Windows Store Apps – a Panorama-ish GridView

The idea is simple: Take a GridView, tweak it to see if it’s possible to get a somewhat similar feeling as the Panorama control for Windows Phone.

If you search for panorama and windows store you’ll likely end up in discussions about something called “parallax background” – at least that’s what I did. One article that cought my eye was this one written by John Michael Hauck. He took an interesting approach and created a ParallaxConverter to sort it all out. Cudos to him – that’s the one I’m using in this example.

Also included in this marriage-of-a-lot-of-techniques is the tip from Jerry Nixon on how to use a variablesizedwrapgrid and custom gridview to make it a little prettier found here.

So, quick recap of the recipie for this sweet cake:

1. Implement “panorama-ish” effect thanks to John Michael Hauck.
2. Make the item layout a bit nicer thanks to Jerry Nixon.
3. Bake both together for 20 minutes
4. Ready to serve hot from the oven

I won’t dig into details of the code in this post, you have the sourcecode available for that if you wish to dive in.

If you observe the images below you’ll see that the background moves much slower than the gridview in the foreground – voila! mission accomplished!

This is an experimental, playful and far from perfect code. It’s just here to show you that it can be done, and that there are techniques out there that can help you a lot.

Feel free to grab the code in this zip archive. Use or modify it as you wish. If you got the balls to give credit where credit is deserved, go thank Jerry Nixon, John Michael Hauck and the other authors in the community for the effort they put into sharing what they know.