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.
While working with some folder specific operations and console window, I learnt a new thing (I would rather say it as trick) today i.e. how to open console window in that specific folder path without using any special tricks in Windows Registry or typing the full path in console.
Today in this blog post, I am going to share the same trick with you. In case you find it useful, drop a line below.
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.
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.
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.
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”.
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.
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.
