This morning I felt like recreating in Silverlight 2, with Microsoft Blend 2.5 March Preview, a little executable I made in WPF. First of all I listened to some lying-in-a-caribbean-beach-sipping-pineapple-and-grenadine-juice music to tame the frustration without having to drink any alcohol.

Back to the subject. I couldn't manage to make a message appear and disappear at the click of an object because the Visibility option "Hidden" is not available. The solution turned out to be very simple. It is actually a color animation. The initial color of the font is the same as the background. Then in the animation I changed the color to Black for 2 seconds. At 02:01:00 I added a keyframe to turn the text back to its original color. Here is the result:

This animation creates the illusion of a message appearing after being triggered by clicking a button and then disappearing. Notice the fading effect achieved by the 0.1" color animation at the end.

Update 2008 Aug 2: The app doesn't work properly because of an Event Handler issue. Will post solution in the future.

Update 2008 Sep 3: The solution is in my post Fix for: Make text appear and disappear.

Update 2008 Oct 15: The text properties are not found in type "button": in this case TextWrapping ="Wrap" and TextAlignment ="Center". I had to make the button longer so the text would fit. I also added the FontSize property because the default size was too big.