New to silverlight. Traditionally if I were to design a wizard-like process where a user had to go through 3 or 4 steps, I'd have each step as a separate aspx page. Using silverlight, would you do it all in one component, or would you have 3 separate pages each with a different silverlight component? What kind of advantages/disadvantages are there for either approach?
+1
A:
A wizard typically needs to maintain state between screens, which would be much easier to do on a single page instead of multiple pages. You also have the benefit of initializing a SL control once instead of multiple times.
The disadvantage to loading the whole wizard on one page is that one SL control has the potential to be bigger than several smaller controls, depending on how you package it all up. This means a longer initialization time. Also, I would worry about the user using the back and forward buttons in the browser to navigate the wizard. I don't know if you can intercept those clicks from Silverlight and just navigate the SL control screens back or forward, or if you even want to do so.
If the wizard is only a few screens I would imagine the pros of using it on one page outweigh the cons.
Jason Jackson
2008-12-03 23:48:38
I just like multiple pages because it nicely segregates controls and code between wizard steps. That way I don't end up with 1 page containing billions of controls and zillions of lines of code.
Jeremy
2008-12-09 23:24:37