My friends, sincerely, I will never stop wishing that your journey through this world will be touched by kindness, inspired by wisdom, graced with understanding, and kept safe from all harm.

 

Wishing you not just happiness but pure joy, not just wealth but Heaven's treasures, not just silence but God's peace. May this new year bring you all the blessings every day in your life. Wish you and your family a Happy and Prosperous New Year.

Published by on under Greetings | Video

“Betty Wallpapers” is a small Windows Phone 7 application developed by my friend Jebarson Jebamony (aka. Jeba), Microsoft India. Using this application, you can search and download wallpapers and images from the web. It allows to search images with any key. It also has a settings panel, where you can configure various options related to your search parameter.

 

The installer of this application is less than 1MB in size and supports Windows Phone 7.5 or higher. You can install the Trial version (which has few settings OFF by default) and if you like it, purchase it from the Marketplace to support the development.

Published by on under DZone | Windows Phone Apps

Today I received this “Security Alert” from Microsoft via email and thought to share this with you. If you are using ASP.Net in your server, read this post to know about it to keep your server in good health from this DoS Attack. Sharing the email as it is in this post.

 

Microsoft is aware of detailed information that has been published describing a new method to exploit hash tables. Attacks targeting this type of vulnerability are generically known as hash collision attacks. Attacks such as these are not specific to Microsoft technologies and affect other web service software providers. This vulnerability affects all versions of Microsoft .NET Framework and could allow for an unauthenticated denial of service attack on servers that serve ASP.NET pages.

Published by on under .Net | News

In our last video tutorial “What is the Lifecycle of Windows 8 Metro Style Application?”, we learnt how the Windows 8 metro style application life cycle works using a small video demonstration of states.
 
In this video tutorial we will see a practical example of it using the already available metro applications. Continue to watch the video tutorial series.

 

Published by on under Metro | Tutorial

“Fun with Silverlight 4” authored by Rajesh Lal illustrates more than 100 features in Silverlight using a simple problem/solution approach. It takes one feature at a time and guides you in progressive journey where you begin by using the basic components, then by creating graphics and animations.

 

I am feeling Proud to be the Technical Reviewer of the book and will recommend everyone to purchase this book to keep it as reference. In this post, find my review note, link to purchase it from Amazon store and the Table of Contents. Hope, this book will help you in your day to day work.

Published by on under Book | News

Here comes the Weekly Digest (18th December to 24th December) of Silverlight-Zone.com. During this week we have submitted 65 article links at Silverlight-Zone on various topics like Silverlight, Windows Phone 7, Metro Style Applications.

 

In this post, I am going to share the top 5 posts of the week. Top viewed posts were from actuary21c, Evan Hutnick, Glen Gordon, @mbcrump and @kunal2383. Read more to find out the top 5 links. Finally Merry X-MAS to all of you.

Published by on under Silverlight | SilverlightZone

It’s Christmas time and I just wanted to say “Thank You” to you for your support and feedback through out the year. It’s been a pleasure to stay tuned with such awesome friends in my life. Though I know many of you virtually over the cyberspace, but we had a great bonding over the past year.

 

I wish you and your family an wonderful Holidays during the Christmas and a Happy New Year 2012. May god give you all the pleasure in coming year. A small video greetings has been included in this post. I hope, you will like it.

Published by on under Greetings | Video

One month ago, I started a discussion thread “What is the Future of Silverlight?” and received a good amount of feedback on the future of the same. Some provided positive feedback and some had negative feedback.

 

As declared earlier, I am going to announce the Winners name from the discussion thread here, as I wanted to giveaway some licenses to my blog readers on the eve of X-MAS. Click more to see if you are one of the lucky winner to Win Telerik or Pluralsight license. All the best!!!

Published by on under GiveawayContest | Pluralsight

Today in this Video tutorial, we will learn about the Lifecycle of Windows 8 Metro style application. We will also learn what are the various states available during the Lifecycle.

 

Let’s start discussion followed by the video tutorial. An easy way of representation has been added in the video. Let me know your feedback. Don’t forget to share this to your friends and ask their feedback too.

Published by on under Metro | Tutorial

Microsoft is launching Windows Phone Camps in Pune and Chennai during December 2011. It is a brand new event for designers and developers to interact with domain experts. Each session will take you deeper in the world of Windows Phone application design and development.

 

Don’t wait, just register for the free event now and avail this opportunity to learn more and more from the experts. Ask your queries and experience the bigger event with them.

Published by on under Events | News

You might know that, Silverlight 5 has been already released by Microsoft. During the previous releases of Silverlight 5, I have published many articles on it. Here in this post, I am clubbing all of them so that, it will help you to find them in a single page as a great resource to start with Silverlight 5.

 

Here is a collection of Silverlight 5 Tutorials that you may want to read while working with the Silverlight 5. Find all the links that I have published in my blog. Do you have any feedback or queries? Don’t hesitate to write at least a single line in the Comments Section.

Published by on under Silverlight | Silverlight5

Hope you gone thru my previous video tutorial “How to Create a Windows 8 Metro Style Application using Visual Studio 2011?”, where I demonstrated about Windows Metro Style Application templates, creation of project and it’s project structure. There we also demonstrated one simple “HelloMetroStyleApplication” sample.

 

In this video tutorial, we will learn about “Package.appxmanifest” file which resides in the Metro application project directory. We will discuss step-by-step about each property page and XML content of this manifest file.

Published by on under Metro | Tutorial

People often asked me to start a Video Tutorial series on Windows 8 Metro Style Application development using Visual Studio 2011 and here is first part of the series. The series will include the video tutorial as well as some text to give you easy access to the code.

 

In this first part (10 mint Video Tutorial), we will learn how to get started with the Project and also we will learn the project structure. Later we will have a small demo to show you how to develop your first “Hello Metro Style Application” using Visual Studio 2011 IDE. Continue to the tutorial to learn more.

Published by on under Metro | Tutorial

Here is the post on Weekly News Digest at Silverlight-Zone.com. During the week (27th November 2011 to 3rd December 2011), we have submitted ~65 new article links collected from different blog feeds. The posts were on Silverlight, Windows Phone 7, LightSwitch and WinRT Metro.

 

In this post, find the top 5 posts of the week, also sharing the most popular 5 posts of the month near to the end of the post. On regular basis, sharing the daily news digests links at the end. We had a news on the release of Silverlight 5, which didn’t happen last month. Read more to find out all the popular links.

Published by on under Silverlight | SilverlightZone

Here comes our “Monthly Summary” post. During November 2011, I have submitted 12 blog posts here and this is the summary post of those blog threads categorized item wise. Find all the posts that I have published. In case you missed any one of them, this will help you.

 

As a quick note, stay tuned to our (KolkataGeeks) weekly webcast. All details are available in this page. Follow us and stay tuned on the cutting edge technologies.

Published by on under Archives | DZone

Do you want to integrate the network connection settings page (like: Airplane, Bluetooth, Cellular and/or WiFi) in your Windows Phone 7 application? Then this article will help you step-by-step to understand and integrate it.

 

Connection Settings page are those, where you can configure your connection types and various parameters of the connection. Windows Phone 7 SDK exposes the APIs for you to integrate them in your application. In this tutorial, we will discuss about these with a nice demo. Read further to know about these settings page and integration steps to the application.

Published by on under Silverlight | Tutorial

Here comes the weekly digest of Silverlight-Zone.com. During last week, we have submitted 83 article links on various technologies like Silverlight, LightSwitch, Windows Phone 7 etc. In this post, find the top links. Also, the link towards daily news digest is also available at the end of the post.

