Programming Windows Phone 7 : Elements and Properties - Non-Tiled Tile Brushes & Playing Movies

Playing Movies

Almost as easy as displaying bitmaps is playing a movie. However, due to their size, video files are almost never included in an executable and almost always are played from a web connection. You can play a movie from my Web site in ImageExperiment by replacing the Image element with a MediaElement:

<Grid x:Name="ContentGrid" Grid.Row="1" Margin="12,0,12,0"
      Background="{StaticResource PhoneAccentBrush}">
    <MediaElement Source=http://www.charlespetzold.com/Media/Walrus.wmv />
</Grid>

Non-Tiled Tile Brushes

You’ve seen examples of SolidColorBrush, LinearGradientBrush, and RadialGradientBrush. This class hierarchy is complete from Brush on down:

Object
        DependencyObject (abstract)
               Brush (abstract)
                       SolidColorBrush (sealed)
                       GradientBrush (abstract)
                               LinearGradientBrush (sealed)
                               RadialGradientBrush (sealed)
                       TileBrush (abstract)
                               ImageBrush (sealed)
                               VideoBrush (sealed)
                       ImplicitInputBrush (sealed)

However, the only other brush supported under Windows Phone 7 is ImageBrush, and although it derives from TileBrush, you can’t create a tiled pattern with it. (You can in the Windows Presentation Foundation, and perhaps someday in Silverlight.) Basically, ImageBrush lets you set any property of type Brush to a bitmap. Here’s ImageExperiment again but with the Image element replaced with an ImageBrush set to the Background property of the content grid:

<Grid x:Name="ContentGrid" Grid.Row="1" Margin="12,0,12,0">
    <Grid.Background>
        <ImageBrush ImageSource="Images/BuzzAldrinOnTheMoon.png" />
    </Grid.Background>
</Grid>

Like Image, TileBrush defines a Stretch property, but the default value is Fill, so the image fills the area without regard to aspect ratio.