You might know that Ctrl + W is a shortcut key for many browsers like Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome etc. to close the tab bar items. If you have tabs in the open tab bar and want to close the currently open tab, you can use Ctrl + W shortcut key instead of clicking the close button.

 

In Visual Studio, you might want to do the same. Suppose you have a no. of documents open in your tab and you want to close some of them with a shortcut instead of clicking one by one. How can you do that? Read the post to configure your Visual Studio IDE to assign a shortcut for it.

Social Networking is all about developing connections or ties between friends and associates. While people have always networked with one another the Internet has allowed us to network with people all over the world easily. Any interest or cause can support its own social network, where fans and followers can meet, chat, and share their views. But building a social networking site from scratch involves some complex logic and some serious coding.

 

If you want to read some real hands on experience on LINQ, C#4.0, AJAX, MVP pattern etc. then this book is for you. This book is authored by three industry veteran and they have put all their real time experiences here. Read to know few highlights of the book. Also, there is a link to order the book.

There are many new feature announced to support Text advancements in Silverlight 5 Beta. Among them, one is the character spacing. This feature adds spacing between characters inside a TextBlock, RichTextBox and other control elements.

 

In this post we will demonstrate the use of this new feature and also showcase a simple demo to make you understand better. Read it and start learning Silverlight 5 features.

In my latest two tips we have seen that we can customize the string using Run, Span tags as well as StringFormat in the XAML page. What about if I want to format it for proper DateTime, Currency or Numeric style? As I told you in my last post that, we can achieve the same using the StringFormat parameter in XAML too.

 

Here in this post, I will demonstrate you the process in depth. Read to know more about it and make your life more comfortable designing your Silverlight application.

Yesterday in this post "Tips: Formatting Silverlight TextBlock Control", I shown you how to use various tags like Run, Span, Bold, Italic and Underline to format the text of TextBlock control, present in your XAML code. I also described the use of Run to bind multiple strings inside a TextBlock control.

 

Today in this small post, I will show you a different method to concatenate multiple text content inside a single control. This tip will help you next time while doing the same. Read to know more.

In general we use multiple TextBlock controls inside a StackPanel to format a single line. In this post I will show you a different way to format a single line. This is very useful if you want to bind any data in the middle of the text string. Also this is useful if you want to format the line with multiple formatting option. Read to know more about it.

Here comes the weekly news digest of Silverlight-Zone.com. In this week, we have accumulated 60 posts collected from various sites and delivered to you in a single page daily. It's our effort to bring all good contents to you, so that, you don't have to dig into the net more.

 

In this week, most visited posts were on Animated Splash Screen in WP7, Panorama control in WP7, LightSwitch developers count as of today, Use of IEventAggregator to communicate between views and how to create WP7 trial application. Read to know more about them.

Many of you don't aware of it in depth, mainly the freshers who just started doing their hands dirty with the light of Silver. In this post I am going to describe you about AppManifest.xaml file and it's uses in depth. Read the complete post to know more about it.

 

Don't forget to leave your feedback and/or any queries at the end of this post. Appreciate for reading this post.

ImplicitDataTemplate is a new feature in Silverlight 5. Using ImplicitDataTemplate, you can declare multiple Data Templates for your control and based on the data type, you can load the proper data template automatically.

 

In this article we will discuss on the same step by step with a good example. Read the complete article to know it in depth. Do you have any queries, let me know. Feedbacks are always appreciated.

Silverlight-Zone.com completed it's 4th month with a huge posts on Silverlight, Windows Phone 7, XAML etc. This month was the best month for those technologies. During the MIX11 event in this month Microsoft released it's first beta of Silverlight 5. They also released the Async CTP for Silverlight and WP7 and many more.

 

In this post I am going to share the best picks of the month as well as top links of the week. In this month top visited post was from Michael Crump where he demonstrated creating his own website using Silverlight. In this week the post from Abhishek Baxi received a huge hit where he listed out all Windows Phone developer resources. He called it as "Mother of all Lists".

 

Read out the whole post to find out the top links of the month and the week.

Today, I received my Code Project MVP Certificate by courier. This is my first MVP Certificate from CodeProject. Feeling very proud to be part of the Global MVP team. I am happy that, my contribution towards community and their regular support gave me the chance to achieve this. This recognition I will contribute to each and every supporter of mine, who helped me in various way to achieve this award.

