One of best appreciated features of ASP.NET version 2 was the master page concept. There is no reason a Silverlight application could not benefit from master pages. So, let’s see how to implement master pages in Silverlight : similar capabilities though different implementation.
Our first implementation will be basic but we will improve it in forthcoming posts.
A master page is a web page (here a Silverlight page) that consists of fixed parts and one (or more) content area. The content area can be changed, for instance following an action on a menu item.
In the following Silverlight application, the master page is made of a layer at the top (with an animated text), a menu (left part) and a status bar (bottom part). In the content area, it’s possible to display (at one time) one of two XAML pages. We will show how to switch content in the content area and how to pass information from one XAML content page to another one.
from Gerard Leblanc