 

Top 5 posts were from @Debug_Mode, @jmarbutt, @kunal2383, @twmurph and @TimHuckaby. Don’t miss to read out those posts. If you have blog and you are writing article/posts on the said technologies, please share us the link below (as comment) and we will make sure to include them to spread all over the social networking sites.

Published by on under Silverlight | SilverlightZone

Kolkata Geeks invites you to join our weekly online session. We are going to present online sessions in weekly basis so that people lives outside of Kolkata can join us and even participate or contribute to the community. We believe that community cannot be grown individually, but by the people in the community. So we, from behalf of KolkataGeeks community, we invite you to join us to our online session and participate to our community.

 

Session Title: How to Increase Performance of Web Apps using jQuery
Date: Sunday, Nov 27, 2011 from Time: 2 PM (IST) Duration: 1 hour (2PM to 3PM)

Published by on under Events | jQuery

My friend, Mr. Abhimanyu Kumar Vatsa (aka. @itorian) published a Free eBook on “Razor View Engine in MVC 3”. I appreciate the effort that he had contributed to publish this eBook and hence sharing this book details and downloadable link in this post, so that, it can reach to maximum people and they will get benefit from it.

 

Vatsa had demonstrated it in simple fashion (Step-by-Step), that a beginner can understand properly. Continue reading and download the PDF file freely. Also, don’t forget to share this to your friends and colleagues.

Published by on under .Net | Book

When the power of HTML5 on Windows 8 was first showcased, we have seen a lot of rumours on the future of Silverlight. Many online article mentioned that, it is the end of Silverlight. Some said Microsoft is going to stop the development of Silverlight after this Silverlight 5 release and there will be no Silverlight 6 in future. Is it really so?

 

Let us discuss this topic here. I am not going to write an article this time. We will have a discussion on this topic, your career goal on this platform and what your customers say about it. There are plenty of gifts for you to win. Among them one will be Telerik Ultimate Collection license and the other will be a Pluralsight Annual Plus Subscription from me. So, take part of the discussion, hear from other users voice, discuss and win cool gifts.

Published by on under GiveawayContest | Pluralsight

Here is our weekly digest post of Silverlight-Zone.com. During 13th November to 19th November, we have submitted 69 new posts in our database. Find the top 5 posts running on the site here. Also, we have links to daily digest pages. If you missed one, you can easily find it here.

 

If you have blog and you are writing article/posts on the said technologies, please share us the link below (as comment) and we will make sure to include them to spread all over the social networking sites.

Published by on under HTML | HTML5

On last Saturday, 12th November 2011, I presented 1 hour Technical session on “Windows Phone 7” in Kolkata Developer Conference. The event was organized by Microsoft User Group Kolkata (KolkataGeeks). It is the premier technical event for technology professionals at Kolkata interested in learning, connecting and exploring latest Microsoft technologies.

 

In this post, I will recap my Windows Phone 7 session. I will also share the Session Slides (PPT), Demos and related Article links. Some snaps of the event will also be available at the end of the post.

Published by on under DevCon | Events

Here comes the weekly news digest of Silverlight-Zone.com for the week 6th November 2011 to 12th November 2011. Once again the “Future of Silverlight” hit the developers. Lots of rumours we have seen during the week on Silverlight. Still waiting to hear about the future from the voice of Microsoft.

 

Find the top 5 posts made by Mike James, John Callaham, @maryjofoley, @JeremyLikness and @Telerik. Also find out the daily news digest links, if you missed any one during last week.

Published by on under Silverlight | SilverlightZone

On 12th November 2011 (Saturday) I will be presenting Technical Session on “Windows Phone 7” at Kolkata Developer Conference (DevCon) 2011 organized by Microsoft User Group Kolkata (KolkataGeeks). It is the premier technical event for technology professionals at Kolkata interested in learning, connecting and exploring latest Microsoft technologies.

 

This is also going to be community Launch event for Microsoft Office 365. So be there and enjoy the flavour of cutting edge Microsoft technologies. Read out more to find about the session details.

Published by on under DevCon | Events

Behaviors are most demanded feature to include in Silverlight, Windows Phone 7 and/or WPF applications to implement proper MVVM pattern to do some UI level actions. These are pluggable on demand and don’t need any other extra code to integrate. Just a simple XAML change and you are done.

 

In this article, we will learn how to use the inbuilt “PlaySoundAction” behavior to add sound effect on button click. We will demonstrate it using Windows Phone 7 application. Read more to learn. Complete demonstration with images for each steps available.

Published by on under DZone | ExpressionBlend

Weekly News Digest of Silverlight-Zone.com is up once again. We publish this digest every Sunday. As regular, find herewith the “Top 5 Posts of the Week” and “Daily News Digests” links.

 

During the week, we submitted 71 article links related to Silverlight, Windows Phone 7, Metro, LightSwitch, XAML etc. We submitted these links from various authors. If you are also writing blog posts on those topics, please share us your blog link so that, we can contribute them to the site to reach out the already available good content to the vast readers. We welcome every feedbacks and suggestions to improve our site. Thanks to everyone for their support.

Published by on under LightSwitch | Silverlight

During October 2011, I have submitted 19 blog posts, among them 5 articles are there. I also received two awards from communities. In this post, I am going to share all the posts submitted here in my blog as separate category. This will help you to find out the proper post that you are searching in my blog.

 

As a short note, we (KolkataGeeks team) are proud to announce the Kolkata Developer Conference 2011 event. If you are in Kolkata, come and join the event; learn; discuss and win lots of goodies including Telerik Ultimate Collection license. Registration is going on.

Published by on under Archives | DevCon

Kolkata Geeks pleased to announce Developer Conference 2011 (DevCon) on Saturday, 12th November 2011. Developer Conference is the premier technical event for technology professionals in Kolkata interested in learning, connecting and exploring latest Microsoft technologies.

 

I am attending this event. Are you? Don’t forget to attend my Technical Session on Windows Phone 7. Read more to find out more about his event agenda, venue and timing.

Published by on under DevCon | Events

Here comes the weekly news digest of Silverlight-Zone.com. This week i.e. 23rd October to 29th October, we have submitted 61 article links in our database and the total link count raised to 3255 till now. Thanks to Michael Crump and Silverlight Gal for their contributions towards Silverlight-Zone community portal.

 

In this post, I am going to share the popular 5 posts of this week, which were visited mostly by our readers. Also, sharing the Daily News Digest links of the week. If you missed them earlier, you can find them here.

Published by on under Silverlight | SilverlightZone

Few days ago, I started with a Tutorial series on Project Management using Telerik TeamPulse tool and discussed on Agile Scrum using that tool. We learnt about the Telerik product which is built on top of Silverlight. We learnt how to create new project and the steps to create your Sprint or Iteration.

 

Today in this fourth chapter, we will learn how to create new Stories and respective Tasks for that Story. Plenty of screenshots available to understand. Feedbacks are always appreciated.

Published by on under CodeProject | TeamPulse

On 3rd October 2011, I had started a giveaway contest of “SQL Wait Stats Joes 2 Pros” book authored by Pinal Dave, Microsoft Evangelist and Founder of SQLAuthority.com. The contest ended on 21st October 2011.

 

We received no. of participants in the contest and after reviewing all the entries, I have randomly picked up two Winners, who will receive signed copy of the “SQL Wait Stats Joes 2 Pros” book. Congratulation email will be send out to the winners requesting their shipping address. Find out whether you are the lucky winner of the contest.

