Beginning Windows 8 Application Development

Chapter 10

Creating Multi-Page Applications

WHAT YOU WILL LEARN IN THIS CHAPTER:

• Understanding the fundamental navigation patterns used in Windows 8 apps
• Getting to know the Page class and understanding the navigation mechanism among pages
• Starting other applications through file associations from your app
• Using the Split Application and Grid Application templates to create apps with your custom content

WROX.COM CODE DOWNLOADS FOR THIS CHAPTER

You can find the wrox.com code downloads for this chapter on the Download Code tab at www.wrox.com/remtitle.cgi?isbn=012680. The code is in the Chapter10.zip download and individually named, as described in the corresponding exercises.

In Chapter 9, you learned about a number of important Windows 8 app user interface (UI) patterns, such as using the context menus and the app bar, integrating your app with the settings charm, saving the application state, using dialog box messages, and so on. The samples in those exercises were simple applications with one screen — or, following the Windows 8 style app terminology, with one page.

Real applications often use more than one page. In this chapter, you learn how to create applications with multiple pages. First, you will study the navigation concepts used in Windows 8 apps, and you will get acquainted with the UI controls that support paging.

With Visual Studio, Microsoft provides two project templates — the Grid Application template and the Split Application template — that are great for starting ...