SilverlightTM 4 Problem — Design — Solution

Chapter 4. Welcome Home

Creating the User's Personal Home Page

Now that you have the ability to register users, it's time to give them a solid landing page for when they log into the site. The last chapter basically left off with a blank page and a logout button just so that you could see how the login/logout functionality worked with the authentication service. Now it's time to put something useful on this page. The home page should provide a dashboard-like look and feel complete with site navigation controls so that other areas of the site are made accessible. In this chapter, you will see how to utilize some of the new controls available in the Silverlight Toolkit to provide an easy navigation menu, as well as give the users the ability to select a preferred theme for the site. Most sites these days allow some kind of customization to be made from the user, and FitnessTrackerPlus will be no different. In the previous chapter, you also saw how to use the new navigation framework to provide page navigation with full browser history integration. Now you will see how to also use the fragment navigation aspect of this framework to ensure that you can continue to provide a master page-like interface that allows you to reuse the banner and footer areas created earlier. Anytime you can avoid duplicating user interface code, you will be one step ahead of the game.

In addition to the site navigation and theme selection, the user home page will provide access to basic account settings such ...