Published by on under Book | SQL

Here comes the “Weekly News Digest at Silverlight-Zone.com. During this week (16th October 2011 to 22nd October 2011) we have submitted ~67 news items in Silverlight-Zone. I appreciate the time of our Contributors who spent some of their valuable time to help the Silverlight-Zone community grow.

 

Read more to find out the top 5 posts of the week which were top visited by our readers. As usual, I am also posting the Daily News Headline links of this week. You may find it useful in case you missed them.

 

Follow us on Twitter and Facebook to keep you updated on latest posts on Silverlight, Windows Phone 7, LightSwitch, XNA stuffs. We want some more contributors who can voluntarily help us to serve already available good links to the community.

Published by on under Silverlight | SilverlightZone

Boryana Miloshevska published this eBook “Silverlight for Windows Phone Toolkit in Depth” in WindowsPhoneGeek.com. The book includes hands on guide with code to demonstrate all the controls available in the Windows Phone 7.1 Toolkit (August 2011).

 

Click “Read More” to know about this book and find the links to download the eBook for Free. Hope this book will be a great help to you. Don’t forget to visit the book’s page to say a “Thanks” to the Author of the book.

 

Published by on under Book | eBook

Here comes the weekly news digest at SilverlightZone.com. During last week (9th October 2011 to 15th October 2011) we submitted 63 news posts on Silverlight, Windows Phone 7, LightSwitch and Visual Studio 11. We have also seen the launch of Windows Phone 7 in India.

 

As usual, here in this post, I am going to share the top 5 posts of the week followed by the links towards Daily News Digest. If you missed to read some posts, you can find them here. Follow us on Twitter and Facebook to receive regular update on the latest article news posted daily.

Published by on under LightSwitch | MVVM

I am feeling very glad to announce that, INETA community has been awarded me with their “Annual Community Champion Award” for the Q3 of 2011. It’s a big honor to receive this award from INETA community. I can’t express my excitement to acknowledge this award.

 

I’m finding that my community work is rewarding me in various ways. It’s definitely a great year for me when I have been awarded by different portals. Over the past 2-3 years, I was connected with so many influential people who helped me to build my career.

Published by on under Achievements | Awards

Finally received my Microsoft MVP Certificate and Kit yesterday. The kit consists of the MVP ring for 2011, MVP pin and the MVP ID-Card. You might already know that, I have been awarded 2nd time as Microsoft Silverlight MVP. To read about it, you may visit my post “Awarded Microsoft MVP (Silverlight) for the Second Time - October 2011”.

 

In this post, I am sharing some snaps of the MVP 2011 ring and the Certificate.

Published by on under Achievements | Awards

Last day we discussed about “Silverlight Page Navigation Framework” where we understood the basic concept. We learnt how to add pages in the project from the template and the root of the page xaml. We also learnt about the assembly which we need to use to develop a navigation application using Silverlight.

 

Today in this post, we will discuss about Uri Mapping which will help you to implement the navigation application very easily. You will also be able to hide the actual Url of the page. We will discuss about each point in brief with a simple example continuing from previous post.

Published by on under Silverlight | SilverlightTips

Let us start with a three days tutorial series on Silverlight Navigation Framework. Today in this post, we will discuss about Page Navigation Framework in Silverlight. Here we will learn what the Page is, how to kick start with navigation framework and details about this.

 

This post will help to understand the basic knowledge of it. You will find it handy while developing your Silverlight application. Next two days, we will learn how to map a page URL and pass parameter to the page using a small and simple example. Continue reading to learn more about it.

Published by on under Silverlight | SilverlightTips

Today posting the last week’s news digest of Silverlight-Zone.com. During last week (2nd October 2011 to 8th October 2011), we have submitted ~76 news links in SilverlightZone on different topics like Silverlight, Windows Phone 7 and LightSwitch.

 

It’s our effort to share the already available good content to you. As usual, this post will cover the Popular 5 Posts of last week and link towards daily news digest for your reference. Share us your thoughts and views about Silverlight-Zone.com. We are eager to hear something from you. Your continuous support matters to help the community grow.

Published by on under MVVM | Silverlight

imageSometime we want to show the System Information to the user, whether it is an Application or a simple Game. We need to show those system specific information to the Windows Phone 7 user by using an System page. So, in such case, how will you fetch those information and show them to the user?

 

Well, this post will help you to understand it and let you know about this data in Windows Phone 7 device. Read to learn more about this topic.

Published by on under CodeProject | DZone

The root class of the Windows Phone 7 page includes two attributes called “Orientation” and “SupportedOrientations”. Those are actually enum values and provides you option to set the orientation of your page programmatically.

 

Today in this post we will describe about it in depth. If you are new to Windows Phone 7 programming, you will find this tip handy to understand about the page orientation on Phone page. Read to know more about this.

Published by on under Silverlight | Tips

Silverlight 5 Toolkit is now available in CodePlex site. This is the first version of Silverlight 5 Toolkit targeting Silverlight 5 RC build. This is also a first release of Silverlight Toolkit after April 2010. It took more than one year to release this bits. No Silverlight 4 toolkit available yet.

 

In this post, I am going to share the downloadable location as well as the new components available in this release. Read to know more about them.

Published by on under News | Silverlight

Do you work on SQL Server as a SQL developer or administrator and want to gain some good knowledge on SQL Wait Stats and Parallel Execution from SQL Guru Pinal Dave? Then this post will help you to win a hard copy of his book.

 

Pinal Dave, who is a Microsoft Evangelist published a book “SQL Wait Stats Joes 2 Pros” recently. He accepted my request and going to giveaway 2 copies of his book to my blog followers. Read more to register for the contest and Win the book Free.

Published by on under Book | SQL

Here comes this week’s news digest of Silverlight-Zone.com. This week starting 25th September 2011 to 1st October 2011, we have submitted 69 new article links on various topics like Silverlight, Windows Phone 7, LightSwitch, XAML and Metro.

 

Though there are various new topics, but still people are worried about the future of Silverlight and hence we noticed a significant hit on those posts. Don’t be panic, this is a cover story now since last three weeks. Read this post to read out the top 5 links.

Published by on under Silverlight | SilverlightZone

I am feeling very proud to announce that, I have been awarded as Microsoft MVP (Most Valuable Professional) for the second consecutive year. Feeling good to say that I am still holding the second Silverlight MVP tag from India.

 

1st October is an wonderful day to me. In 2010, I received this award for the first time with a holding of second Silverlight MVP of India and still continuing with that. My sincere thanks to my MVP Lead, all Community friends and my Parents. Without all of their support it was quite difficult to get.

Also a warm Congratulation to all new and renewed MVPs of this quarter.

Published by on under Achievements | Awards

During September 2011, we have seen a no. of product releases by Microsoft including Silverlight 5 RC, Expression Blend 5 Preview, Windows 8 Developer Preview, Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview and Windows Phone 7.1 SDK Final. It was a busy month, no doubt. I also did a no. of posts (26) in my blog which has 15 articles.

 

In this post, I am going to share all the posts submitted here in my blog as separate category. This will help you to find out the proper post that you are searching in my blog.

Published by on under Archives | CodeProject

That’s a good question asked by Alan in my last post “Why the Frame Rate Counter is not available in my Windows Phone 7 Emulator?” Ok, to answer to this query, there could be some different issues/solutions for this.

 

Let’s discuss more on this query here. If you are facing the same issue, this post might help you. There could be different possibilities too. If you have different solution, please use the comment link to submit your approach here.

