The tiles on the new Windows 8 Start Menu “tilts” when you press them, tilting toward the direction you click/touch them. This effect is also well known from the Windows Phone tiles. Unfortunately there is no out-of-the-box way of accomplishing this in either of the platforms. However for Windows Phone, a TiltEffect class is in the Silverlight Toolkit, so I figured I could just port that. Turns out it wasn’t that hard – all I pretty much had to do was change the manipulation events to use the new Pointer events instead, and will work with both mouse and touch.

To use it, first download the updated tilt effect class and add it to your project.

Next add a xmlns to register the namespace for use in XAML:

     xmlns:sg="using:SharpGIS.Metro.Controls"

And lastly add the tilt effect to your control exactly like  you would on the phone:

    <Rectangle Width="200" Height="200" Fill="Blue"
        sg:TiltEffect.IsTiltEnabled="True" />

Here’s what this look like on a couple of animated panels:

It’s worth noting that the tilt effect is not EXACTLY the same as the Windows 8 start menu, but it’s fairly close (and a bit cooler if you ask me )