Understanding Frame and Page Navigation

To navigate from screen to screen in a Windows Phone application, an understanding of the PhoneApplicationFrame and PhoneApplicationPage controls is important. There is only one PhoneApplicationFrame available to a Windows Phone application; this frame reserves space for the System Tray and the Application Bar, as well as the content area where PhoneApplicationPage controls live. You can create as many different pages as needed and then navigate to those pages from the frame. Refer to Figure 9-7 to see how the controls are placed on a device's screen.

Figure 9-7.  PhoneApplicationFrame and PhoneApplicationPage

To navigate from page to page within your application, you use the NavigationService class. This class exposes methods to navigate to pages given a URI, as well as to go back to the previous page. The following walkthrough illustrates the use of the NavigationService class.