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I am trying to find the difference between the uses of a basic page and a blank page on windows store apps. I am writing an application that has multiple pages and I am not sure which one to use for my main page and I can't seem to find an answer that is helpful.

Mirimari
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Basic Page inherits Common.LayoutAwarePage. This gives your page various capabilities like the automatic back button and a visualstatemanager for snapping among other things.

Blank Page only inherits Page and does not get any of the above capabilities. So for example if you need to incorporate snapped view in your page, you need to add a handler for the size changed event in your code.

A Basic Page makes it very easy to just write all the snapped changes in your VisualStateManager in XAML and then test it without running your code using just the device tab where you can select state of your device.

The MainPage in your project is a Blank Page and I prefer to create all other pages as Basic Pages to not worry about stuff like the back button.

That being said, Windows 8.1 apps do not include the LayoutAwarePage so if you are not used to the LayoutAwarePage, do not bother.

Let me know if you need more clarification.

Rajeev Bhatia
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    Also, let's not forget that Basic Page provides right-from-left entrance fade animation to all visual controls added to the page. – VasileF Nov 24 '13 at 21:07
  • Thank you! Does this also include the stuff about saving state. Does the blank page have code for this? – Mirimari Nov 25 '13 at 05:20
  • Most welcome! The Basic Page also provides methods like SaveState and LoadState which have a Dictionary where you can save and load the state of your page. The Blank Page does not provide this! – Rajeev Bhatia Nov 25 '13 at 05:28
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Go with the Basic Page as it gives you automatic back button your view's title etc, and if you don't need them you can disable them also. But for blank page you have to write code for those common things.

souvickcse
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This blog post will help you in understanding of Basic Page vs Blank Page.

http://myblogwindow8.blogspot.com/2013/06/blank-page-vs-basic-page-template.html

Muhammad Umar
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