What is the best way to slide a panel in WPF?

If you work with WPF animations long enough, you'll figure out that large-area controls do, in fact, move in a what you call 'jerky' manner. I've had this problem even with tiny buttons that needed to move horizontally on the screen, and I have certainly given up on moving anything large (e.g., a window).

I've found WPF performance of animations to improve significantly when not using BitmapEffects. Try disabling them in your example. I replaced my drop shadows with semi-transparent solid regions with gradient fills and performance improved.

I've also heard that some bitmap effects have increased performance in newer versions (maybe 3.5 SP1?) as more of the rendering has been pushed to the hardware.

It looks like the best solution so far, is to use a Visual Brush and move two static images when sliding in and out the panels. Something similar to this is described in this blog post:

Using animated navigation pages in a WPF application (switched to web archive, but this is from 2008 so no promises if it is still the best technique).