Published by on under Mango | Silverlight

Microsoft released Windows Phone 7.1 SDK tools yesterday, 28th September 2011. It’s in RTW release, that means, it is released to web. Cliff Simpkins announced the release of the Windows Phone SDK 7.1 in Windows Team Blog.

 

In this post, find the link to download the RTW version of Windows Phone 7.1 SDK (Mango) which includes both the web and standalone offline installer for all separate languages.

Published by on under Mango | News

Frame Rate Counter in Windows Phone 7

While working with Windows Phone 7 emulator, you might noticed that, in debug mode it shows some numeric values at the right side of the screen. So, what are those values and why that numeric bar is available in debug mode?

 

The bar represents numeric values for Frame Rates to debug Memory usage by your WP7 application. In this post, we will briefly discuss on this topic. Read further to learn more about this Frame Rate Counter.

Published by on under Silverlight | Tips

Few days ago, I did a Giveaway contest of Telerik RadControls for Silverlight and LightSwitch here “Telerik RadChartControl for LightSwitch Application - Day 3 - Giveaway Contest” and received a good nos. of tweets from people who attended this contest to Win the license.

 

Today in this post, I am going to announce the Winner of the contest. Read the post to check whether you are the lucky Winner of the Telerik License.

Published by on under LightSwitch | Silverlight

In Windows Phone 7, the System Tray is the small bar across the top of the screen in Portrait mode. It displays the Signal strength, Current time and Wi-Fi connection strength.

 

In this post, we will learn more about Windows Phone 7 System Tray. It is easy to write code to show or hide the tray. We will use a small demo to demonstrate it.

Published by on under CodeProject | DZone

Are you facing any issue deploying your Windows Phone 7 application in the emulator or, are you facing any issue while opening the Windows Phone 7 emulator? Is it stating some System Error while finding “MFPlat.dll”? If you are facing the similar issue, this post will help you. Do bookmark this post and share to others, so that, if anyone is facing the same will resolve it easily.

 

In this post, I will tell you the background of the issue and the solution to fix this problem. If you have any other alternative, do share it here and help the other person. Read more to find out the issue and it’s solution.

Published by on under Windows | Windows7

Fourth week of the month and I came with the Weekly News Digest of Silverlight-Zone.com. Since last 2 weeks, top posts were on the future of Silverlight. Is Silverlight dead or still it is alive? Read more on this topic from various Silverlight authors.

 

In this post, I am also going to share the daily news digest links of the week. In case you missed to read this week’s post, you can find them here. Stay tuned @SilverlightZone on Twitter for daily updates. We are also available on Facebook. Like our facebook page to stay tuned on the updates.

Published by on under Silverlight | SilverlightZone

In Windows 8 if you installed Visual Studio 11 separately, you may notice the error “Tool makepri.exe cannot be found. Please install Windows Modern SDK” while building Metro Style Windows application. What is that and how to resolve this issue?

 

In this post I will discuss about this issue and will also give you the solution. If you are facing the similar issue, read to find out more.

Published by on under SDK | Tips

In this article, I will guide you to setup a Windows 8 Virtual Machine in VMWare environment. Just follow the steps mentioned here and you will be done with the installation. I will use the 32bit Windows 8 Developer Preview ISO image to mount for the installation step. If you have bootable drive, you can directly use that.

 

The step-by-step process will show you creation of new Virtual Machine and then the installation of Windows 8 Developer Preview version in the VM. Read the complete post to find out more.

Published by on under Tutorial | Win8

Last day we discussed on project creation in TeamPulse team management solution. If you didn’t yet read it, follow this post here: “How to Create a New Telerik TeamPulse Project?” where we discussed the project creation step-by-step.

 

Today in this article, we will use that project and will show you how to create Sprints/Iterations inside your TeamPulse project, so that, you can plan your sprint/iteration properly for your team. In the next article, we will learn how to use iterations and add stories for each sprint. Let’s discuss on the iteration creation and deletion of it in depth.

Published by on under CodeProject | TeamPulse

It was a busy schedule this week and we experienced the latest news in Microsoft front. In BUILD event, Microsoft released Windows 8 Developer Preview, Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview along with .Net 4.5 and Expression Blend 5 Developer Preview. After build session, people started discussing on the future of Silverlight and hence during the week this topic was top demanded.

 

Top posts were from @JeremyLikness, Scott M. Fulton, @mossyblog, Janvanderhaegen and Jonathan Allen. Find the top 5 posts of the week as well as daily digest links in this post.

Published by on under Silverlight | SilverlightZone

Visual Studio 11 provides an integrated development experience that spans the entire lifecycle of software creation from architecture to code creation, testing and beyond. This release adds support for Windows 8 and HTML 5, enabling you to target platforms across devices, services and the cloud.  Find the link to download the standalone/offline installer (ISO) of the Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview.

Published by on under .Net | News

Microsoft released Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview to the developer community. First they released it for the MSDN subscriber that means, it was available only for MSDN subscribers till the date it was announced. Now it is available for general public. You can now download it and start exploring the features. You can also start developing Windows 8 applications using this IDE.

 

In this post, I am going to share you the links for both MSDN and general public download. Grab it and start exploring.

Published by on under .Net | CodeProject

Yesterday, in the post “TeamPulse - A Project Management Solution from Telerik”, we discussed about Telerik TeamPulse application. We discussed about installation requirements and also shared the links to download the TeamPulse.

 

In this post, we will learn how to create a TeamPulse project for your team, so that you can manage your stories, bugs and check the status of each individual story. Read more to learn about it.

Published by on under CodeProject | TeamPulse

Telerik TeamPulse - A Project Management Solution from TelerikTeamPulse is a project management solution from Telerik based on Agile best practices. You can manage your team project using this Silverlight based tool to actively collaborate between team members, track progress of project.

 

It is a web based Silverlight application, where you can track your project status and other information. In this post, I will share you details about this project management solution, link to download the installer and other stuffs. If you want to explore it, download the installer and setup the solution now.

Published by on under CodeProject | Silverlight

Here comes the Weekly Digest post at Silverlight-Zone.com. During the week (4th September to 10th September) we have submitted many posts on Silverlight (especially Silverlight 5), Windows Phone 7, LightSwitch and other related stuffs. Our motto is to deliver the already posted good articles/news to you as a single medium. Your continuous support to this boosts the energy to serve the community better.

 

In this post, find out the Top 5 posts visited at Silverlight-Zone. Most of the top articles were on Silverlight 5. Vikram Pendse is above the list this time with his awesome article on Silverlight 5's PInvoke, followed by the big list of Silverlight 5 features by Community Program Manager Pete Brown. If you didn't read that post, you should read it to find out more.

Published by on under Silverlight | Silverlight5

Yesterday we discussed on Silverlight 5 RC Feature called PInvoke. Hope that was informative for you. We learned how to call system APIs from Silverlight application. We demonstrated this using In-Browser application, but you can use that for Out-Of-Browser too easily.

 

In Silverlight 4, if we wanted to access system drive or any files, we had to use the COM APIs and this was only applicable from Out-Of-Browser applications. In this article, we will show you the way to access system resources using PInvoke in Silverlight 5. You can call this directly from Browser applications as well as Out-Of-Browser applications. Read to know more.

Published by on under Silverlight | Silverlight5

Silverlight 5 RC (Release Candidate) has been already released. There are some new features already included in this build. Among them, one most important feature is PInvoke. PInvoke means Platform Invoke. By using this, you can directly talk to system resources without using COM APIs.

 

In this article, we will explore it more and show you how to open the "Run Dialog" directly from the Silverlight 5 application. Here also, we will use In-Browser application which you can easily port to Out-Of-Browser.

