However, although using a navigation component would probably be the easiest way, I think that it’s possible to manipulate the forward and backward buttons manually.

The basic trick behind it is to manipulate the URL by modifying a special anchor tag at the end of it.

For example, let’s say the following is the url to your app

http://www.yourdomain.com/slapp

Let’s also say, the user clicks on a button called “contact” (within the application), then you could modify the URL from within Silverlight so it looks like this:

http://www.yourdomain.com/slapp#contact

This way, the website won’t be reloaded but your Silverlight application can load the contact data and display it to the user.

If the user now presses the back button in his browser, the URL will get reverted back to the prior state and the Silverlight application still remains in the browser window displaying the original information.

This is the basic principle how the navigation app shown in the video above works.
You can observe this behavior by the way by looking at the url while the demo application is running. You’ll see that only the short part at the end of the url changes while the user is navigating through the app.

So, basically you have to do two things:

1. Manipulate the URL by adding and removing “#nameOfTheContent” tags to the end of it
2. Catch the events which are fired when the URL changes and load the correct data based on this URL.

Of course, google’s also always a good source for finding more information about this: https://encrypted.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=silverlight+forward+back+buttons ;-)

Thanks