Professional Windows® Phone 7 Application Development: Building Applications and Games Using Visual Studio, Silverlight®, and XNA®

Chapter 6. Navigation

WHAT'S IN THIS CHAPTER

• How Windows Phone applications navigate between pages

• Handling the Back button to cancel operations within a page

• Using animations to transition between pages

• How the Windows Phone execution model works

• Handling to save persistent and transient data when the application goes into the background

Unless you're building a very simple application, your user experience will consist of multiple pages or views. As part of designing your application you will need to determine what transitions are possible and how you are going to navigate between different areas of your application.

You will also need to ensure that your application plays well with the rest of the Windows Phone. This includes integrating with the Back button, to ensure that users can cancel dialogs or navigate within the application. In this chapter, you will learn how to control navigation into, through, and out of your application. You will also learn how to persist the current state of your application so that the user isn't aware if your application has to be restarted.

PAGE LAYOUT AND ARCHITECTURE

Up until now everything that you've been doing has been on a single PhoneApplicationPage. In a real application it is likely that you will want to have multiple pages within your application through which the user will navigate. Designing applications for a Windows Phone is much harder than designing for the larger screens found on laptops or desktop computers. Where you might have had ...