Silverlight Navigation

Robust navigation is an important part of a highly usable site. Replacing the out of the box SharePoint navigation can help to increase user adoption of a new site by increasing the performance and functionality of the navigation. This lab will demonstrate one such Silverlight navigation replacement, including a context menu that introduces additional functionality.

Overview

Robust navigation is an important part of a highly usable site. Replacing the out of the box SharePoint navigation can help to increase user adoption of a new site by increasing the performance and functionality of the navigation. This lab will demonstrate one such Silverlight navigation replacement, including a context menu that introduces additional functionality.

For the sake of simplicity, the custom navigation in this lab is delivered as a web part. In a real implementation, the web part should be replaced with a custom control that is added to a master page.

Objectives

This lab will demonstrate how to write a custom Silverlight application that interacts with the out of the box SharePoint navigation constructs to deliver a new navigation experience. Specifically, you will

• Build the user interface for the new navigation in XAML
• Add the code to interact with the SharePoint navigation constructs
• Add additional XAML and code to introduce a context menu

System Requirements

You must have the following items to complete this lab:

• 2010 Information Worker Demonstration and Evaluation Virtual Machine
• Microsoft Visual Studio 2010
• Silverlight 4
• Silverlight web part extension for Visual Studio
• Silverlight 4 Toolkit

Setup

You must perform the following steps to prepare your computer for this lab...

1. Download the 2010 Information Worker Demonstration and Evaluation Virtual Machine and create the Hyper-V image.
2. Install the Visual Studio 2010 Silverlight Web Part. The Silverlight Web Part is an add-on to Visual Studio 2010.
3. Ensure that the latest version of Silverlight 4.
4. Install the Silverlight 4 Toolkit.
5. Run the SetupLab.cmd file from the <INSTALL>\Labs\SilverlightNavigation\Source\Begin folder to establish the SharePoint environment necessary for this lab

Exercises

This Hands-On Lab comprises the following exercises:

1. Setting up the User Interface
2. Showing the QuickLaunch Items
3. Adding a Context Menu

Estimated time to complete this lab: 45 minutes.

Starting Materials

This Hands-On Lab includes the following starting materials.

• Visual Studio solutions. The lab provides the following Visual Studio solutions that you can use as starting point for the exercises.
  • SilverlightNavigation \Source\Begin\SLNavigation\SLNavigation.sln: This solution uses a webpart to show some of the possibilities and capabilties of replacing the out of the box QuickLaunch navigation
  Note:

  Inside each exercise folder, you will find an end folder containing a solution with the completed lab exercise.