Today, Microsoft announces about Outlook 2013 RT which will come with Windows 8.1 (earlier known as Windows Blue). This will come installed for free on all new Windows RT devices like Surface. As Windows 8.1 will be an free upgrade, you will get the Outlook RT with this update.

 

To know more about Outlook RT announcement, check out the complete post. I am also embedding a video which will give you first glance to Windows 8.1.

Published by on under Office | Office 2013

Numeric control is not new and all of us already experienced it in various applications and websites. Telerik also has this control in all of their control libraries but was missing in Windows 8 for XAML library. Recently they announced the beta release of 2013.Q2 for Windows 8.

 

In this post, we will start with this new control that’s first introduced with Q2 2013 release of Telerik’s RadControls for Windows 8 XAML and find out the common properties a developer needs.

Published by on under Telerik | Win8

Once you set up your TFS build server with an automated build, the big boss will ask you to publish the web project to the intermediate server each time a new build occurs. This might be for the testers to make sure that the code is working properly.

 

What to do? You analysed that, it will hamper your productivity. Isn’t it? Then what to do? Can we automate the build server to deploy the new code each time it succeeds? Let’s discuss it.

Published by on under TFS | Tips

Today while creating my first CI Build definition in the Visual Studio Team Foundation Server, I noticed that, though the Silverlight 5 SDK is installed in the server, I was unable to run the build. It was throwing an error message that says “The Silverlight 4 SDK is not installed”.

 

The issue was not actually with the Silverlight SDK and I found the solution after lots of analysis. In this post, I am going to share it so that, if you come across the same issue, it will be helpful.

Published by on under Silverlight | TFS

Sometime we might want to navigate to a specific URL in LightSwitch application. That might be a web page URL or a direct URL to some file. If you are a Silverlight developer, you might know how to navigate to an URL but there are some trick in case of LightSwitch.

 

If you are looking for a piece of code to learn the mechanism and to include in your project, then this post will guide you step-by-step.

Published by on under LightSwitch | Silverlight

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.

Published by on under Silverlight | Win8

I just faced an issue with my Surface RT device. I was unable to turn on the device though it was completely charged. Though I had no idea about the issue but I was guessing about the Power Switch issue. Did a lot of stuffs, searching online etc. but nothing help.

 

Finally I tweeted about the issue and got a reply which helped me to turn on the device. If you came to this page just because your Surface is not turning on, this post will help you.

Published by on under Surface | Windows

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.

Published by on under Achievements | Awards

Last year we discussed “How to Capture a Screenshot as File in Windows 8?” which you will find useful in your desktop PC or laptop. You will also find that post useful in a Surface if you have a keyboard attached to it, because “Win + Print Screen” key combination is needed to capture the screen.

 

What about Microsoft Surface which does not have a keyboard attach to it? In that case, a touch keyboard will be require to press the keys but that will fill half of the screen.

Published by on under Surface | Win8

In the last post “What is Two-Factor Authentication?” we discussed about various factors of authentication system including different examples. We also learnt about Knowledge Factor, Inherence Factor and Possession Factor.

 

Microsoft recently added a second step authentication mechanism in all their accounts as an extra security layer. This post will guide you to turn ON/OFF this security layer.

Published by on under Security | Tips

Two-factor authentication is a user authentication system where an user needs to provide two different factors to authorize the user’s identity. It is not a new concept and in many places we are knowingly or unknowingly using it for secure access.

 

There could be multiple factors too and that known as Multi-factor authentication. Today in this post we will learn basics about this type of authentication system.

Published by on under Security | Tutorial

Sometime the Visual Studio’s clean project command does not return as expected and maximum time people used to manually delete the bin, obj, Client Bin, Generated_Code directories to clean all the traces of previous build.

 

Here I will share a small batch code which will help you to clean up those directories by just a single click. Tune it up if you want to add few more directories in the list.

Published by on under Tips | Tools

If you are a Win8Dev and building a Windows 8/WinRT application, you might want to download a file asynchronously from a web location. The job is very easy in Silverlight and in this case too but you just need to know the way, the APIs and the configuration settings.

 

Many developers already faced the difficulty to download a file in their WinRT apps and hence I thought to share the code with the API details in this post.

Published by on under Tutorial | Win8

One of my friend, Abhishek Sur (Microsoft MVP, Client App Dev), recently published a book titled "Visual Studio 2012 and .NET 4.5 Expert Development Cookbook" covering basic usage of Visual Studio 2012 IDE, its various components and better utilization of the tool.

