Design Tips for Quick Navigation Between Views

Question

Typically, when a view requires a lot of bindings or some user interface elements, such as a Bing Map, a “while” is required to load (for example, between half a second and a second).

I do not need a delay between the click action (for example, clicking an item in a ListBox) and the navigation action (displaying a new page).

I do not mind the gradual display of the page. For example, for a Bing card, I do not mind displaying a black page with only a title, but after a second the map appears.

What are the best practices? He can post a sample if I'm not clear enough.

edit: I will keep the question open for a while, so others can answer. Thanks to Matt and Mick for the amazing answers. I am already working on some improvements. The main one is the binding of my controls after the page loads.

Answer 1

It was expected that on devices with limited resources non-trivial actions would be performed for at least some time.

The most recommended recommendation for solving this problem is to use animations to give the user an idea of ​​perceived performance. It was a recurring recommendation at all stages of the CTP and Beta product team and presentations in Mix 10 and Tech Ed 2010.

Page transitions are a general approach to this.

Discussed here by Kevin Marshall, before being included in the November toolkit.

WP7 - Example page transitions

And here, referring to the control in the toolbox.

Transitions for Windows Phone 7

There are also a number of very simple optimizations you can do that will give you a little hack for a little effort.

• do not name controls that you do not reference in code
• use the background worker to load any data, to avoid the impact of the user interface stream (already loaded loading of your page) and disable it after loading the page (disable any controls that cannot be used in this) ( Phạm Tiểu Giao - Themes in WP7 )
• use httpwebrequest for the web client for the same reason ( WebClient, HttpWebRequest and UI thread on Windows Phone 7 )

I would also reiterate Matt's suggestion that you do not load controls that are not originally used.

If you decide to go the extra mile , you can do more to optimize page loading. These two posts deserve attention in this regard.

Create High-Performance Silverlight Applications for Windows Phone

WP7 Development Tips Part 1 - Kevin Marshall Epic Work Blog for Awesome People

If you use Listboxes, check out also Oren Nachman and David Anson

WP7 Silverlight Perf Demo 1: VirtualizingStackPanel vs. StackPanel as a ListBox ItemsPanel

Keeping a Low Profile LowProfileImageLoader helps freeze Windows Phone 7 UI thread by loading images in the background

Never do today what you can put off until tomorrow. Help DeferredLoadListBox (and StackPanel). Windows Phone 7 lists scroll smoothly and sequentially

and make sure the image sizes are optimized for their display size.

Answer 2

My suggestions / recommendations:

• Create and go to the new page as quickly as possible.

• Display a page with placeholder content at load time (if necessary).

• Indicate that something happens while the page is loading. Uncertain progress indicator (use this ) is a convention on the platform.

• If you cannot use the page until all controls are loaded, deny access to the page. The translucent object displayed on the entire page is a general technique that allows you to not only not touch the controls, but also indicate that they cannot be touched yet.

• If possible / practical, set the size of the elements in xaml / code to prevent relaying due to resizing after loading the element.

• Try delaying the loading of items that were not originally on the screen to reduce the expected total loading time.

and finally:

• Optimize everything to reduce load times and make the application as flexible as possible.