C H A P T E R 3
The Navigation Framework
One of the issues in the early versions of Silverlight was that when you created a new Silverlight project, you were essentially given a blank slate—with no existing user interface structure or framework to help you get started. This created quite a barrier for creating business applications in Silverlight, which typically contain complex user interfaces with numerous views that the user must navigate between. Therefore, to attempt to create a business application of any size in Silverlight 2, you had to start by creating a user interface framework.
Note When you create a new project using the Silverlight Application project template, you get exactly the user interface structure that was available in Silverlight 2.
Silverlight 3 introduced the navigation framework to act as the foundation and structure for your application's user interface, which helped this problem significantly. It provides a user interface framework for creating single document interface (SDI) applications, in which only a single screen of information (that is, content) is presented to the user at a time, but users are able to navigate between multiple screens (which will be referred to as “views”).
Two project templates were added in Silverlight 3 (the Silverlight Navigation Application and Silverlight Business Application project templates discussed in Chapter 1), which already implement the navigation framework and help you get started building an application.
In this chapter, we'll take a look at how you make use of the navigation framework in your applications—but let's first discuss the various types of application navigation patterns and where the navigation framework fits into these.