wpf Creating Splash Screen in WPF Creating custom splash screen window

Example

WPF does not support displaying anything other than an image as a splash screen out-of-the-box, so we'll need to create a Window which will serve as a splash screen. We're assuming that we've already created a project containing MainWindow class, which is to be the application main window.

First off we add a SplashScreenWindow window to our project:

<Window x:Class="SplashScreenExample.SplashScreenWindow"
        xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"
        xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml"
        WindowStartupLocation="CenterScreen"
        WindowStyle="None"
        AllowsTransparency="True"
        Height="30"
        Width="200">
    <Grid>
        <ProgressBar IsIndeterminate="True" />
        <TextBlock HorizontalAlignment="Center"
                   VerticalAlignment="Center">Loading...</TextBlock>
    </Grid>
</Window>

Then we override the Application.OnStartup method to show the splash screen, do some work and finally show the main window (App.xaml.cs):

public partial class App
{
    protected override void OnStartup(StartupEventArgs e)
    {
        base.OnStartup(e);

        //initialize the splash screen and set it as the application main window
        var splashScreen = new SplashScreenWindow();
        this.MainWindow = splashScreen;
        splashScreen.Show();

        //in order to ensure the UI stays responsive, we need to
        //do the work on a different thread
        Task.Factory.StartNew(() =>
        {
            //simulate some work being done
            System.Threading.Thread.Sleep(3000);

            //since we're not on the UI thread
            //once we're done we need to use the Dispatcher
            //to create and show the main window
            this.Dispatcher.Invoke(() =>
            {
                //initialize the main window, set it as the application main window
                //and close the splash screen
                var mainWindow = new MainWindow();
                this.MainWindow = mainWindow;
                mainWindow.Show();
                splashScreen.Close();
            });
        });
    }
}

Lastly we need to take care of the default mechanism which shows the MainWindow on application startup. All we need to do is to remove the StartupUri="MainWindow.xaml" attribute from the root Application tag in App.xaml file.