Published by on under Silverlight | Silverlight5

imageExpression Blend 5 Preview Ultimate is now available for Silverlight 5 Release Candidate. It supports only Silverlight 5 projects including Sketch Flow. You can install it side-by-side with Expression Blend 4. For more information, visit Microsoft Download Centre.

 

Direct link: Download Microsoft Expression Blend 5 Preview for Silverlight 5 RC

Published by on under ExpressionBlend | News

imageFriends, as I mentioned last 2-3 days, the day finally arrives when I am going to Kick-Off the Giveaway contest for you. Yes, you heard correct. Telerik is going to give you a FREE License of RadControls Library for Silverlight which you can use for both Silverlight and LightSwitch application development. The prize value of the License of this library is $799 and you can get this absolutely FREE. Just you have to follow some simple steps to Win this license.

 

The contest will stay for just 5 days. Don't wait. Time is running out. Read the complete post and attend the contest to win this $799 controls library. Who knows, you will be the Winner!!!

Published by on under LightSwitch | Silverlight

Yesterday in the blog post "Telerik RadChartControl for LightSwitch Application - Day 1 - Setup the Screen", we discussed about the prerequisite, setting up project, creation of Table and Screens for LightSwitch application. We created a simple screen of data grid from some data present in the table.

 

In this post, we will discuss on integration of Telerik Chart control in LightSwitch application. This will not only help you Telerik control integration but will help you to add your own UserControls into the screen. Don't forget to take part in the Giveaway, which Telerik is doing for my blog readers.

Published by on under LightSwitch | LightSwitchTutorial

If you are working on LightSwitch application, you may probably need to use UserControl or you may need to use Telerik controls or any other 3rd party controls. So, in such case, how will you add UserControls in LightSwitch application?

 

In this article series, I will show you how to add a UserControl in LightSwitch app using the Telerik RadChartControl. This will give you basic understandings of the use of RadChartControl.

 

At the end of the series, there will be a Giveaway of Telerik RadControls for Silverlight, which you can use for both Silverlight and LightSwitch application development.

Published by on under LightSwitch | LightSwitchTutorial

Last week, Microsoft released Silverlight 5 Release Candidate (RC). If you didn't yet download the bits and try out the new features, read the post "Silverlight 5 RC is now Available". During the week, we submitted blog posts from various sources to Silverlight-Zone.com on Silverlight, Windows Phone 7, LightSwitch, XNA and other similar categories.

 

In this blog post, find the top viewed 5 posts @SilverlightZone. "The WP7 Motion API" was the popular post. Read more to find out the complete list, as well as the Archive links of Daily News Headline.

Published by on under Silverlight | SilverlightZone

As of now, you might know that, Silverlight 5 RC (Release Candidate) has been released by Microsoft on 1st September 2011. If you are not aware of that, or if you didn't yet download the latest bits of Silverlight 5, visit "Silverlight 5 Release Candidate is now Available - Download Silverlight 5 RC" to know about this release as well as download the installer to start developing your applications.

 

So, what's new in this release of Silverlight 5? There are many but in this post, we will discuss about some changes in the Application settings for Elevated Trust for Out-of-Browser and In-Browser applications. What's that? Read more to know about this.

Published by on under Silverlight | Silverlight5

Telerik MVP (Most Valuable Professional)

It's the early morning, when I received a mail from Telerik MVP Lead (Community Relations Manager) Holly Bertoncini stating that, I have been awarded as Telerik MVP for the Q2 of 2011. This is because of my contribution towards the Telerik (Silverlight) community.

 

Feeling good to add an additional MVP tag to my profile. Thanks to Telerik team for considering my work to reward me as an MVP. Also thanks to all my readers & followers, who supported me all the times.

Published by on under Achievements | Awards

Silverlight 5 Release Candidate is now available from Microsoft. They just released the RC build to public. You will be able to download it freely from Microsoft Download Center.

 

In this post, I am going to share the link of the Silverlight 5 RC Tools for Visual Studio 2010. Download it and start building your application. Make sure that, it's not in "Go-Live" license, so you can't deploy the Silverlight applications build with this release to production. This build is just for the developers to give the developers a chance to test their applications before they release the final version.

Published by on under CodeProject | DZone

image

The SQL developer needs to be able to create processes for the working database by using one of the many programming objects (like functions, stored procedures, constrains, or triggers). By creating objects that talk with SQL you simply the way other programs (like applications or web pages) can interconnect. These eternal programs only need to call on the names of your programming objects by name rather than needing to submit large pieces of advance code.

 

With SQL Programming Development (Volume 4 of 5) in the SQL Server Joes 2 Pros development series, you learn how programming objects work in SQL Server. This book has been authored by Rick A. Morelan, Pinal Dave and Jessica Brown. If you are a SQL Developer, you may like the series of the book.

 

Published by on under Book | DZone

Today Microsoft showcased Ribbon UI support in Windows Explorer of Windows 8. This features a nice look and feel to the User Interface by providing all the recommended tasks in one place using the Ribbon bar. We are all familiar with Ribbon bar which is currently present in Microsoft Office but this is the first time when they integrated it to the Windows OS by default.

 

I am really very excited to see this in Windows 8 and thought to share it with you. Hope you will also like it. Read the post to know more about it and also find the useful links and video at the end of the post.

Published by on under DZone | News

Here comes the weekly news digest of Silverlight-Zone.com. During last week (i.e. from 21st August 2011 to 27th August 2011) we have submitted 78 new links in Silverlight-Zone on various topics like Silverlight, Windows Phone 7, LightSwitch, XAML, MVVM, XNA and more.

 

Most popular post was "Fundamental MVVM" from John Papa. In this post, I am going to share the top 5 visited posts @SilverlightZone during last week. Also, I am going to share the daily news digest links in case you missed to find some of them.

Published by on under LightSwitch | Silverlight

Few days ago, I published a XAML Tips "How to Convert a Rectangle to a Path Control using Expression Blend?". Today in this post, we will discuss on another tips similar to that post. In this post, we will discuss on the steps to crop an element to give a desired output.

 

This post will help a beginner who just started designing XAML using Expression Blend. Hope, this small tip will help you to understand it in better way. Read to know more on this topic.

Published by on under CodeProject | DZone

Windows Phone 7.1 SDK Release Candidate (RC) is now available for download. Microsoft released this version with “Go Live” license, that means, you can now build production applications and submit them to the Marketplace. This build also empowers the developer to build applications and games both for WP7.0 and WP7.1 devices.

 

In this post, find the link to the web installer and standalone/offline installer. Download, install and start building your games or applications.

Published by on under CodeProject | DZone

This will be a short tip of the day where I will show you the way to convert a Rectangle or a Ellipse control to a Path control. If you are not familiar with Expression Blend and currently working with it to design your UI, this tip will definitely help you in various scenarios.

 

Let’s start with a small demonstration using Rectangle control. You can do the same for Ellipse too. Read to know more.

Published by on under CodeProject | DZone

Proud to announce that, I have been selected as the Winner of Article writing competition at "The Code Project" for the month of July 2011. This is the first competition that I have won from Code project.

 

Last month I wrote an article on Silverlight which demonstrated the steps require to do the communication between two local Silverlight applications. This article was well appreciated by the readers and my sincere thanks to all community fellows to support me by providing their vote and feedback. Read to find more about the article.

Published by on under Achievements | Awards

During last week (i.e. from 14th August 2011 to 20th August 2011) we submitted 85 posts at Silverlight-Zone.com. Topics were on Silverlight, Windows Phone 7, LightSwitch and Xbox. Some posts on WPF also showcased there.

