Search

Introduction

With the beta release of Silverlight 3 a lot of new goodies were introduced and one of them was the navigation framework and in the final release additional features were added. It allows us to easily implement navigation between the newly introduced Page controls in a Silverlight application, interacts with the Browser History journal and provides us with Uri mapping. To learn more about these features read on the article.

For this article the demo will be the Mini SilverlightShow application, which I used not a long time ago as a demo to my article about the Telerik's RadPageNavigation control.

Matt Casto has published part 1 of his Silverlight 3 Feature By Feature series of blog posts and it is concentrated on deep linking.

The Good:  The Navigation Framework is a really great addition to Silverlight!

The Bad:  I’d rather be able to manually add items to the browser history and display pages based on the URL, but this solution will be fine for now. I think there might be a way to do that, but I could not find any other documentation and I ran out of time to look through everything with Reflector.

The Beautiful:  I finally have something to point to when Flash developers ask what Silverlight has to offer that Flash/Flex does’t.

In this article Robby Ingebretsen is talking about deep linking and browser history navigation in Silverlight :

"Deep linking is a strange term and the first time I heard it was while I was giving a talk.  Someone asked me if Silverlight supported deep linking and I sort stumbled around until I found my way to a big “I don’t know.”  Well, now I do and the answer is, um, kind of.  Technically, it’s a no, but, as with most things, there is always a way.  Last week I spent a couple of evenings trying to track one down."

Telerik's RadPageNavigation control meets Mini SilverlightShow

In the Q3 Release of the RadControls for Silverlight, which is compatible with the RC0, you can find the RadPageNavigation control. It provides Silverlight applications with navigation, navigation history and possibility to use the browser's back and forward buttons. These three features are great and via them we are able to give the users greater experience when using Silverlight applications. For example we can create a standard web site scenario using several Xaml pages and the RadPageNavigation control and I've done it. This article describes the whole process I went through in order to implement the functionality of the control, but before write it, I needed a project. After quite a wondering I decided to implement part of the functionality of SilverlightShow into a Silverlight application and soon the name of the project was also revealed - Mini SilverlightShow. I choose that name because the Silverlight implementation of the site will have less functionality and will be smaller in size. Creative, isn't it?

Here you can find the Mini SilverlightShow live demo and source code. Now let's get the things explained!