 

This post is just an announcement of the book and introduce you with the content of it. If you are willing to buy, find herewith the links of different store.

Published by on under .Net | Book

If you are using Telerik’s RadRichTextBox control in your Silverlight application, you might have noticed that the control exposes a format tool which pops up in the screen when you select some text inside the control. This is the same behaviour that you notice in Microsoft Word too.

 

But for some reason, you might want to hide that toolbar if you are building an application like notepad. This small post will cover the same for you.

Published by on under RadRichTextBox | Silverlight

These days Skype is a common platform for audio/video calling over internet. Many people uses it to connect with their family and beloved one, some other also uses it for business purpose to connect with their client.

 

Recently I noticed frequent crash in Skype and when tried to reopen, it was unable to login but was showing a message that I am already signed in to system. This post covers the solution to that.

Published by on under Skype | Tips

It’s just 10 days when Visual Studio 2012 Update 2 RTM was released and now again, Microsoft released their next update pack named “Update 3”. This release is currently available under CTP (Community Technology Preview) first release.

 

Find herewith more about this release i.e. list of changes and the link to download it. Keep in mind that, it’s a CTP release and not ready for production environment yet.

Published by on under News | VisualStudio

If you are working with the Telerik’s RadRichTextBox control for Silverlight, you might come to a situation where as per your business need you might have to customize the default context menu of the said control. If you are looking for an way to add or remove context menu group, this post will help you.

 

Continue reading the post to understand the way this context menu has been structured. Once you understand the basics, it will be easy for you to do further modifications.

Published by on under RadRichTextBox | Silverlight

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.

Published by on under Infragistics | WP7

In your Silverlight application, you might want to detect whether network connection is available and then based on the result, you might want to do a service call or disable few buttons. This is a most wanted feature by the Silverlight developers.

 

So if you are looking for code, this post will help you to understand the APIs and integrate the same in your Silverlight applications.

Published by on under Silverlight | Silverlight5

Infragistics announces their NetAdvantage webinar series which will be held from 23rd April 2013 to 25th April 2013. The webinar series will cover most of their controls which includes Ignite UI, Windows Forms, XAML controls, NucliOS for iOS and Windows UI.

 

This post will cover a brief about the agenda and a link for you to register to the webinar series. As the seats for this webinar is limited, register for it now.

Published by on under Events | Infragistics

Just 2 months after the release of Visual Studio 2012 Update 2 CTP release, Microsoft released the final version of Visual Studio 2012 Update 2 which also includes a single Blend version that can be used to build apps for Silverlight, WPF, Windows Phone and Windows 8 Store etc.

 

The update is freely available for you to download from Microsoft site. I am going to share the direct link here for you to get easy access link.

Published by on under ExpressionBlend | News

Are you a Windows 8 Application Developer? Are you building an app like audio/video player or game which needs to keep the display active when user is inactive in the system? Then you came to a right place where we will discuss how to keep the display on while idle.

 

This post details about the Windows 8/Windows RT API usage and code snippet to request the system to keep the display on. Continue reading to know more about it.

Published by on under Win8 | Windows 8 Tips

Are you a Windows 8 or Windows RT user? Are you looking for a code to change your Windows 8 lock screen programmatically? Then this post will be definitely helpful for you. Just follow the simple steps to write an application by which you can change it easily.

 

Windows 8 already exposes settings panel to change the lock screen of the Windows, but this post will help you to programmatically access that using the exposed APIs.

Published by on under Win8 | Windows

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.

Published by on under WP7 | WP7DEV

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.

Published by on under DZone | WP8

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.

Published by on under DZone | WP8

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.

Published by on under Telerik | WP7

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.

Published by on under WP7 | WP7.8

Few days ago while searching for a LightSwitch eBook for one of my friend, I found “LightSwitch Succinctly” authored by Jan Van where he describes about this tool’s uses and the need of it for your application development.

 

It’s a very good eBook for absolute beginner and available for free. I hope, this will really help you if you are judging to use LightSwitch in any one of your application.

Published by on under eBook | LightSwitch

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.

Published by on under Silverlight | Silverlight5

For Windows Phone applications and/or Windows 8 Store applications we need metro icons and that’s very easy to create with Syncfusion Metro Studio 2. I am using this free tool for quite a long time in my apps as well as in my blog posts and am quite impressed with it.

