The term particle effects describes a computer animation technique where many small particles are combined to create realistic special effects that would otherwise be difficult to achieve using standard animation techniques. Typical examples of the visual effects that are achieved with this approach include: fire, water, smoke, fog, snow and sparkles. In this post we look at a simple implementation of a particle system in Silverlight and use it to create a realistic smoke effect.

If you’ve worked with ObjectDataSource parameters, you may know you can bind parameter values to properties of the current page. You may have also found that when the data source is declared inside a user control, there’s no mechanism for finding property values inside that control. Below we look at the background behind this, and present two possible solutions.