Windows Phone Toolkit Animated Page Transitions

Adding animated page transitions to your app can help it look more polished and, when used modestly, can increase the user’s perception of the quality of your app.

The Windows Phone Toolkit includes a set of classes that make it easy to add animated page transitions. The Toolkit is discussed in depth in Chapter 9, “Enriching the User Experience with the Windows Phone Toolkit Controls.”

Within the Toolkit, transitions are defined by assigning a transition effect represented by TransitionElement objects such as TurnstileTransition to various transition events. These events occur during navigation and indicate the direction of the navigation (see Figure 4.5).

FIGURE 4.5 Transition navigation events.

Forward in navigation occurs when the page is first navigated to; forward out occurs when navigating to a new page. Backward in and backward out occur when a backward navigation takes place, such as when the user taps the hardware Back button.

Navigation events are married with TransitionElements. The Windows Phone Toolkit comes with the following five built-in TransitionElements:

RollTransition

RotateTransition

SlideTransition

SwivelTransition

TurnstileTransition

In the next section you see how to add animated page transitions to an app, and how to specify the type of transition for each navigation event.