Navigation and Passing Data Between WP7 Pages

Unlike other popular mobile platforms, Windows Phone 7 (WP7) uses a different scheme for navigation between screens. The first thing to point out is that WP7 screens are actually called Pages. Think of WP7 Pages as HTML pages within a web browser. While this may seem like a stretch, in actuality it isn't too far off. Similar to a web browser viewing a web site, you have a default page and you click on links to navigate to other pages, and you can back up to a previous page by clicking on the back button.

Since all WP7 devices come with a back button, the WP7 operating system needs a hierarchy of navigation to allow the user to go back to a previous page. HTML pages within a web browser support a back button because of the history created by the user following links and through redirects. Thus if the user clicks the back button the web browser returns to the previous page in history. While WP7 does not have the equivalent of a link, it does, however, have the equivalent of a redirect provided by the NavigationService.Navigate method. This method provides another similarity to a redirect in that it also uses an equivalent URL. Known as a URI (Universal Resource Identifier) it serves the same purpose of a path to the Page as well as a Query String. In fact the form is the same as you would expect in a traditional web site.

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