 

Many people asked me several times about creating metro icons and thus I thought to share about it in today’s blog post. Here it goes for you.

Published by on under Syncfusion | Tools

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Yield is a contextual keyword available only in certain contextual statements, mainly interacts with the foreach loop. It allows each iteration in a foreach loop to be generated only when needed. In this way it improves the performance of the query.

 

Today we will discuss about it with a small funny code. Let’s see how much we actually know about this keyword. If you can answer the output of the code, you already know about it.

Published by on under .Net | CSharp

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.

Published by on under Events | Webcast

As a Silverlight, WPF or WPDev you might be aware of the MessageBox class present in the SDK to show a message to the user and ask the user to interact with the application on some special cases. As a Win8Dev, you will find it missing in WinRT.

 

What to do? There is a class named MessageDialog which does the same thing but asynchronously in Windows 8 applications. If you are new to Win8Dev, you will find it useful.

Published by on under Tutorial | Win8

It was the nice Friday morning when I woke up and picked up my Lumia 800 to check out the time, mails and tweets. I discovered a small little enhanced feature (possibly a bug) on my device. My device was in charging mode though it was not connected to power cable.

 

First I was not able to believe my eyes but after few minutes, I confirmed that as an issue and took up the camera to record it. Sharing it here…. just enjoy.

Published by on under Lumia | Lumia800

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.

Published by on under .Net | Silverlight

It is sometime difficult when you have a bunch of properties exposed from a class and you just need few of them while debugging a code block. Sometimes it becomes even more complex when you have a collection of that class.

 

Is there any easiest way to improve the code debugging in Visual Studio? Yes, there is. In this post we are going to learn this technique if you have never used it yet.

Published by on under DZone | Tips

Microsoft released CTP (Community Technology Preview) version of Visual Studio 2012 Update 2 just few months after the release of Visual Studio 2012 Update 1. This new release comes with the Blend for Visual Studio which now supports all the major project templates.

 

If you are using multiple versions of Expression Blend, it’s time for you to upgrade to this release. Find out more about this release and download links.

Published by on under ExpressionBlend | News

Nokia rolls out the Windows Phone 7.8 update globally to it’s entire set of Windows Phone 7 devices which already have WP7.5 installed. It comes it some new features already available in Windows Phone 8 devices.

 

Among all the features, the most awaited feature that a WP7.5 user want to see in their screen is the all new Start Screen with those small, medium and large icons.

Published by on under Lumia | News

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.

Published by on under DZone | Silverlight

“Duck Typing” is not a common interview question but one of the interviewer in a panel may ask you this just to check your knowledge out of the common questionnaire. You might be already answered this in a different question but stucked here.

 

So, what is this “Duck Typing” and how this benefits a C# developer? Ok, let’s start discussing this in today’s blog post and I assume, you will find it interesting.

Published by on under .Net | C# 4.0

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.

Published by on under News | WP7

Many time we need to map objects between UI/Domain or Service/Domain layers. Mapping the objects between them is very hectic. So, are there any simplest mechanism by which I can map two objects? Is there is.

 

There is a AutoMapper class which you can use to map between two objects. This also provides option to do a custom mapping. Let’s begin with it and learn about it today.

Published by on under .Net | AutoMapper

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.

Published by on under WP7 | WP7DEV

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.

Published by on under WP8 | WP8Dev

You might be aware that, we now have a Team Foundation Service (TFS) on the cloud from Microsoft Visual Studio team, where you can host your source code for free (as of now, but they will charge you in future for this) and manage your project work in agile methodology.

 

Today in this post, we will learn how to connect Telerik’s TeamPulse tool with the Visual Studio Team Foundation Service (TFS) on the cloud.

Published by on under TeamPulse | TeamPulseTutorial

Many time while working in our application module, we need to use “out” and “ref” parameters in various methods. Sometime you will face this question in front of interview panel too. So, what are those keywords and how they differ?

 

In this post, we will discuss the basics of C# to make you understand more about “out” and “ref” parameters which you will find useful.

Published by on under CSharp | Interview Questions

It’s time to welcome the fresh New Year with fresh hope, fresh expectation. Forget the past and think ahead. Thanks to all my friends, family members, blog followers and the unknown persons with whom I am connected with virtually.

 

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.

Published by on under Greetings |