My friend Abhijit Jana recently published a book “Kinect for Windows SDK Programming Guide”. The book covers step-by-step tutorial to demonstrate the API usage with well explanation and code sample for beginners.

 

Hence I thought to share this to my blog readers and followers in case it helps you to learn Kinect programming. Sharing herewith a sample chapter and other links.

Published by on under Book | Kinect

If you are looking for a way to retrieve the current battery status of Windows Phone device, first let me inform you that the same is not available for WP7 device. But if you are looking for the same to implement in WP8 device, you can do it now.

 

Windows Phone 8 SDK exposes an API to retrieve the current battery status of the device which includes remaining percent and time. Let’s discuss more about it.

Published by on under Tips | WP8

If you just installed Telerik’s Team Pulse solution for your TFS synchronization, you might face the following error message that says “The TeamPulse Integration Service could not load the required Team Foundation client libraries”.

 

You might already searched for a solution online and came here to resolve the issue. So, let us discuss how to resolve it.

Published by on under TeamPulse | Telerik

How to Crop an Image based on a Shape or Path control?

In the last post we discussed “How to Crop an Image using the WriteableBitmap class”. If you didn’t read it yet, first try to understand that before reading this post as we are going to use it in this post very frequently.

 

Today in this post we are going to learn how to crop an image in different shapes like rectangle, circle or any other different complex shapes programmatically.

Published by on under Silverlight | SilverlightTips

Some time we need to crop an image uploaded by user in Silverlight or Windows Phone applications. Sometime we also need to do a rotate transform or skew transform to the image before saving it. So, how to achieve it?

 

This blog post will cover the code with details using the WriteableBitmap class that comes with the SDK. Continue reading to know more about it.

Published by on under Silverlight | SilverlightTips

Earlier days while working with Silverlight 2, it was very difficult to take a snapshot of the XAML page programmatically in Silverlight. Later WritableBitmap class helped us to take snapshot of any portion and save it as image.

 

Today I learnt something new to do this operation very easily using Telerik library methods and hence thought to share with you in this post.

Published by on under Silverlight | Telerik

Yesterday while working with Telerik’s RadHtmlPlaceholder control for Silverlight, I noticed that, it is unable to open certain websites and showing a message that says “The content cannot be displayed in a Frame”.

 

After doing an investigation, I came to know that, it is default behaviour of the control we can not handle. Let’s discuss more on the issue and the reason behind it.

Published by on under Silverlight | Telerik

Windows Phone 8 is already in the market and people having the Windows Phone 7 device is waiting for the WP7.8 update to test few features that is already available in the WP8 devices because the WP7 devices can not be upgraded with the WP8 operating system.

 

WMPoweruser reported some new features which we will get in WP7.8 update from a Nokia Customer Feedback page, but it is still not officially confirmed yet.

Published by on under News | Nokia

As a Windows 8 Store application developer, we need to store and retrieve data to and from XML file stored in the application directory. There are various ways to store data in XML but this post will cover a simplest way to do that.

 

Here we will use a 3rd party extension in our application as assembly reference and use their XmlDeSerializer class to handle it easily. Keep reading to know more about it.

Published by on under Tutorial | Win8

The Windows 8 Software Development Kit (SDK) contains header libraries and a set of tools which you can use to develop Windows Store apps using technologies like Visual C#, Visual Basic, Visual C++ and/or JavaScript.

 

Recently a new version of the SDK has been published which you can grab from here. Also it has a new version of the WACK to validate your Windows 8 Store application branding.

Published by on under Win8 | Windows Store

Last month Microsoft released Windows Phone 8 SDK and now they are organizing a 10 hours online webcast to train you in WP8 application development. In this webcast you will learn more about development from the experts.

 

In this post, find the session details, time table and the link to register for the free webcast event. Take part of it and enhance your Windows Phone skills.

Published by on under Events | Webcast

The “Clipboard” is a user driven set of functions that enables an application to transfer data between applications or within an application. Windows 8 Store SDK defines a set of APIs to handle the OS clipboard in your application.

