Microsoft released Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview to the developer community. First they released it for the MSDN subscriber that means, it was available only for MSDN subscribers till the date it was announced. Now it is available for general public. You can now download it and start exploring the features. You can also start developing Windows 8 applications using this IDE.

In this post, I am going to share you the links for both MSDN and general public download. Grab it and start exploring.

Yesterday, in the post “TeamPulse - A Project Management Solution from Telerik”, we discussed about Telerik TeamPulse application. We discussed about installation requirements and also shared the links to download the TeamPulse.

In this post, we will learn how to create a TeamPulse project for your team, so that you can manage your stories, bugs and check the status of each individual story. Read more to learn about it.

TeamPulse is a project management solution from Telerik based on Agile best practices. You can manage your team project using this Silverlight based tool to actively collaborate between team members, track progress of project.

It is a web based Silverlight application, where you can track your project status and other information. In this post, I will share you details about this project management solution, link to download the installer and other stuffs. If you want to explore it, download the installer and setup the solution now.

Silverlight 5 Release Candidate is now available from Microsoft. They just released the RC build to public. You will be able to download it freely from Microsoft Download Center.

In this post, I am going to share the link of the Silverlight 5 RC Tools for Visual Studio 2010. Download it and start building your application. Make sure that, it's not in "Go-Live" license, so you can't deploy the Silverlight applications build with this release to production. This build is just for the developers to give the developers a chance to test their applications before they release the final version.

Few days ago, I published a XAML Tips "How to Convert a Rectangle to a Path Control using Expression Blend?". Today in this post, we will discuss on another tips similar to that post. In this post, we will discuss on the steps to crop an element to give a desired output.

This post will help a beginner who just started designing XAML using Expression Blend. Hope, this small tip will help you to understand it in better way. Read to know more on this topic.

Windows Phone 7.1 SDK Release Candidate (RC) is now available for download. Microsoft released this version with “Go Live” license, that means, you can now build production applications and submit them to the Marketplace. This build also empowers the developer to build applications and games both for WP7.0 and WP7.1 devices.

In this post, find the link to the web installer and standalone/offline installer. Download, install and start building your games or applications.

This will be a short tip of the day where I will show you the way to convert a Rectangle or a Ellipse control to a Path control. If you are not familiar with Expression Blend and currently working with it to design your UI, this tip will definitely help you in various scenarios.

Let’s start with a small demonstration using Rectangle control. You can do the same for Ellipse too. Read to know more.

Proud to announce that, I have been selected as the Winner of Article writing competition at "The Code Project" for the month of July 2011. This is the first competition that I have won from Code project.

Last month I wrote an article on Silverlight which demonstrated the steps require to do the communication between two local Silverlight applications. This article was well appreciated by the readers and my sincere thanks to all community fellows to support me by providing their vote and feedback. Read to find more about the article.

Microsoft released the new stable version of "Silverlight for Windows Phone Toolkit (SDK 7.1)" at Codeplex. This is the first stable build after the February 2011 release. This release features several new controls and fixes to the existing controls.

In this post find the new controls that has been added to this release. Also find the setup link and urls to the release notes.

Hope you already read my article series "Collection of Windows Phone 7 (Mango) Tutorials". During the tutorial series, we used the common styles "PhoneTextNormalStyle" and "PhoneTextTitle1Style" in the TextBlocks added to the TitlePanel. So what are those? These are all common styles defined by the style library of WP7 SDK.

In this post, we will learn about various font sizes defined in the default style library of Windows Phone 7. So, you don't have to define them again and can reuse those styles which will be standard sizes all over any Phone 7 Applications. Let's discuss them here. Read to know more about it.

Sometime we need to bind the same data in different properties of the same control. For example, in some cases we need to show text in a TextBlock and also want to show the same text as a Tooltip to that TextBlock control.

How to do it? It's very easy to bind the same value twice in the control. But is there any other way to implement the same? Let us discuss this today in this blog post. If you are not aware of it till date, you will definitely like.

Sometime we need to detect the browser information of the user's computer where our Silverlight application is running. We can do this using the JavaScript but sometime it is useful to detect it from our Silverlight application. So, how to do it? Let us discuss this with a small simple example.

Read this post to know how to detect the browser information using the HtmlPage.BrowserInformation property.

"Why my Visual Studio debugger is not working for my Silverlight application?" - it's not a new question. People ask this several time in different forums. If you search on net, you may probably find the solution. But, in this post I am just sharing the solution once again for my blog readers and anyone on the net who may face similar issue in future.

In this post, I will share you 4 small tips. Just follow the steps from top to bottom and let me know which one resolved your problem. This tip might not be a new thing for you but don't forget to share to others. This could be useful for them.

All most all secured sites like bank websites asks you to close your browser window after you signed out from the web application. This is due to high security which actually removes all session details from the browser cache.

If you want to develop the same behavior in your Silverlight application, how will you do this? This post covers the code to implement the functionality of the same. Read to know more.

If you work in XAML pages, sometime you might noticed that the XAML page freezes for sometime while opening the page in design view. This is very annoying and many time it is responsible to crash the Visual Studio IDE. So what to do?

If you use Expression Blend to design the XAML page or don't want to open the XAML in design view, this small tip will help you to improve the performance of the IDE. Read more to know.

Recently I had started exploring Windows Phone 7 with first Mango update and accumulated a no. of beginners tutorial in my blog. In this post, I am going to share all the chapters of the series as "31 days with WP7" - a must needed guide for a beginner who wants to learn about Windows Phone 7 programming.

Hope, this will be helpful to you to understand the basics before jump start to the application development. This post is on popular demand and I am dedicating this to all my blog readers. Thank you everyone for your support.

Many time we need to change the layout type of any panel present inside the page. This is mainly a designers job but sometime developers need to change them on their requirement. In that case, people need to find out the start and end tag of the panel and change them accordingly. This is little bit a tricky process.

In this post, I am going to share you the easy process to switch between different layout types. If you are a designer or using Expression Blend, you are already familiar with it. But for a newbie, I think it will be a great help.

Last Wednesday (July 6th 2011) we explored a way to create a Circular loader using XAML without writing any line in the code behind file. Lot of you gave a good feedback and discussed various findings on the same.

I did some more investigation to create a different type of circular loader which you can include in your Silverlight, WPF and Windows Phone 7 applications where you are using XAML code. In this article, I will be guiding to create similar kind of Circular loader as shown above. This will be more simple than the previous one. Let's start our discussion and create one loader like this.

On last Saturday (i.e. 9th July 2011) I delivered one hour session on "MVVM from Scratch using Silverlight" in Pune User Group's (PUG) Monthly meet. The session was full of demo and very little with slides.

In this post I will just recap the session for you to know what are the things I discussed there. I will also share the slides here, if you want to go through it offline.

If you are a XAML designer and creating controls for Silverlight, Windows Phone 7 or WPF, you may come in some situation that the custom properties for the controls are not properly organized by the developers. If you come into such situation forward this link to the developers and they may find it useful.

In this article, we will learn how to well organize the custom properties of your control so that, designers can easily search in appropriate location. Read to know more about it.