Chapter 15. Navigation and dialogs

When you first created a Silverlight 2 application, you ended up with a project that contained a single white main page, probably sized at 300 × 400, depending on the template you used. There was no guidance for structuring your application or how to move from page to page. Unlike HTML pages or WPF/Windows Forms, the navigation structure wasn’t something intuitive, building on a decade or more of knowledge and established patterns. Instead, most new Silverlight developers were left staring that that blank page, wondering what to do next.

Silverlight 3 introduced not only a complete navigation framework, but also an application template built on this framework. The navigation framework takes a modern browser-oriented approach to navigation, supporting concepts such as journal histories, back-and-forward navigation, and uniquely addressable pages. This framework addressed the needs of both application structure and end-user navigation.

Silverlight also supports dialog content. In addition to the standard open and save dialogs provided by the operating system, you can create your own simulated dialogs using controls such as Popup and ChildWindow.

15.1. Browser navigation background

15.2. The Navigation Application template

15.3. Navigating to pages

15.4. Navigation out of the browser

15.5. Showing dialogs and pop-ups

15.6. Summary