 

In this continued series of Windows 8 Store application development tutorial, we will learn more about the API and the way to integrate the Clipboard in your WinRT application.

Published by on under Tutorial | Win8

This is the continuing series of the Windows 8 Store application development tutorial and in this chapter, we will learn about creating and updating the live tiles of your WinRT application. There are 46 different types of tile templates available which we will go to learn today.

 

A live tile is one of the best way to provide a good experience to your application which you will find in your Windows 8 Start screen. Continue for further reading.

Published by on under Tutorial | Win8

If you are a Windows 8 Store application and/or game developer, you may want to provide feature to share text, graphics, links or game score cards to Facebook, Twitter or Email. Windows 8 SDK provides those APIs to implement the feature in your application.

 

Today in this chapter of the Windows Store Tutorial series, we will discuss more about the API methods and how to integrate it in your application. Continue reading.

Published by on under Tutorial | Win8

Many time we need to access files and folders from our applications. The Windows Store apps SDK provides us Asynchronous APIs to use for this service to query files and folders. You have to be familiar with async await calls in order to get started with this.

 

This post is part of the Windows Store Application Development Tutorial series. Today we will learn how to handle files and folders in your Windows 8 metro applications.

Published by on under Tutorial | Win8

Microsoft recently released Windows Phone 8 SDK which you can install in your Windows 8 Pro x64-bit version to get started with the development process with Visual Studio 2012. Keep in mind that, your CPU should support Hyper-V and SLAT in order to run the WP8 emulator.

 

Today in this post we will have a quick look into the new WP8 SDK template, the project structure and improved manifest file.

Published by on under WP8 | WP8Dev

Second Level Address Translation a.k.a. SLAT is a technology introduced in Intel and AMD processors. Recently released Windows Phone 8 SDK needs it to run the emulator 8 in your Windows 8 system.

 

So, what is this SLAT and how to check whether your CPU really supports it? In this post, we will discuss this with you.

Published by on under Tips | Win8

As mentioned in yesterday’s Windows Phone 8 launch event, Microsoft publicly released the WP8 SDK for developers. You can now build apps targeting Windows Phone 8 devices. You will be also able to program for Windows Phone 7 devices in Visual Studio 2012 now.

 

In this post, I am sharing the downloadable links of both web and offline ISO versions. Go through the System Requirements first before downloading and installing it.

Published by on under News | WP8

If you are familiar with Windows Phone applications, you might be already aware of Application Bar. Application Bar is used to provide users with quick access to an application’s most common tasks, which are basically hidden when they are not needed.

 

Today in this chapter we will learn more about Application Bar in Windows Store apps along with integration and design guidelines.

Published by on under Tutorial | Win8

In earlier Windows versions, we were missing this great feature of CD/DVD mounting. To achieve this, we had to install 3rd party software tools and was always demanded as in-built feature in Windows.

 

Windows 8 now has this feature and you can now easily mount any ISO image to create a virtual CD/DVD ROM in your PC. Continue reading it to know how to do this.

Published by on under Win8 | Windows

Many of us need to integrate settings page in our applications. All we generally do is by creating a separate page in our project. But Windows 8 provide us a separate settings panel in Charm bar which you can use for your settings page.

 

In this post we will learn more about it from scratch and integrate it to our demo application. Also, we will learn how to invoke the charm bar to show the settings panel.

Published by on under Tutorial | Win8

In last chapter “Navigate between Pages” we discussed the basics of page navigation, where we navigated from one page to another page using the Frame.Navigate(type, obj). We also discussed how to pass an object as query string parameter.

 

Today in this chapter we will discuss more advanced page navigation using the LayoutAwarePage which comes with the Grid and Split application template by default.

Published by on under Tutorial | Win8

Let’s begin with our fourth chapter of building Windows Store application development using Visual Studio 2012. In the previous chapters of this tutorial series, we got familiar with this project template and built a basic “Hello World” application.

 

Today in this chapter we will learn how to navigate from one page to another page in Windows 8 Store applications. So, continue reading.

