Today Microsoft showcased Ribbon UI support in Windows Explorer of Windows 8. This features a nice look and feel to the User Interface by providing all the recommended tasks in one place using the Ribbon bar. We are all familiar with Ribbon bar which is currently present in Microsoft Office but this is the first time when they integrated it to the Windows OS by default.

I am really very excited to see this in Windows 8 and thought to share it with you. Hope you will also like it. Read the post to know more about it and also find the useful links and video at the end of the post.

Here comes the weekly news digest of Silverlight-Zone.com. During last week (i.e. from 21st August 2011 to 27th August 2011) we have submitted 78 new links in Silverlight-Zone on various topics like Silverlight, Windows Phone 7, LightSwitch, XAML, MVVM, XNA and more.

Most popular post was "Fundamental MVVM" from John Papa. In this post, I am going to share the top 5 visited posts @SilverlightZone during last week. Also, I am going to share the daily news digest links in case you missed to find some of them.

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.

During last week (i.e. from 14th August 2011 to 20th August 2011) we submitted 85 posts at Silverlight-Zone.com. Topics were on Silverlight, Windows Phone 7, LightSwitch and Xbox. Some posts on WPF also showcased there.

In this post find the most visited 5 posts. As usual, I am sharing the "Daily News Digest" pages of last week too, in case you want to find out the posts submitted during the week.

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.

Today in this article we will discuss how to fetch feed from Picasa and display images from that RSS feed to your Windows Phone 7. This will not only clear the image feed mechanism in WP7, but will also help you to understand how to read RSS feed in Windows Phone 7 or in a Silverlight application.

After reading this article, you will be able to fetch any feed and display specific content in your application. Hope, this will help you. Don't forget to share it to your followers and if you have any query, drop a line below.