Achieving higher user interactivity is a key thing in Windows Phone. There are many features provided for the developers to build their applications as it make possible. Panorama and Pivot controls are two of the most interactive features provided.
Panorama control gives the user ability to create much hub-type looking applications. smooth multi screen scrolling with Parallax effect, ideally including images in the views are the bests of the best. The Pivot control is more for presenting slices of the related data to the user or categorizing the content such as in-built emails & calendar. In another way, both controls are very suited for dynamic data-binding and representing them interactively to the user.
The weather application that is available on the image on left is a good example for a Pivot application. You can browse in detail weather forecast in a pretty much effective and detailed way.
Going towards creating a Windows Phone panorama or Pivot applications, you can choose one of them at the point of adding a new project.Once you get done with a new application, you will see the MainPage.xaml page which is the first page of any Silverlight application by default.
The basic structure of a Panorama application looks like this.
<Grid x:Name="LayoutRoot" Background="Transparent">
<!--Panorama control-->
<controls:Panorama Title="my application">
<controls:Panorama.Background>
<ImageBrush ImageSource="PanoramaBackground.png"/>
</controls:Panorama.Background>
<!--Panorama item one-->
<controls:PanoramaItem Header="first item">
<ListBox>
</ListBox>
</controls:PanoramaItem>
<!--Panorama item two-->
<controls:PanoramaItem Header="second item">
<ListBox>
</ListBox>
</controls:PanoramaItem>
</controls:Panorama>
</Grid>
The layout is basically a set of Panorama items inside the Panorama Controls tab. It is good to have a list box inside each Panorama item. I have faced many difficulties when creating the Vertical scroll without it. But, once you inserted the code in between it, it works fine.
A Pivot application also has the same structure with the Panorama Controls being Pivot Controls and Panorama Items being Pivot items. As it is said in many places, the best practice is to use a Panorama Application when the data is not too much as it can made much interactive and to use Pivot Application when amount of data is much higher.
