Preventing the Pivot or Panorama controls from scrolling
The Panorama and Pivot are great, defining assets of the Windows Phone 7 user experience. Their main role is to display a wealth of information panning horizontally, and eventually enable item selection. Even though these controls are not designed to handle complex user input, you may stumble upon some scenarios where it might be necessary.
If you encounter such a scenario you will undoubtedly notice that the Panorama/Pivot will always take precedence when it comes to handling the panning manipulations. For example, placing a cursor within a TextBox will cause the hosting Panorama/Pivot to pan horizontally as the finger moves left or right to place the cursor. For the exact same reason Sliders and ToggleSwitches tend do not behave as expected.
I have implemented the BlocksPan.IsEnabled attached property to address this scenario. Setting it to true on a control makes any manipulation on the control block the panning of the hosting Panorama/Pivot. The usage is straightforward:
<controls:Panorama Title="MY APPLICATION" x:Name="panorama">
<controls:PanoramaItem Header="First item">
<TextBox pcExt:BlocksPan.IsEnabled="True" Text="This textbox blocks the panning"/>
Technically, the idea is to make the parent Panorama/Pivot invisible to hit test when a manipulation is started on a child control where this attached property is set. You can find the source code and an example attached to this post.
Note: Allowing complex user input within a Panorama or a Pivot is not a recommended UX practice on Windows Phone, furthermore expecting horizontal manipulations on controls hosted in a Panorama/Pivot results in an “ergonomic ambiguity”. This extension is only intended to target the few scenarios where creating another dedicated level of navigation does not make sense.