 

In this post find the most visited 5 posts. As usual, I am sharing the "Daily News Digest" pages of last week too, in case you want to find out the posts submitted during the week.

Published by on under HTML | HTML5

Microsoft released the new stable version of "Silverlight for Windows Phone Toolkit (SDK 7.1)" at Codeplex. This is the first stable build after the February 2011 release. This release features several new controls and fixes to the existing controls.

 

In this post find the new controls that has been added to this release. Also find the setup link and urls to the release notes.

Published by on under CodeProject | News

Hope you already read my article series "Collection of Windows Phone 7 (Mango) Tutorials". During the tutorial series, we used the common styles "PhoneTextNormalStyle" and "PhoneTextTitle1Style" in the TextBlocks added to the TitlePanel. So what are those? These are all common styles defined by the style library of WP7 SDK.

 

In this post, we will learn about various font sizes defined in the default style library of Windows Phone 7. So, you don't have to define them again and can reuse those styles which will be standard sizes all over any Phone 7 Applications. Let's discuss them here. Read to know more about it.

Published by on under CodeProject | Silverlight

Sometime we need to bind the same data in different properties of the same control. For example, in some cases we need to show text in a TextBlock and also want to show the same text as a Tooltip to that TextBlock control.

 

How to do it? It's very easy to bind the same value twice in the control. But is there any other way to implement the same? Let us discuss this today in this blog post. If you are not aware of it till date, you will definitely like.

Published by on under CodeProject | DZone

Today in this article we will discuss how to fetch feed from Picasa and display images from that RSS feed to your Windows Phone 7. This will not only clear the image feed mechanism in WP7, but will also help you to understand how to read RSS feed in Windows Phone 7 or in a Silverlight application.

 

After reading this article, you will be able to fetch any feed and display specific content in your application. Hope, this will help you. Don't forget to share it to your followers and if you have any query, drop a line below.

Published by on under Picasa | RSS

Here comes the weekly news digest of Silverlight-Zone.com. During last week (i.e. from 7th August 2011 to 13th August) we have submitted 83 news links in Silverlight-Zone on various topics like Silverlight, Windows Phone 7, LightSwitch, XAML, MVVM and more.

 

In this post, I am going to share the top 5 visited posts @SilverlightZone during last week. Also, I am going to share the daily news digest links in case you missed to find some of them.

Published by on under LightSwitch | Silverlight

Sometime we need to detect the browser information of the user's computer where our Silverlight application is running. We can do this using the JavaScript but sometime it is useful to detect it from our Silverlight application. So, how to do it? Let us discuss this with a small simple example.

 

Read this post to know how to detect the browser information using the HtmlPage.BrowserInformation property.

Published by on under CodeProject | DZone

"Why my Visual Studio debugger is not working for my Silverlight application?" - it's not a new question. People ask this several time in different forums. If you search on net, you may probably find the solution. But, in this post I am just sharing the solution once again for my blog readers and anyone on the net who may face similar issue in future.

 

In this post, I will share you 4 small tips. Just follow the steps from top to bottom and let me know which one resolved your problem. This tip might not be a new thing for you but don't forget to share to others. This could be useful for them.

Published by on under CodeProject | Silverlight

All most all secured sites like bank websites asks you to close your browser window after you signed out from the web application. This is due to high security which actually removes all session details from the browser cache.

 

If you want to develop the same behavior in your Silverlight application, how will you do this? This post covers the code to implement the functionality of the same. Read to know more.

Published by on under CodeProject | DZone

Few weeks ago Mr. Jim Moscater, Community Leader of DZone, contacted me saying that he really liked my WP7 & Silverlight related blog contents and wanted to invite me to join DZone's MVB (Most Valuable Blogger) program.

 

I am very proud to say that, I am now a MVB of DZone. So, what is this MVB Program? Read to know more about this.

Published by on under Achievements | Awards

During last week (from 31st July 2011 to 6th August 2011) around 89 article links on Silverlight, Windows Phone 7, LightSwitch and XNA submitted in Silverlight-Zone.com.

 

In this digest post, top 5 popular links are on "Windows 8 and the Future of Silverlight", "7 reasons to be a WP7 developer", "What's new in Silverlight 5", "Smooth Streaming on WP7" and "Windows Phone SDK 7.1 - A Developer review". If you are worried about the future of Silverlight, never miss to read out the post by Identity Mine.

 

Read to know more about the popular posts and find out the daily news digest links. Follow us on Twitter and become a fan of our Facebook page to be updated on latest article links.

Published by on under LightSwitch | Silverlight

If you work in XAML pages, sometime you might noticed that the XAML page freezes for sometime while opening the page in design view. This is very annoying and many time it is responsible to crash the Visual Studio IDE. So what to do?

 

If you use Expression Blend to design the XAML page or don't want to open the XAML in design view, this small tip will help you to improve the performance of the IDE. Read more to know.

Published by on under CodeProject | Silverlight

Few days ago, I published one article on "Application Library Caching in Silverlight 4". In that article, we discussed about Library Caching concept in detail with a small demo. We discussed various parts of the AppManifest to support this feature for 3rd party libraries. But sometime you may need this feature for your own custom libraries too to reduce the XAP file size by separating the external assemblies in their own ZIP file, which will download by the app when it is require.

 

Let us discuss on this topic today by a small example which will help you to understand how to prepare your dll library to support Library Caching by your application. Read more to learn about it.

Published by on under Silverlight | SilverlightTips

Last week was a busy week in Microsoft Technology. We noticed lots of releases during the whole week and hence increased the no. of posts in Silverlight-Zone.com too. During the week, 24th July 2011 to 30th July 2011, we have total 87 new article and news links posted here on Silverlight, Windows Phone 7 and LightSwitch.

 

In this weekly news digest, I am going to share the popular 5 posts of the week and links to all the daily digest pages. Most popular posts are on News of "WP7 Mango build 7712 release", News of "Microsoft gives WP7 developers a refreshed Mango build", News on "Windows Phone MVC release", "Collection of WP7 (Mango) Tutorials" and "A Story on LightSwitch in the not so distant future". Read out more to find out those links.

Published by on under LightSwitch | Silverlight

Few weeks ago, I published a post in my blog on "Default Browser Switcher Extension for Visual Studio 2010" and today that has been selected as "Articles of the Day" in Microsoft official site ASP.Net and showcased.

 

In that article, I described about a cool extension that you can download freely from the Microsoft Gallery. This extension will help you to improve the productivity if you are working as a web developer. That article demonstrates installation and uses steps-by-step. Read more to read about it.

Published by on under Achievements | News

Microsoft released Visual Studio LightSwitch 2011 on 26th July 2011. This is the first version of the product. You already known about this but those who are new to this product, let me tell about it first. This is a new tool for building data-driven Silverlight Application using Visual Studio IDE. It automatically generates the User Interface for a Data Source targeted for the desktop and cloud by writing a minimal code.

 

In this post, I am going to share the download links (both Web and Offline installer), as well as some good resources to jump start with this tool.

Published by on under LightSwitch | News

Sometime it is require to communicate between two local Silverlight applications. Though this situation is very limited but it may require as per your business deal. In such case, the local messaging mechanism comes into the place.

 

In this post, we will learn about this local messaging system using a small Silverlight application where we will have a sender project and a receiver project. At the end of the article, I embedded the demo which will give you more visibility on what we are going to do in the demo. Let's discuss more on this topic.

