Jaime Rodriquez posted a must read article regarding the Silverlight 3 PlaneProjection feature.
Silverlight3 introduces a new Projection property on UIElement. The property is of type Projection (an abstract class). In SL3, the only implementation of Projection class is PlaneProjection, which is an implementation of a 3D PerspectiveTransform. As of SL3 beta1, the implementation is software-based (so not hardware accelerated today).
The UIElement that is projected into this 3D scene is interactive even if projected. Both front and back are interactive.
Customers have been requesting 3D support for Silverlight since the first public previews back at 2006. While Silverlight will not have true 3D the pseudo 3D provided by PlaneProjection is good enough for many scenarios.
PlaneProjection = Transforms + 3D scene
For me, it is easiest to think of PlaneProjection as a wrapper for a 3D scene and series of 3D Transforms that you can apply to a UIElement to get it to ‘project’ in 3D space.The transforms that PlaneProjection applies to its UIElement are:
- A TranslateTransform exposed via LocalOffsetX, LocalOffsetY, LocalOffsetZ in PlaneProjection.
- A set of RotateTransform represented by the CenterOfRotationX, CenterOfRotationY and CenterOfRotationZ and the RotationX, RotationY an RotationZ properties.
- A TranslateTransform(3D), exposed via GlobalOffsetX, GlobalOffsetY, GlobalOffsetZ
