Jesse Liberty

In the previous WPFS we covered the basics of Navigation and the in the one before that we covered the fundamentals of animation.  Let’s combine these two ideas to create a better navigation experience.

When we move from page 1 to page 2, a small amount of animation can make the experience more interesting and less confusing for the user.  For example, rather than having the first page be replaced instantly by the second page, we can animate the first page off and then have the second page revealed “behind” the first.

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To navigate from one page to another, you can take advantage of the static Navigate method on the page’s read-only NavigationService property.  This passes your request to the NavigationService Singleton for your application, and greatly simplifies the navigation syntax.

A Quick Demo

Demos should, in my opinion, be absolutely as simple as humanly possible, to keep the focus on the topic at hand.  In that spirit, we’ll create a new application with just three pages:

• Main Page
• Page1
• Page2

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Animation in Silverlight is declared in Storyboards and triggered by a user’s action, by a background action or process or, most commonly, by a change in state.  Thus an animation might be triggered by pressing a button, but more often the animation will ease the user’s perception of the transition from one state such as the mouse-over, to another, such as mouse press.

Outside of games, most animations are brief and fairly simple, but they can make a significant difference both to the sense of polish as well as to avoiding confusion for the user.

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Don Van Vliet, Captain Beefheart, died yesterday. 

I went to see Captain Beefheart  when I was 15. He was playing a very small room somewhere at MIT and we all sat on the floor while he blew our minds. 

Astonishing, amazing, driving, challenging, exciting music like I’d not heard up to that point.  Beefheart was a musical genius, but as has been said of Wagner “His music is better than it sounds”  — that is, his music is not always easily approachable. But brilliant it is and his astonishing five octave range was just the most noticeable of his myriad talents; a musical genius that ran deep and consistent and that was extremely influential on many other musicians.

I highly recommend the Wikipedia biography and, more important, his music.

I read a lot of tutorials, and most of them suck.

Sorry, but they do; they almost tell you what you need to know and then you are left hanging; with your code not quite working and you can’t figure out why.

It is time to write down some best practices for writing tutorials; then once the list is complete, you can email a link to the list to the author of the next tutorial you read that sucks.

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In the previous mini-tutorial you saw how to create a custom Behavior, and in that custom behavior you captured the on click action event of the button.  This pattern is so common that there is a special type of behavior, an ActionTrigger to simplify coding a custom behavior the responds to an event. 

Rather than writing an OnAttached method in which you capture the event, and an OnDetaching method in which you remove the event handler, the ActionTrigger assumes you want to capture an event, and requires only that you provide an Invoke method that will be called when the event is fired.

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Behaviors are, in my experience, under-appreciated by many Silverlight and Windows Phone programmers; possibly because they are most easily used from Expression Blend, which itself is greatly under-appreciated. 

A behavior is an encapsulation of logic within Xaml – it is essentially, declarative logic.  As such it has many advantages over writing the same logic in C#, notably that of re-use.

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Here are 10 tips on getting your Silverlight and Windows Phone questions answered quickly and painlessly.

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