It was a most demanding features by the Windows Phone community to include the Text-to-Speech engine in Windows Phone and the WPDevs who were missing it in Windows Phone 7 can now use this feature in their Windows Phone 8 applications.

The TTS engine is now available in WP8 devices which you can easily integrate in your app. This small post will describe how to use it.

Though it’s not the common practice in Windows Phone application development, but you may want to terminate your Application programmatically on some special occasions. These occasions may vary in different cases.

In this post, we will learn how to kill the application programmatically so that, it should not reside in the memory unnecessarily when user hits back to come out from the application.

Developers always try to provide the user a easiest way to represent the data irrespective of the technology that has been used. Hence, for a huge collection of data, generally we provide “AutoComplete TextBox” to the user instead of ComboBox or ListBox.

The reason behind this is to provide searchable and filterable UI to the user for easy access. Today in this post, we will learn how to use the Telerik’s RadAutoCompleteBox in both Silverlight and Windows Phone.

If you are a phone application developer, you may want to integrate vibration in your application, so that, you can vibrate the phone programmatically to provide some message to the end user silently in some special occasion.

Today in this post, we will learn how to programmatically vibrate your Windows Phone device by learning the SDK API details. Continue learning and provide your feedback.

XAML namespace is an extension of XML namespace and conventionally written as “xmlns” in XAML pages. We use it on all XAML pages in Silverlight, Windows Phone, Windows 8, WPF related technologies to better reference assemblies and namespaces.

In this post we will learn more about this XMLNS namespace and the way to customize it for a cleaner XAML page. Interested to know it? Continue reading and share your feedback about the post.

It’s the sunny morning when I woke up from bed and opened my Surface to check the mails and tweets those I received while I was sleeping. In the collection of all unread mail, I noticed a mail with the subject line that says “Welcome to Nokia Developer Champion”.

At the very beginning I thought it as dream but now my dream comes true. Yes, I am now a Nokia Developer Champion from India and I am feeling very proud to announce it to you.

As a WPDev, sometime we want to show a callout type information box or a notification popup within the Windows Phone application to the end user. Building such type of control needs a lot of effort before using that in an application.

Infragistics came up with their own control to help the Windows Phone developers to save their effort building it from the scratch. Today we are going to discuss it here with step-by-step code snippet.

Almost two years ago we discussed about “Microsoft.Phone.Info.DeviceStatus” class to retrieve Windows Phone device information in your application. In addition to those, there are some more APIs to fetch more details which is available as extended properties set.

Today in this post, we will learn about the API and the way to fetch those additional details in your application. Continue reading to know more about it.

In the last blog post, we learnt “How to Share a Media File from WP8 using the ShareMediaTask?” which was a launcher available in Windows Phone 8 SDK. Similarly there are few more launchers available in the SDK by which you can launch WP8 specific applications programmatically.

Today in this blog post we will learn how to create an appointment in Windows Phone 8 using the API named “SaveAppointmentTask”. Continue reading for details.

If you are a Windows Phone 8 application developer, you might want to implement a functionality to share a media (say, a picture) from your media library or camera library. So, how can you do that? Windows Phone 8 SDK provides you an API by which you can implement the same easily.

Today in this post, we will learn about the API and the implementation steps in a Windows Phone application. If you are looking for it, this will be an ideal solution for you.

Last day we learnt “How to Integrate WP7.8, WP8 Live Tiles in your WP7.5 apps?” which was using the default APIs provided by Windows Phone SDK. That does not provide additional APIs like transparency, front and back content etc. to control the live tiles of your application.

In this post, we will learn how to customize the primary live tile of your Windows Phone 7.8 or 8.0 applications easily using the Telerik libraries.

The Windows Phone SDK update for WP7.8 is already there and many people already started receiving the WP7.8 OS update in their existing WP7.5 handsets. If you are a developer, you might want to integrate the new Live Tiles in your existing application to give it a good look.

In this post, I will guide you to update your existing apps to include the new live tiles. Continue reading to find out the step-by-step process to integrate it.

A long time ago while developing a custom control, I wrote a piece of code which allows a developer to enter “Auto” as string to a custom property of type double. Yesterday, I was in a need to use the same functionality in one of my control.

That reminds me the previous implementation and fortunately I was able to get it from TFS repository. Thus I thought to share the same with you in case you need it in future.

Microsoft is again back with their webcast series and this time they planned for both Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 sessions on the same day but in a different time slot. The webcast series will happen for five continuous days, 1.5hrs daily for each technology.

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 8 and Windows Phone 8 skills.

Memory Leakage in applications are most common and a developer maximum time does not care about it. There are various possibilities for Memory leakage and one of them is Events registered in applications which a developer unknowingly forgets to handle.

So, what are the cases where that could make problem and are there any proper solutions to tackle down this issue? Let us discuss on this topic today.

“What is Dispatcher object and why to use it in application?” - It’s a common question asked by beginners working in various XAML technologies like Silverlight, Windows Phone etc. I came to such instances many time when the developer has no clue about “Cross Thread Exception”.

That is the reason I wanted to publish this post mentioning the use of this Dispatcher object, mainly when you are getting an “Invalid cross-thread access” exception.

Above expectation, Microsoft released the WP7.8 SDK update for the Windows Phone 7 developers who wants to upgrade their apps to target the new WP7.8 OS rolling out after 31st January 2013. This update brings some prominent features like the new start screen.

In this post, I am going to share the downloadable links of the new SDK and the instructions to install this SDK update.

Today while deploying one of my new Windows Phone 7 application to my unlocked WP7 device, I noticed that, it is not deploying it due to connection error though the device is connected properly and able to sync with the Zune Software.

Later after doing lots of brain storming I was able to fix the problem and thus sharing the solution here in case you came across similar issue while deploying.

In Windows Phone 7, we had four network settings page that we can invoke using the ConnectionSettingsTask. We had no other APIs to launch other settings page but in Windows Phone 8 Microsoft exposed few schemas for invoking these settings pages.

In addition to the existing pages, now we have few more as addition. Today in this post we will learn how to open those settings page using proper URI schemes.

WMPowerUser reported a new update in Windows Phone Store which allows you to download Windows Phone applications from the store manually to your desktop and later install them in your mobile.

I am not sure how this will benefit the user and developers both but let’s jump to a discussion and check it out.