Microsoft started rolling out another update to their most awaited phone OS i.e. Windows Phone 8.1 having a build no. 12400 released as Developer Preview. If you did not receive the update notification yet, go to phone settings and force a phone update.

Start enjoying the major improvements and functionalities available in Windows Phone 8.1 OS, if you already have WP8 hardware device.

You might be already searching for it and landed to this post. If you started working on Windows Phone application/game development, you might want to add an option to rate your app/game in the store. The API has been changed a bit in WP8.1.

In this post we are going to discuss “How to launch the Rating & Review screen in Windows Phone 8.1” with a comparison between the API changes.

In the last post “Windows Phone 8.1 Text-To-Speech - What’s changed for #WPDev?”, we discussed about the Text-To-Speech API changes in Windows Phone 8.1 in comparison to Windows Phone 8.0 APIs. We also covered the capability changes in WP8.1.

Today in this blog post we will learn about the API changes to retrieve all voices installed in the device as well as the way to set a specific voice. Continue to read further.

If you are a WPDev, you might want to integrate the Text-To-Speech engine of WP8.x SDK in your application/game. Though it is not a new feature, but the API has been changed in Windows Phone 8.1 SDK which you might want to know before integrating.

In this blog post, I am going to share the API changes in Windows Phone 8.1 and do the comparison with WP8.0 APIs. Continue reading to know more about this.

If you have already started working on Windows Phone 8.1 app/game, you might have observed that, unlike to the older versions of Windows Phone, every XAML page starts with a Page tag instead of PhoneApplicationPage and thus, you are not able to show/hide the StatusBar control in that page.

So, what’s needs to be done in order to show or hide the Status Bar of Windows Phone 8.1 based on the requirement of your app? In this small post, we will discuss about it.

Sometime for some security reason, developer might want to restrict his/her Windows Phone application to be deployed in SD cards. There might be different reasons too. So, how can you prevent your user to deploy the app in the SD card of their device?

Let’s discuss the No-Code way to prevent this deployment. Remember that, it is only applicable for Windows Phone 8.0 or higher apps.

For last couple of days, only one event was trending over the Microsoft developer community and that was global //Publish/Satellite event happening all over the world on the same day May 16th – May 17th, 2014. Like other cities in India, we also had the opportunity to organize this event in Kolkata.

Great community, great devs and great apps. Let’s have a small recap of the entire Kolkata event for those who missed to join us.

Almost everyone uses 3rd party controls to reduce the burden building them from scratch and when it is Telerik control libraries, it’s pretty awesome! Telerik announces an offer to help the Microsoft developer community to use their product for Free.

It’s a very limited time offer. So, don’t be fool. Claim your free license of Windows Phone, Windows Store control libraries and save some money to use in other good things.

Microsoft released Visual Studio 2013 Update 2 RTM, which will now allow you to develop applications for Windows Phone 8.1 and Universal Windows platforms. Using Universal Windows Apps templates, you will be able to build apps that targets both the platform from a single solution.

In this blog post, I am going to share you the links to download Visual Studio 2013 Update 2. This includes both the web installer and the offline/standalone installer (ISO image).

Windows Phone 8.1 is already there for developers and developers already started building and/or upgrading their apps to support the new changes in Windows Phone 8.1. The RC version of Visual Studio 2013 Update 2 is already there with WP8.1 SDK preloaded.

In this post, we are going to discuss the enhanced TextBox control which came with additional features like place holder text, header content etc.

Today, 2nd April 2014, during the //BUILD conference Microsoft officially showcased the new features set which are coming as part of Windows Phone 8.1. Also during the event, they showcased the features and improvements coming as part of Windows 8.1 Update 1.

In this blog post, I am just noting down those exciting new features coming in Windows Phone 8.1. Just go thru them and let me know which one will be the exciting one for you.

It happens sometime that a specific theme like Light or Dark looks good in some application. In such case, you have to specify all the colours manually to background foreground etc. This is very hectic job. Is there any easy way doing this?

Yes, we have. Jeff Wilcox simplified this process by releasing a ThemeManager library (open source) for you which you can use in your app and force a specific theme for your Windows Phone application.

When working a lot on Windows Phone Emulator, it is sometime easy to use the  computer keyboard to perform some specific tasks instead of tapping onscreen display on the Emulator. Sometime, it is also require to know the keys when you don’t have the hardware buttons in emulator.

Here I am sharing all the keyboard shortcuts which the Windows Phone Emulator supports. I am sure, this will be handy to have while developing apps.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Sometime we need to provide an encryption mechanism to protect user data in phone and/or sharing the data over internet to a database. Data security should be always maintain by a developer to protect the content of the application that the user enters.

If you are building an app and looking for some way to implement the mechanism, here is a wrapper class for you to do encryption and decryption of a string literal easily.