As a WPDev, you might want to provide your users an option to change the Lock Screen of their Windows Phone 8 device. It can be from a locally stored images within the app XAP, a RSS feed, Camera Roll and/or periodically from a push notification.

 

In this blog post, we will learn how to integrate the functionality in your app to simply load and set the lock screen background from a set of images available within the app xap.

Published by on under Windows Phone | WP8

Style inheritance in XAML? Sounds funny? No. If we have inheritance in classes, CSS styles; then why not in XAML styles? There are many such occasions when we need to copy the same style in multiple templates/styles of a control.

 

In this post, we will learn how to use a single piece of style and use it in other place to inherit the common styling. If you are using XAMLs excessively, this might be a very good topic for you.

Published by on under Silverlight | Win8Dev

Have you ever lost in your way while coding in multiple files inside Visual Studio and want to recover some piece of code that you changed but not yet pushed to your TFS code repository? Have you ever wonder if there was a mechanism by which you can actually track the changes in your code file?

 

Then here is the solution for you. There is a nice VSIX extension named “Auto History” that could help you in this case. Let’s discuss more about this.

Published by on under Tips | Tools

If you are a Windows Phone app developer and building a Camera application, you might want to know whether the user pressed the shutter key half or full. In general pressing the shutter key half sets the focus to an object and pressing it completely captures the view.

 

In this short blog post, we will learn how to subscribe for the shutter key press events and identify whether the user pressed it half or full.

Published by on under Windows Phone | WP8Dev

You might have already known that, the UK firm named BSkyB raised a complaint against Microsoft infringing the name of their online cloud storage service “SkyDrive” and then a settlement was made providing Microsoft a time to change the brand of their service.

 

Today, General Manager of Microsoft consumer apps & services Ryan Gavin announced that, they are soon going to rename their popular cloud storage service “SkyDrive” to “OneDrive”.

Published by on under News | OneDrive

If you are a WPDev and building Windows Phone app and/or game that uses primary or secondary (front facing camera), you might need to check whether the device supports either or both of them. Windows Phone SDK provides APIs to check for supported camera type.

 

In this blog post, we will discuss about this API and learn how to know whether the phone supports either or both of those camera types.

Published by on under Windows Phone | WP7DEV

Microsoft released the RTM version of Visual Studio 2013 in October 2013 and after that, this is the first release of an update for it named “Visual Studio 2013 Update 1”. This version includes a set of fixes for the issues and improvements requested by the users.

 

Here I am sharing the download links for you to download and install the update before it pops up in the Visual Studio update notification area.

Published by on under News | Visual Studio 2013

How many of you want to check the available free space in your Windows Phone device? It is very simple to get the details from the settings page. But think about a case where you want to check the free space from your app and want to chose some logic to notify the user.

 

In this small but useful post, we will discuss about the API and will share a small piece of code, which will allow you to know the available free space in user’s phone device.

Published by on under Windows Phone | WP7DEV

Another good news for the Nokia Lumia (Windows Phone 8) users. From today, Nokia started rolling out Lumia Black update to it’s entire set of Windows Phone 8 devices, a big update after Amber. This update consists of new features and apps for you.

 

You will get this update notification within a few days, based on your residing country, carrier and device. To know more about this update, continue reading.

Published by on under Lumia | News

Good news to all Windows Phone 8 users. Greg Sullivan, the director of Windows Phone public relation, confirmed in an interview that all Windows Phone 8 users can upgrade their device OS to Windows Phone 8.1 (which is most likely going to release this spring, as per different source).

 

It’s not yet confirmed what are the new things coming with WP8.1, but  surely there will be something new for the consumers.

Published by on under News | Windows Phone

Windows Phone by default provides the inbuilt mechanism to support Clipboard Copy, Paste functionalities and shows the proper icon in any TextBox control. But in some case, you may need to handle the copy experience explicitly.

 

This small post will discuss about the API and the code that you can use in your Windows Phone application. Continue reading.

Published by on under WP7DEV | WP8Dev