Published by on under Silverlight |

During the week 17th July to 23rd July, we have 68 new article links at Silverlight-Zone.com which consists of various topics like Silverlight, Windows Phone 7, LightSwitch, XAML and Blend.

 

In this weekly news digest, I am going to share the popular 5 posts of the week and links to all the daily digest pages. Most popular posts are on "A Collection of WP7 (Mango) Tutorials", "3rd Part of Data Driven Application with MVVM", "Metro Theme Customization7", "Microsoft has 3 months to make or break Windows Phone" and "Excel like Filtering in Silverlight DataGrid".

 

Read more to find those interesting posts of this week and the digest links in case you missed them.

Published by on under Silverlight | SilverlightZone

It's definitely a great start of the day when you notice that one of your article has been selected as "Articles of the Day" in Microsoft's official site WindowsClient.net. This happened with me once again.

 

Few months ago I published one blog post describing a tip that helps to quickly close the open Visual Studio documents. There I also described how to customize the keyboard to assign shortcut for any Visual Studio commands. Read to know more.

Published by on under Achievements | News
Visual Studio LightSwitch is a new tool for building data-driven Silverlight Application using Visual Studio IDE. It automatically generates the User Interface for a Data Source without writing any code. You can write a small amount of code also to meet your requirement.

 

This eBook collects all 5 Chapters of Silverlight Show article series 'Beginners Guide to Visual Studio LightSwitch (Beta 1)' for your offline reference. In this post, I am going to share the Contents of this eBook. Also, there is a link to purchase the book. Read to know more about this.

Published by on under Book | eBook

Recently I had started exploring Windows Phone 7 with first Mango update and accumulated a no. of beginners tutorial in my blog. In this post, I am going to share all the chapters of the series as "31 days with WP7" - a must needed guide for a beginner who wants to learn about Windows Phone 7 programming.

 

Hope, this will be helpful to you to understand the basics before jump start to the application development. This post is on popular demand and I am dedicating this to all my blog readers. Thank you everyone for your support.

Published by on under CodeProject | DZone

The weekly news digest of Silverlight-Zone.com released. We have 63 new article links posted in Silverlight-Zone on different topics like Silverlight, Windows Phone 7 and LightSwitch. In this post, I am going to share the top most 5 links as well as the daily digest links for your reference.

 

This week (10th July 2011 to 16th July 2011) top post was on the future of Silverlight and whether Silverlight is really dead. This post was made by Stephan Forte. A good discussion on Silverlight and XAML. If you are still in doubt, read this post. There are also other topics from James R. Borck, J. Prosise, Owen Williams and Suprotim Agarwal on Silverlight and WP7. Read more to find the links.

Published by on under Silverlight | SilverlightZone

Many time we need to change the layout type of any panel present inside the page. This is mainly a designers job but sometime developers need to change them on their requirement. In that case, people need to find out the start and end tag of the panel and change them accordingly. This is little bit a tricky process.

 

In this post, I am going to share you the easy process to switch between different layout types. If you are a designer or using Expression Blend, you are already familiar with it. But for a newbie, I think it will be a great help.

Published by on under CodeProject | ExpressionBlend
Custom Loader

Last Wednesday (July 6th 2011) we explored a way to create a Circular loader using XAML without writing any line in the code behind file. Lot of you gave a good feedback and discussed various findings on the same.

 

I did some more investigation to create a different type of circular loader which you can include in your Silverlight, WPF and Windows Phone 7 applications where you are using XAML code. In this article, I will be guiding to create similar kind of Circular loader as shown above. This will be more simple than the previous one. Let's start our discussion and create one loader like this.

Published by on under CodeProject | Silverlight

MVVM from Scratch using Silverlight - PUG Monthly Meet - July 2011

On last Saturday (i.e. 9th July 2011) I delivered one hour session on "MVVM from Scratch using Silverlight" in Pune User Group's (PUG) Monthly meet. The session was full of demo and very little with slides.

 

In this post I will just recap the session for you to know what are the things I discussed there. I will also share the slides here, if you want to go through it offline.

Published by on under CodeProject | Events

The Weekly News Digest of Silverlight-Zone.com is out. This week we have total 71 article news posted in Silverlight-Zone on various topics like Silverlight, Windows Phone 7, LightSwitch and XNA. Like always, Windows Phone 7 articles are trending much than Core Silverlight articles. I think, to start viewing some new links on Silverlight, we have to wait more time for the next build of Silverlight 5.

 

In this post, I am going to share all the daily news digest so that, you can find the all the links posted there daily. Also, I am going to share the top 5 posts of this week (3rd July 2011 to 9th July 2011). Read to know more.

Published by on under Silverlight | SilverlightZone

Sometime we need to know whether Network connectivity is available or not from our application. In Windows Phone 7, we have the required API exposed for the developers to detect the status of the network connection and take respective step based on that.

 

So how to detect it? In this small tip of the tutorial series, we will learn about the API and we will also see how this can be done using a small demo which includes code too. Read to know more about it.

Published by on under Mango | Silverlight

If you are a XAML designer and creating controls for Silverlight, Windows Phone 7 or WPF, you may come in some situation that the custom properties for the controls are not properly organized by the developers. If you come into such situation forward this link to the developers and they may find it useful.

 

In this article, we will learn how to well organize the custom properties of your control so that, designers can easily search in appropriate location. Read to know more about it.

Published by on under CodeProject | ExpressionBlend

There are many instance when we have "Browser1" as the default browser in the system and we want our web application to be run inside a different browser (say "Browser2") from the Visual Studio IDE. To do this, we need to open the "Browser2" application and set it as default one, so that, the "Browser2" will start as the application handle from the IDE. After that, you have to revert back the default browser to "Browser1" by doing the same step.

 

This is really very difficult job. To simplify this thing, there is an Extension for the Visual Studio 2010 IDE. If you download and install that free extension, you will be able to do this very easily. In this post I will share the step and show you how this will improve your productivity.

Published by on under CodeProject | Tips

Circular Loader

Sometime we need to show a circular loader in WPF and/or Silverlight. We may need it in Windows Phone 7 too. In simple statement, we need to show a circular loader in various XAML applications like Silverlight, WP7 and WPF.

 

In this article, we will learn how to create a Circular Loader as shown in the screenshot. I will not use a single line of C# code to create this loader. Everything will be in the XAML file itself to keep the code behind file clean. Read to know more about it step-by-step and after reading this article, you will be able to create and use a circular loader like this. Source code is also available for download at the end of the page. Feel free to use it.

Published by on under CodeProject | Silverlight

Input Scope of a TextBox defines the information related to the scope of the data provided by the input method and use to define the layout of the onscreen keyboard of the device. It is present in the "System.Windows.Input" namespace and exposed in TextBox as a property called "InputScope".

 

You might be wondering what is this property and why should one use it. Ok, let us discuss this in depth with a small sample. After reading this chapter, you will be able to understand it more and use it on your business requirement. Don't forget to share this tutorial links to others as this will help them to learn more.

 

Published by on under Mango | Silverlight

On coming Saturday, 9th July 2011, I am going to take an hour session on "MVVM from Scratch using Silverlight" in the Pune User Group's (PUG) monthly meeting. The session will start from 10 AM and will continue for one hour. Also there are two more sessions on Windows Phone 7 and Parallel Programming.

 

In this one hour session, I will demonstrate what is MVVM pattern, how a designer/developer will get the benefit of using it. I will also demonstrate how this will help you to clear up the code behind file and make a fully loosely coupled & maintainable code. Read more to find the Agenda and Venue of the event. Entry is FREE, hence you can join it directly at the venue. Will meet you there.

