Silverlight: Starting a storyboard within another storyboard

I've been banging my head against concrete walls for sometime, trying to find out how to start a storyboard within another storyboard.

For the silverlight/WPF experienced, this might be a small task. For beginners, it is a daunting task, unless you already know how to do it.

Here's how I did it...

1. I had to create a dependency property. (why? because DPs are awesome and I love them, and then they are the only properties that can be affected by animations.

2. My problem statement. If yours is similar, you might benefit:

- I have a user control (uc1) that has a rectangle on it (red in color).

- I create a storyboard (sbRedToBlue) on the user control (uc1) that changes the red to blue over 2 seconds (or whatever your animation is)

- Now I create another user control (uc2) and host an instance of the first control (uc1).

- I create another storyboard (sbDoTheThing) in the uc2 and want to run uc1.sbRedToBlue when sbDoTheThing reaches 00:00:500.

3. My Solution:

- I create a dependency property Boolean ReadyToRoll in uc1.

- We have some bad news now, if you're using silverlight we've small glitch that prevents changes from being reflected in the UI. The good news, however, is that there is a workaround. Use callbacks. (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3870266/storyboard-changing-property-but-not-reflected-in-ui)

- In the callback, I check for the new value of the dp, if it is true (which means ReadyToRoll is true), I begin uc1.sbRedToBlue.

- Its gets all the simple now, In expression blend when I am editing uc2.sbDoTheThing, at 00:00:500, I select instance of uc2, open up the misc panel in the property explorer, and there I see the property ReadyToRoll. I set this to true... My prayers are heard.

I've written this post while being pushed for timelessness. Feel free to write to me on my email address g.sarwal@gmail.com for further support/help/recommendations/suggestions/blah-blah/rant...