Transformations include rotation (RotateTransform), scale (ScaleTransform), skew (SkewTransform), and translation (TranslateTransform). This class hierarchy differs from the Matrix structure because it is a class and it supports animation and enumeration semantics.
For XAML syntaxes that take a Transform, you need to specify a nonabstract derived type of Transform as an object element. Typically, this is one of the Silverlight-defined classes: MatrixTransform, RotateTransform, ScaleTransform, SkewTransform, TransformGroup, and TranslateTransform. See the syntax sections on the appropriate class.
Use the MatrixTransform class to create custom transformations that are not provided by the RotateTransform, ScaleTransform, SkewTransform, and TranslateTransform classes.
A two-dimensional x-y plane uses a 3x3 matrix for transformations. You can multiply affine transformation matrices to form linear transformations, such as rotation and skew (shear) that are followed by translation.
An affine transformation matrix has its final column equal to (0, 0, 1); therefore, you only have to specify the members in the first two columns.
You cannot extract the matrix-specific information from the nonmatrix transformations. However you can adjust the nonmatrix transformations with their specific properties, or replace a transformation with a matrix transformation at run time.