Published by on under Events | MVVM

Silverlight-Zone.com completed it's 6 months

Here comes the weekly digest of Silverlight-Zone.com from 26th June 2011 to 2nd July 2011. We have completed 6 months of this site with more than 2000 news items. We received some good feedback too including a huge hit to the site. This motivates us to serve you better in future.

 

In this post, I am going to share the top 5 posts of this week. Windows Phone 7 is trending in this site. Top 5 posts are "The news of distribution of WP7 Mango to developers by Microsoft", "Windows 8 Rumour to Future for WP7", "A Screen Recorder application in WP7", "Hosting HTML App in WP7 Mango" and "Betting the House on LightSwitch". Read to find out these links as well as the link to daily news digest of the week in case you missed to read them.

Published by on under Silverlight | SilverlightZone

Microsoft released Windows Phone SDK 7.1 Beta 2 on 29th June 2011. Earlier it was named as Windows Phone Developer Tools. While releasing the beta 2 version of the Software, they renamed it to Windows Phone SDK 7.1.

 

Today I downloaded the SDK and installed it in my laptop. Sharing the same experience here just in case you want to read it. This will also help a beginner to kick start on the same.

Published by on under Mango | Silverlight

Last three days we learnt about the new feature of Windows Phone 7 (Mango) called "Local Database Support". Yesterday we discussed it in depth by building a small demo application. While working with the demo you might noticed that, we used a connection string to connect with the local database present in the Windows Phone storage.

 

In this post, we will discuss more on the connection string. After reading this post, you will be able to know what are the various types and parameters available for connection string.

Published by on under Mango | Silverlight

In the last two chapters of the tutorial series, we discussed about the local database support in Windows Phone 7 (Mango). We learnt how to create a DataContext class from existing SQL CE database and also we learnt about the issues that arises once we add the class file in the project to build. We learnt the steps to resolve those issues too.

 

In this article, we are going to discuss about the CRUD operations that we can do using the DataContext class with a small application. We will learn how to create and delete a database, we will also learn how to insert or fetch records. After reading this tutorial you will also be able to do other operations like edit, search etc.

Published by on under Mango | Silverlight

Microsoft released Windows Phone 7.1 SDK Beta 2 today, 29th June 2011. It has a no. of new features as well as some breaking changes respect to previous Beta 1 release.

 

In this post, find the link to download the Beta 2 SDK of Windows Phone 7.1 (Mango) which includes both the web and standalone offline installer. Also find the links towards new and breaking changes.

Published by on under Mango | News

Hope you read my previous post on Windows Phone 7.1 (Mango) local database support. If you didn't read the earlier post, you need to read it before reading this one. You can find it here: "Create DataContext". That will give you the basic context about the same.

 

In this post (I will rather calling it as a Tip), we will configure the project by adding the generated DataContext class and in the next post, we will learn what are the various CRUD operations we can do with a sample application. That will give you complete visibility to this new feature implementation.

Published by on under Mango | Silverlight

Do you know that, Windows Phone 7.1 (Mango) now supports local database? Yes, you can now use local database inside your Phone 7 device and use it to CRUD operations. You can now create a DataContext class from an existing database and use it as the entry point class to do DB operation.

 

In this chapter we will learn how to create a DataContext class for local SQL CE database. At the end of this tutorial our data context class will be ready for further DB operations.

Published by on under Mango | Silverlight

Last two days we learned about Accelerometer class, it's base class and the accelerometer tool that comes with the Phone emulator. Hope those posts gave you some basic idea about it.

 

Here in this post, we will learn the use of this feature with a small demo application. We will also learn how to use the phone to write application that depends on the gravitational force applied to the sensors. This will give you better idea to create game application that will work when the user moves his phone device.

Published by on under Mango | Silverlight

Here comes the weekly news digest of Silverlight-Zone.com from 19th June 2011 to 25th June 2011. We have submitted 72 article links during the week on various topics like Silverlight, Windows Phone 7, LightSwitch, Expression Blend and even Windows 8.

 

During this week, top news was on Windows 8 Rumour to Windows Phone 7 future followed by several Windows Phone 7 related articles. In this post, I am going to share the top 5 posts as well as the links to daily news digest at Silverlight-Zone.com. Read to know more.

Published by on under LightSwitch | Silverlight

Yesterday, we came to know about Accelerometer of Windows Phone 7. We also learnt about the structure of the Accelerometer class and it's base class. Now, it's the time to see how to run the same inside the Phone emulator. In this post we are going to see the accelerometer tool that comes with the Phone 7 emulator.

 

Read more to know how to run the accelerometer tool and what customization we can do with this tool. This will be beneficial for you when we discuss more about the topic with a sample application.

Published by on under Mango | Silverlight

Accelerometer defines the force applied to the Windows Phone 7 device which can be used to determine the measure of direction that has been applied by the user by moving the device. This values are represented as a 3D vector coordinates in X, Y and Z axis. Using the Accelerometer class present in the library, we can programmatically control the device's 3D acceleration.

 

In this article we will learn about the class that we will use to demonstrate the same feature. Read to learn more about it.

Published by on under Mango | Silverlight

Last two days, we learnt about Alarm and Reminder class present for Windows Phone 7 application development. We came to know about the class structure and demoed the implementation with small application created in step-by-step process. We also learnt about the use of Task while discussing the same.

 

In this tutorial chapter we will learn more about the tasks present for Mango devices. After reading this part you will be able to understand the different tasks and their uses. Read more to learn about them with visual code snippet and huge screenshots.

Published by on under Mango | Silverlight

Yesterday we discussed about the Alarm class and also demonstrated the use of it using a small demo app. Today in this post we will learn about Reminder class and will see the structure of the same. We will also demonstrate the implementation with a small demo.

 

Like Alarm class, Reminder class is also part of the "Microsoft.Phone.Scheduler" namespace and inherits the same base class. Let's read more about it and explore each and every step to create a simple Windows Phone 7 Reminder application.

Published by on under Mango | Silverlight

Windows Phone 7.1 now supports scheduled tasks which runs even the application is not running. We can now schedule a task and when the bell hits, it starts executing the said task. In this chapter of the tutorial series, we will explore this using the Alarm class.

 

Alarm class creates an instance which runs in the background using the task agent and at the specified time, it will raise the event to execute. If your application is not running at that time too, it will execute and show the alarm screen. Read to know more about the class with a small demonstration.

Published by on under Mango | Silverlight

In our last chapter of Windows Phone 7 Tutorial, we learnt about detecting network information using the static class called DeviceNetworkInformation. We also demonstrated it with a small demo application.

 

In this new chapter of the tutorial series, we will learn how to detect the device information using the APIs present inside the SDK. We will learn how to detect whether any Keyboard has been installed with the device, whether the device is running under battery or using any external power supply. We will also learn the way to detect about the memory of the device and other device information.

 

Read more to know about the class and it's properties with a small demonstration of the code.

Published by on under Mango | Silverlight

During the week 12th June to 18th June, we posted 63 new article links at Silverlight-Zone.com which consists of Silverlight, Windows Phone 7, LightSwitch, XAML and Blend.

 

In this weekly news digest, I am going to share the popular 5 posts of the week and links to all the daily digest pages. Most popular posts are on "Google Maps for WP7 using Bing Map control", "HTML5 and Silverlight5 discussion", "Tips & Tricks on Office with Mobile 7", "HTML5 based WP7 Application" and "Release date for WP7 Mango devices".

 

Read more to find those interesting posts of this week and the digest links in case you missed them.

Published by on under Silverlight | SilverlightZone