Chapter 28. Pop-ups, windows, and full-screen applications
This chapter covers
- Working with Popup and ChildWindow elements
- Creating native OS windows
- Customizing window chrome
- Taking your application full-screen
There comes a time when just about any nontrivial application needs to make a request of the user that can’t be entirely contained on the current screen. In Windows Forms and previous technologies like Visual Basic 3+, the programmer would create a form that would be shown at runtime. The form would have a few fields and some sort of confirmation button. This was extremely easy to do because, quite frankly, it was the primary method of application navigation and structure at the time.
When browser applications first started becoming more common, we switched to moving users to secondary pages in more of a wizard-type format. This approach was cumbersome and involved any number of page loads during the process. Eventually, web developers came around to what client developers knew all along: popping up a window makes perfect sense in a keyboard- and mouse-oriented environment. Libraries like jQuery made it easier for those developers to simulate windows by overlaying content on the page, eliminating the page loads and other transitions.
When Silverlight came out, it was first a web technology. Although you could certainly argue that it was a desktop technology in web clothing, it took inspiration from browser applications and the approaches used there.