Windows Phone 7 - Loading Animation

Question

On the Windows Phone 7 device, when you run some of the standard apps (as well as the Facebook app), while the app is loading data it shows an animation of a series of dots that enter from the left and collect in the center of the screen and then exit from the right.

It seems to be a standard animation that is being used by many of the apps.

I was wondering if there is a standard animated image, or if there was sample code that would I could look at so that I could implement it in my application.

Answer 1

That is the ProgressBar with IsIndeterminate = true

You might like to check out this post for implementing it with a splash screen too.

Creating a Splash Screen with a progress bar for WP7 applications. - Alex Yakhnin's Blog

And these posts for implementing it in a performant manner.

Jeff Wilcox – A high performance ProgressBar for Windows Phone

Jeff Wilcox – Windows Phone performance progress bar update: part 2, remember to turn IsIndeterminate off when not needed!

Answer 2

This is an old obsolete answer if you are targeting Windows Phone 8 as performance issues have been resolved. You should use the ProgressBar in the Silverlight toolkit.

The PerformanceProgressBar is probably still useful for Windows Phone 7 development.

See the note from Microsoft regarding the performance issues on this page: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsphone/develop/gg442303(v=vs.105).aspx