After the release of Visual Studio 2012 Update 3 (RTM) in 26th June, Microsoft released the 4th Update to the web today, the 13th November 2013. Within this timeframe, they also released couple of intermediate release of the Update 4 for beta testing and bug fixes.
This includes the latest cumulative series of feature additions and bug fixes. If you are waiting for the final release of Update 4, it’s the time to update your IDE with latest set of features & fixes.
XAML Spy is the visual runtime inspector for Silverlight, WPF, Windows Phone and Windows 8 Store applications which provides direct access to UI visual tree, runtime UI modifications to check/set different properties temporarily, monitor events, extract package contents and much more.
With the release of XAML Spy version 2, the company introduced a light weight Free version for the XAML designers/developers to play with their XAML files. Read more to grab your copy.
Windows Phone 8 Update 3 (aka. GDR 3) preview already released for developers to build and test their applications and games. There are few features in this release that you might want to add in your app. For this, you need to check whether the device already has GDR3 installed.
In this small post, we are going to discuss how you can check whether the Updated 3 (GDR 3) has already been installed in the user’s device.
Programming is an art to implement the ideas into software which end user uses to accomplish their job easily. Writing articles for the programmers needs patience and skills to help the other clarify their doubts. There are lots of blogs and sites which already helps programmers day-by-day.
It’s about an year ago a team of passionate programmers took an initiative to compile a newspaper named “The Programmers” with valuable articles. If you are a developer, don’t forget to grab the copy.
While working on an application last weekend, I was in need to pass an object as query string parameter to the other page of my Windows Phone application. NavigationService does not allow you to pass any complex object.
Then I found a cool idea by which you will be able to send the whole object to the other page. In this blog post, I am going to share you the trick.
If you are a Silverlight application developer and using Telerik RadDiagram control, you might have seen that you can zoom and pan the diagram control and move it to any boundary. In some scenarios, we need to restrict it to a positive quadrant.
In such case, based on your business logic, you have to restrict the diagram to some quadrant value. In this small post, we will learn how to set it’s viewport to a specific bounds.
Ambiguity is the ability to express more than one interpretation in normal way. This can happen in any manner; in our code too. If you are working on WCF RIA Services in Silverlight, you might encounter this issue too with class references.
Today in this blog post, I will share you a small trick by which you will be able to fix this error in your Silverlight project. Continue reading to further discussion.
Microsoft released Windows 8.1 RTM and Windows RT 8.1 RTM on 17th October for general public to update their Windows 8 system. Many people already updated their Surface RT devices but as an exception, few people reported on Twitter and Forums that they are not able to update their RT devices.
If you are unable to update your Surface RT or unable to find the update in Windows Store, you are one of them who are victim of a small issue reported by Microsoft.
Windows Phone 8 GDR3 comes with a plenty of features and enhancements including bigger screen resolutions, screen rotations and more. Read to get the GDR3 bits in your device.
So Microsoft finally came up with an official list of new features in Windows Phone 8 General Distribution Release, named as GDR3. Also, they are now opening a “Developer Preview Program” for the WPDev’s to test their apps against the new OS build before it comes to consumer.
In this post, I am going to share you the set of features that you are going to see in the next update of your Windows Phone 8 device.
Here comes my another application for Windows Phone users, named “Place Explorer”. The app is currently available in Windows Phone Store for free. Using this app, you will be able to find out the favourite places around the city near your current location for food, drinks, shopping, accommodations etc.
Find out more details about the app and a downloadable link to install in your Nokia Lumia series of Windows Phone 8 devices.
Last month as part of the 5th anniversary celebration of my blog (www.kunal-chowdhury.com), we organized a big contest where we had lots of licenses and subscriptions valued $50,000 above to give away. Thanks to all the Sponsors who came up to celebrate with us.
Now the time came to announce the winners of the contest. Are you excited to know who are the winners? You might be one of them too. Let’s check out the list.