Published by on under Tutorial | Win8

logo

Today in this tutorial series, we will learn how to develop our first Windows Store application using the C#/XAML template. We will also learn how to build and run it inside a simulator that comes with the Visual Studio 2012 IDE.

 

Don’t forget to follow the complete tutorial series of Windows Store apps (WinRT) development and share the chapters with your network friends.

Published by on under Tutorial | Win8

Last day in “Getting Started with Windows Store apps Development” we discussed about Windows Store applications and how to setup your development machine to start with the development. We also discussed it’s four different project categories.

 

Today in this continued series post, we will learn more about project templates in each category and the basic project structure of most used templates.

Published by on under Tutorial | Win8

Based on the discussion with you over twitter and facebook, I am starting with a Tutorial series on Windows Store application development. The tutorial will focus on C# and XAML template to give you proper steps learning this application development.

 

Today we will kick-off our first chapter of this tutorial series where we will introduce with this technology and setup the developer environment with required tools and other stuffs.

Published by on under Tutorial | Win8

In current web based application market, it’s more important to load and browse the application faster and there application caching is becoming most important thing. All the browsers support caching but that is not enough.

 

HTML5 now comes with application caching mechanism by which a developer can tell the client to cache what it needs to browse them in offline too. Continue to read more about it in today’s post.

Published by on under HTML | HTML5

Here comes my new Windows Phone application in the Windows Phone Store. The application is free for you to use. Kids can learn capitals of countries using this app. Not only this, you can anytime search on this app to query about the capital of a country.

 

This is my 8th Windows Phone app and dedicating it to all Windows Phone users. Continue to get the downloadable link and few screenshots of the application.

Published by on under DZone | Silverlight

1st October is the most prestigious day for me. Today Microsoft re-awarded me the MVP (Most Valuable Professional) award for the 3rd time in a row and I am still a Silverlight MVP since October 2010.

 

My sincere thanks to all the community friends, MVP Lead for their continuous support. Hope to serve the developer community with more contents in coming year.

Published by on under Achievements | Awards

Few days ago, we learned about “Easy Form Validation using HTML5”. Hope, you liked that post. Today we will explore another new great feature of HTML5 with complete code analysis and simple but easy to understandable demo.

 

HTML5 exposes geolocation API to get the geographical location of user. Today we will focus our discussion on this topic. So, continue reading.

Published by on under DZone | HTML

On 10th September 2012, I started a Giveaway in my blog as celebration to my 500th blog post. Today I am announcing the winners of that giveaway who will get Pluralsight monthly subscription, SQL Interview book or Telerik DevCraft license from me.

 

Don’t forget that all my blog readers are eligible for a free Screen Camera license worth $49.95. So grab your licenses now.

Published by on under GiveawayContest |

Today we will start working with RadSlideHubTile control recently added to the Telerik RadControls library for Win 8 Metro. Though there are couple of hub tile controls, but today we will start with the basic one named “RadSlideHubTile”.

 

If you are new to Windows Store app development, you can get the Free trial copy of this library from Telerik to start with this new application development. Continue reading for more information.

Published by on under Metro | Telerik

Writing validation logic using JavaScript in a HTML form is not an easy way. We all have seen it in HTML4 but what’s new in HTML5? Will it provide us easy way to validate the form with writing a small piece of code only?

 

Today we will be talking about this validation stuffs in HTML5. But as usual, all the browsers don’t support all of them but a good start to think for future.

Published by on under CodeProject | DZone

Few days ago we discussed about RadDataBoundListBox from Telerik RadControls library which maximum WPDev want to integrate in their Windows Phone app. Today in this blog post we will discuss about another control from that library.

 

RadSlideView control is also another important control from that library which we will discuss today and maximum developers can find it useful. So, continue reading.

Published by on under Telerik | WP7

Telerik Team recently published a Picture Gallery application for Windows Phone demonstrating how to create a native Windows Phone client for Flickr or any other image hosting service. The app is freely available with source code.

 

You can use this source code and modify it to extend to a better application of your choice. Don’t forget to tweet this post as it will give you a chance to win Telerik RadControls license for WP.

