c# - Is there a typesafe way of navigating between screens in Windows Phone?

Question

I'm looking for a way to navigate between screens in my app. Basically what I've seen so far consists of passing a string URI to the NavigationService, complete with query string parameters., e.g.

NavigationService.Navigate(new Uri("/MainPage.xaml?selectedItem=" +bookName.Id, UriKind.Relative));

I'm not really keen on this though ultimately because it requires magic strings, and they can lead to problems down the road.

Ideally I'd just create an instance of the class I want to navigate to, passing the parameters as arguments to the constructor. Is this possible? If so, how?

Answer 1

While the actual navigation will have to use strings eventually, you can create or use a wrapper that is type safe.

I would suggest looking at Caliburn Micro even if you only used it for the type safe navigation. Here is a snippet from a tutorial on using it in WP8:

The NavigationService that comes with the toolkit supports a view model first approach: instead of declaring which is the URL of the page where we want to take the user (that is the standard approach), we declare which is the ViewModel we want to display. The service will take care of creating the correct URL and display the view that is associated with the view model.

Alternatively you could look at Windows Phone MVC which also has some type safe navigation. You might even just be able to pull the navigation code out to use on your own since it's licensed under MS-PL.