Using the Pivot Control
- Page 1
by
kirupa | 22 November 2010
Have questions? Discuss this Windows Phone
tutorial with others on the forums.
Do you know what is awesome? The Pivot
control...and possibly Bono! On Windows Phone 7
applications, navigating through content is
something you will spend a fair amount of time
doing. To help with navigating through content in a
touch-friendly fashion on a small-sized screen, one
of the controls you have at your disposal is the
Pivot control.
Before going further, let's take a look at the following
video where the Pivot Control is being used to navigate
between sections of my application:
The Pivot control is awesome because it takes something
you are probably familiar with and enhances it in an
appropriate way. At a certain level, as you could tell from
the video, the Pivot control is nothing more than the
equivalent of a Tab control. Just like a Tab control, you
have headers that correspond to some content. The content
you see depends entirely on which header is actually
selected. The notable difference, besides looking very
stylish, is that the Pivot control goes beyond the simple
gestures of the Tab control with pan/flick support.
In this tutorial, you will learn how to use the Pivot
control in your own applications using Expression Blend.
Make sure
you have
everything needed to get up and running with building
Windows Phone applications.
Launch Expression Blend and create a new Windows Phone
application. Click on the New Project button or go to File |
New Project to bring up the New Project dialog. Make sure to
select the Windows Phone node under Project Types:
You will see a list of project templates that you can
choose from. Select the one that says Windows Phone Pivot
Application:
Once you have selected the pivot application template,
give your application a custom name (if you want) and press
OK to close this dialog and to create your new project.
Because you selected the Windows Phone Pivot Application
template, your project starts of with a pivot control and
some pivot items already there for you. Here is what your
artboard looks like:
You can view the individual pivot items by expanding your
object tree until you see them:
Ok, now seems like a good time to take a short break. In
the next page, you will learn how to customize your Pivot
control to suit your own needs.
Onwards to the
next
page!
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