As a WPDev, you already know about the NavigationService class that we use regularly to navigate from one page to another. But what if you want to navigate to a web URL? If you use the same class for web navigation, you will face a ArgumentException unhandled in your App class.
If you are one of the victim and came to this page by searching online for the solution, this post will help you today to resolve the exception in your code.
Do you want to add a functionality in your Windows Phone device which can actually listen to users voice or commands? Do you want the app to record the speech or convert the speech into a text string which you can save as a document?
Okay, this blog post will cover that topic for you today. Here we will discuss how to use the API to enable the speech recognition in your WP device.
October 1st 2010, the day when I first received a mail from the Microsoft mentioning as one of the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) awardees of the quarter as a Silverlight contributor. I was holding that title on Silverlight platform for last 3 consecutive years.
Like last three years, this time also I have been awarded for this prestigious title but… I am no longer a Silverlight MVP now. Microsoft awarded me as “Client Development MVP” this time.
These days almost everyone has a smartphone for Net surfing, Music, Games, Messengers, Official works and many more. If you use the device and subscribe to many services, it will consume more battery power and drain quickly than expected.
In this post we will discuss how to increase the battery power of Windows Phone series devices while in standby mode. If your device battery is draining quickly, check out the solution.
Microsoft Visual Studio 2013 RC (Release Candidate) is already there and I hope, many of you already downloaded it and started exploring the new features and enhancements part of the release candidate. Visual Studio 2013 provides us a better way to handle XAML pages.
In this blog post, we will learn the new feature introduced to better commenting XAML codes inside Visual Studio 2013 IDE. You will definitely like it.
As we are approaching the 5th anniversary with a long journey all together since 2008, I want to celebrate it with lots of excitements and thus came up with a set of goodies/licenses especially for you. Let’s take part in this giveaway and win those goodies from us.
If you are working in Visual Studio to design XAML pages for your Silverlight, WPF, Windows Phone or Windows 8 Store application, you might have noticed that, sometime the Visual Studio IDE freezes for a long time and sometime it crashes.
I faced this issue many time and later found some way to recover from that freeze to continue working. In this post, going to share you the trick. I hope this will help you.
Sometime while working with map control in Windows Phone, we may need to calculate distance between two GeoCoordinates. The Windows Phone 8 SDK already provides you the required API for you to calculate the distance very easily.
If you are looking for a piece of code to do the same, here is the small post for you to understand the API and the way to use it in your app.
In a blog post today, S. Somasegar announced the availability of Visual Studio 2013 Release Candidate (RC) and .NET Framework 4.5.1 which is now available for download and has “Go Live” license. You can install Visual Studio 2013 RC on top of preview release or along with Visual Studio 2012.
This post will provide you details about Visual Studio 2013 RC and downloadable links. If you have MSDN/TechNet subscription, you can also find it in your subscription page.
Microsoft announced the availability of Windows 8.1 RTM version for the MSDN and TechNet subscribers today. That means, if you have any one of the MSDN or TechNet subscription, you will be able to download it from your subscription page.
General availability of Windows 8.1 will be on 18th October 2013. If you hold a Windows 8 installation, you will be able to upgrade to Windows 8.1 from Store after that.
Visual Studio 2013 Preview is already here and many of you already downloaded it and started exploring the new features and enhancements introduced in this version. Few people asked me that, they are not able to build Windows Phone 7 applications in Visual Studio 2013 even after installing the WP7 SDK.
So, what is the issue? How can we build Windows Phone application that targets OS 7? This short post is for those developers who are seeking this information.
Everybody wants to protect their code from unauthorized reverse engineers. Isn’t it? For this, a company or a developer needs a Obfuscation tool to add huge noise bits in the generated executable and encrypt it to make sure the disassembler can not read it.
There are many tools in the market and I did some research with few of them. Among them, I liked the “Crypto Obfuscator” tool from LogicNP Software and thus thought to write a review of it here.
