, so for example it would be imposible to update the sand at 0.5px per frame.

It is really a real-time simulation of sand and it cannot be bound to another control.  I image what you want is to be able to set a % complete and the control updates the sand to that %, but it doesn't work like that and it would be very hard to do something like that in its current incarnation.

I will look to add an event that occurs when all the sand has fallen, this may help you with what you need.

Thanks!

Thanks for your answer, Dan. Basically what I want this simulation to do is start the hourglass at the same time as the user clicks on another object. This object will start moving from point 'a' to point 'b'. The goal is to have the object reach point 'b' just before the hourglass runs out of sand. In other words, the object needs to beat the hourglass running out of sand. The whole process should really take less than 30 seconds. As far as adding an event that occurs when all the sand has fallen, that might be useful. However, I think I could use an event that triggers the hourglass to start a new cycle... I could probably use a smaller control as well. Will the reduced size decrease the time it takes for all the sand to fall? Sorry for all the questions, but I hope your answers will help other users as well. Take care!

Hi

I also considered to use this control as a TimeSpan Control.

As a idea to reach this without changeing to much ...

- add a TimeSpan-Property called duration

- add methods for start, stop and pause

- calculate how much pixels you need to move down to fill the duration

- repeate a pixel move down-animation as long as needed to stretch the time (because the are probably not enough pixels there)

With this, the control has still smoth and nice animation every frame, just the sand container doesnt goes empty so fast.

Would be really nice to see, if you think about this. I'm sure, a lot of developers would see this control working as a TimeSpan indicator.

Have a good time

Michael