Published by on under Telerik | WP7

Recently I had shown few of my Windows Phone application to few people and connected with one “Mahatma” (Guru) and inspired by him I built a “Quotes of Vivekananda” application for the sake of Swami Vivekananda lovers.

 

I am dedicating this application to all the followers of Vivekananda who need the bless and inspiration from his great quotes.

Published by on under DZone | Silverlight

Here comes the 6th Windows Phone application from me named “Emergency Dialer”. This application is freely available in the Marketplace and I hope, this will be helpful for you and your parents for sure.

 

I am dedicating this phone app to all the senior citizens who need to contact their doctor, nurse or family members in emergency. Sharing herewith few snaps and downloadable link.

Published by on under DZone | Silverlight

Microsoft just announced that, “Windows Store” is now open for all developers across 120 markets all over the world. Till date it was only available to the company accounts and no individual registration was possible.

 

This announcement will now bring more developers under a roof to build Windows 8 Style applications for Windows Store. Continue reading for more information.

Published by on under News | Win8

It’s celebration time for me as I have completed a 500 posts milestone in my blog and as announced, I am going to raffle few goodies to my blog followers for their support. This will have 4 different types of items to giveaway.

 

Don’t waste your time and enter to this small contest to Win subscription from Pluralsight, SQL Server Interview book from Pinal Dave/Vinod Kumar, Telerik license and more.

Published by on under GiveawayContest |

Many of us build Windows Phone applications and we try to market ourselves and/or our apps. Writing the same code for all the apps is not a big tough but why to write? That’s why I wrote a single code file for my apps and thought to share it with you.

 

Let’s begin with the source code and if you have more to share for other developers, post in the comment section and help them to code easily.

Published by on under Tips | WP7

If you are a web developer, many time you want to use a HTML Color Code Generator, which can give you proper hex-code for your selected color. Also, you might want to integrate a color palate in your web application for your user.

 

This post will help you to build a color palate in any web page and chose your color code from there. A sample and it’s code is attached here for your direct referral.

Published by on under HTML | JavaScript

Today Microsoft announced that they are near to the final release of WP8 SDK tools for developers after doing several testing by selected partners and developers. Though the final WP8 SDK will be available publicly later this year but they are going to open applications for limited developers.

 

If you are interested to getting your hands dirty with the new bits, read out the complete post for details.

Published by on under News | Tools

Almost all of us use ListBox control in our Windows Phone applications to load a no. of records in the screen. Telerik provides their own ListBox control named as "RadDataBoundListBox" which has lots of additional features and performance benefits compare to default Silverlight ListBox.

 

Today in this post, we will jumpstart with the RadDataBoundListBox and see the benefits of using it in our applications.

Published by on under Telerik | WP7

At the time of developing your Windows Phone 7 application, you might see a build error. The build error describes as “The target ‘GetCopyToOutputDirectoryContentProjectItems’ does not exist in the project”.

 

This small post will describe you the solution to fix this error and build your WP7 apps smoothly. Continue reading and if you still face the issue, let me know.

Published by on under DZone | Tips

If you have installed Windows 8 RTM, you might have noticed that the “Hibernate” option is missing in “Power Menu”. So you might want to activate this option in your Windows 8 Power Menu to enable the Hibernate in your system.

 

This blog post will help you to enable “Hibernate” option in your Windows 8 Power Menu. Continue reading to further know about it step-by-step.

Published by on under Tips | Win8

Windows 8 RTM is currently available for MSDN Subscribers and also a 90 days trial available for the general users. Microsoft already planned to release it for general consumers availability on 26th October 2012.

 

Windows 8 has some new sets of keyboard shortcuts which I am going to share here in this blog post. I hope, you will like it. So, continue reading.

Published by on under Win8 | Windows

Today in this small post we will learn how to capture a screenshot of your installed applications in Windows 8 RTM. Whether it is desktop app or a Windows 8 app, you will be able to take screenshot by just pressing a key combination without installing any other software.

 

Not only that, the captured screenshot will be saved to your hard drive as an image file, so that you can directly access them. Continue to read more about it.

Published by on under Tips | Win8