Well, I was pretty upset when they took off effects support from silverlight, I really was. It was something I really loved thus I could’ve added a little bit of depth in design. I get the idea that it might help improving performance of UI rendering in a device.

So, I was trying out some little hacks, or you might say some faulty impersonations of making a drop shadow, so far I’m not close to that “quality” but I did try.

Let’s assume you want to put a rectangle with a drop shadow. Effectively if you break down a drop shadow you will find a black to grey gradient alpha mask of your rectangle, in easy words, nothing but a blurry grey scale representation of your rectangle lying back. Now, that’s what I tried out here. I took a rectangle, copied it behind it and kept it with a black and grey shades. I could’ve used just one gradient gray shaded rectangle but it doesn’t look that good.

Now, let’s see how that looks.

<Grid x:Name="ContentPanel" Grid.Row="1" Margin="12,0,12,0">
            <Rectangle x:Name="tb1" Fill="Black" Opacity="0.2" Margin="1,3,0,0"  Height="{Binding Height, ElementName=tb5}" Width="{Binding Width, ElementName=tb5}"/>
            <Rectangle x:Name="tb2" Fill="Black" Opacity="0.2" Margin="-1,3,0,0"  Height="{Binding Height, ElementName=tb5}" Width="{Binding Width, ElementName=tb5}"/>
            <Rectangle x:Name="tb3" Fill="Black" Opacity="0.4" Margin="0,2,0,0"  Height="{Binding Height, ElementName=tb5}" Width="{Binding Width, ElementName=tb5}"/>
            <Rectangle  x:Name="tb4" Fill="Black" Opacity="0.2" Margin="0,3,0,0" Height="{Binding Height, ElementName=tb5}" Width="{Binding Width, ElementName=tb5}"  />
            <Rectangle Width="250" Height="100" x:Name="tb5" Fill="#FFE63939"  />
</Grid>

This is a very basic try of course. I’m going to make a usercontrol out of it somehow. And if I do, you will find it right here on my blog and looks like somehow I have to fake the blur too.

Well, until next time then. And by the way, it looks like below on the screen: