It’s a Christmas time. Santa could be near your house to knock your door. If you are a Windows Phone user, you will get an additional 20 GB free SkyDrive storage to use in 2014. Microsoft is floating a Redemption Code over email to claim your extra space.
Check your emails to see whether you received it. Don’t worry if you didn’t receive it yet, you will surely get it soon if you are a Windows Phone user.
Today in this blog post we will discuss about Compass APIs available in Windows Phone SDK. After reading this post, you will be able to use your Windows Phone’s device sensors and build some apps and/or games for your targeted users.
Before using the compass in your game, make sure to check whether the device supports it or not. The SDK provides APIs to check that too. Let’s start discussing about it.
If you are part of DVLUP program of Nokia, you might have noticed that, all Windows Phone 8 challenges have the same requirement “Employ Fast App Switching”. This is more likely same as “Fast App Resume”. So, what is this and how can you configure your app to support fast app resume?
In this small post for WPDev, we will discuss a bit about it and the simple process to configure your WP8 apps and/or games to process “Fast App Resume”.
If you are building Location Aware app for Windows Phone 8, you might want to check whether the Location Service is enabled/disabled in the system and based on that, you can take appropriate steps asking user to enable that.
If you are one of such developer, this small but handy blog post will help you to figure out the status of the Location Service. Continue reading to know further about it.
Windows Phone 8 GDR 3 is already there for the developers to try out the new features that are coming in this update 3. Among them, one is orientation lock. If you already installed WP8 GDR3, you might have already seen the Rotation Settings page.
If you are a WPDev, you might want to add an option in your app to launch this settings page. In this post, we are going to discuss how to do this programmatically.
You might have used maps in your Windows Phone applications to help the user navigate from one place to another place. Windows Phone 8 supports downloading of maps for a specific place and/or country. If you want your user to easily navigate to download maps page, this post will help you.
Windows Phone 8 SDK exposes MapDownloaderTask, which will help you for this easy navigation. Continue reading for more information on this.
Windows Phone 8 Update 3 (aka. GDR 3) preview already released for developers to build and test their applications and games. There are few features in this release that you might want to add in your app. For this, you need to check whether the device already has GDR3 installed.
In this small post, we are going to discuss how you can check whether the Updated 3 (GDR 3) has already been installed in the user’s device.
Here comes an opportunity for Windows Phone Developers to try out the GDR3 update before it reaches to the actual consumers. If you are a WPDev, you can now download Update 3 in your unlocked WP8 device and test your applications against it.
Windows Phone 8 GDR3 comes with a plenty of features and enhancements including bigger screen resolutions, screen rotations and more. Read to get the GDR3 bits in your device.
So Microsoft finally came up with an official list of new features in Windows Phone 8 General Distribution Release, named as GDR3. Also, they are now opening a “Developer Preview Program” for the WPDev’s to test their apps against the new OS build before it comes to consumer.
In this post, I am going to share you the set of features that you are going to see in the next update of your Windows Phone 8 device.
Here comes my another application for Windows Phone users, named “Place Explorer”. The app is currently available in Windows Phone Store for free. Using this app, you will be able to find out the favourite places around the city near your current location for food, drinks, shopping, accommodations etc.
Find out more details about the app and a downloadable link to install in your Nokia Lumia series of Windows Phone 8 devices.
As a WPDev, you already know about the NavigationService class that we use regularly to navigate from one page to another. But what if you want to navigate to a web URL? If you use the same class for web navigation, you will face a ArgumentException unhandled in your App class.
If you are one of the victim and came to this page by searching online for the solution, this post will help you today to resolve the exception in your code.
Do you want to add a functionality in your Windows Phone device which can actually listen to users voice or commands? Do you want the app to record the speech or convert the speech into a text string which you can save as a document?
Okay, this blog post will cover that topic for you today. Here we will discuss how to use the API to enable the speech recognition in your WP device.
These days almost everyone has a smartphone for Net surfing, Music, Games, Messengers, Official works and many more. If you use the device and subscribe to many services, it will consume more battery power and drain quickly than expected.
In this post we will discuss how to increase the battery power of Windows Phone series devices while in standby mode. If your device battery is draining quickly, check out the solution.
Sometime while working with map control in Windows Phone, we may need to calculate distance between two GeoCoordinates. The Windows Phone 8 SDK already provides you the required API for you to calculate the distance very easily.
If you are looking for a piece of code to do the same, here is the small post for you to understand the API and the way to use it in your app.
Visual Studio 2013 Preview is already here and many of you already downloaded it and started exploring the new features and enhancements introduced in this version. Few people asked me that, they are not able to build Windows Phone 7 applications in Visual Studio 2013 even after installing the WP7 SDK.
So, what is the issue? How can we build Windows Phone application that targets OS 7? This short post is for those developers who are seeking this information.
Everyone wants to update their phone’s operating system whenever a new update comes up with new features and applications etc., isn’t it? Recently Nokia started rolling out an Amber update with new features and applications to it’s entire set of Lumia series and will be available to all users by end of September.
Yesterday I received the update and at a first glance, it was just amazing. In this post, I will share you some noticeable changes in Amber update for Nokia Lumia.
Everyone wants to build their apps, whether you are a geek or not. And when you have a website or blog with RSS, it’s by nature to build a RSS phone of your blog. A developer who has knowledge of programming can easily start with that. But what about non-techie?
Microsoft has recently launched a tool called “App Studio” which will allow you to build a Windows Phone app without any programming skill. Today we will discuss how to use this tool.
Microsoft released Windows Phone SDK 8.0 Update for Windows Phone 8.0.10322 with four new emulator images to an existing installation of WP SDK 8.0. The new SDK version no is: 8.0.10322. You must have an existing WP8 SDK installed before installing this latest bit.
If you are a WPDev, don’t forget to download the latest SDK to test your apps. Find herewith the link to download the WP 8.0.10322 SDK update.
If you are a WPDev and looking for a way to retrieve the Geo Location of the user and integrate that Geo Coordinates in your Windows Phone 8 application, this post will help you step-by-step to understand the API and the way to use it.
The Geolocator class provides us details about the user’s location. To use this class, you need to add proper capabilities to your application. Let’s start discussing on that.
It’s a long time I was thinking to make a blog reader app for my blog kunal-chowdhury.com and finally it is now available in the Windows Phone store. Using this small app, you will be able to view the latest posts published in my blog.
Though the app is currently available for WP8 devices only, but I am going to push a downgraded version for WP7 devices very soon to the store.