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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

“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.

“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.

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.

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.

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.

Welcome to the Interview Questions series on C#. Last week we discussed about “ref” and “out” keywords of C# with suitable example and I hope, that gave you clear understandings about those two parameter type.

This week we will discuss about struct and class as few people in Facebook asked me to clarify those two types.

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.

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.

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.