In this post find the certificate that I received.

Here we have the weekly news digest of Silverlight-Zone.com. In this week, we have accumulated many posts (52) on Silverlight and Windows Phone 7. It's our effort to bring all good links for you, so that, you don't have to dig the internet for articles on the said technologies.

 

In this post find the most popular post of the week which were showcased in Silverlight-Zone.com. I appreciate everyone's contribution and support to Silverlight-Zone community. Thank you for your support all the time.

Today we already discussed about Multiple Click (ClickCount) in Silverlight 5 Beta, which was introduced recently. The step-by-step guide focused on how to implement the double click, triple click using the new ClickCount property. In that post we discussed that, there are some issues with this feature and in this post I am going to describe them for you.

 

Before working with this feature, you must know the pit-falls. This will help you to understand the issue and take care of your code. Read to know more about it.

Some time you need to know whether your user clicked a control once or double clicked it. Sometime you need to know how many click a user did in the UI control. In this post, you will learn about it.

 

Silverlight 5 Beta has been announced with newly added feature called ClickCount. It's a property added to the MouseButtonEventArgs. Using this you will be able to find out how many multiple click happened by the user.

 

Read the complete post to know about the implementation and the issues. Don't forget to provide our feedbacks at the end.

Here comes the Weekly Digest of Silverlight-Zone. This week was a great week. During the week Microsoft released a no. of products during the MIX11 event. Started with Visual Studio Async CTP Service Pack, Internet Explorer 10 Platform Preview, Silverlight 5 Beta etc.

 

In this post find the most popular post of the week which were showcased in Silverlight-Zone.com. I appreciate everyone's contribution and support to Silverlight-Zone community. This is India's first only Silverlight portal.

Microsoft Released Silverlight 5 Beta yesterday during MIX11 conference. It has a great new features set. Among them, most demanded feature was Debugging Data Bindings in XAML. In this article, I will step you through the complete debugging feature in Visual Studio for Silverlight 5 XAML page.

 

Read the complete article to know more about it and gather knowledge on the debugging feature with a simple code walkthrough. At the end, don't hesitate to leave your feedback. Queries are welcome. I will try to answer you as much as I can.

All of you are familiar with Silverlight and know how to create a Silverlight project. This post is not for the people, who already worked in Silverlight, but for the people who are very new in this technology and start to work as fresh to make their hands dirty. Also, creating this post to refer the project creation in my upcoming tutorial series.

 

If you are a beginner to Silverlight, read this post to know how to create a Silverlight  project.

Scott Guthrie announced availability of Silverlight 5 Beta at MIX11 conference. We already know what is coming on Silverlight 5 beta during Silverlight Firestarter. It's time for us to download the first Beta of Silverlight 5 and make our hands dirty with those bits.

Read the post to get the downloadable links of Silverlight 5 Beta Tools for Visual Studio 2010 and Expression Blend Preview for Silverlight 5. Install them and start doing your hands dirty with the bits.

Visual Studio Async CTP Service Pack 1 has been released which extends Visual Studio 2010 which provides a new streamlined syntax for Asynchronous development. This version of Async CTP is compatible with Visual Studio 2010 SP1.

 

Read the complete post to find out the download link and installation instructions.

Microsoft just announced Internet Explorer Platform Preview 1 in MIX11 keynote event. It is now available for download today. This will be the next version of Microsoft’s industry-leading Web browser and the deep native HTML5 support delivered in Internet Explorer 9.

 

Find more about IE10 Platform Preview in this post. Also find the download link at the end of the post.

In this post, I am going to give a Tip of using Expression Blend to create a Gradient color from any color pattern. Sometime, you might have a color pattern that you have to use in your UI and don't know how to pick the exact color to your UI. This simple post will help you to understand it properly.

After reading this post, you will be able to pick any gradient color from a pattern and use as easily as 1-2-3. Hope, this will help you. Feedbacks are always appreciable.

In this post, I am going to share Top 5 posts of this week at Silverlight-Zone and the weekly digest of Daily News Headline. During this week top posts made by Michael Crump, Kunal Chowdhury, Paul Stovell, Dhanajay Kumar and Manas Patnaik. Good job guys. Read to find out the links.

That's a good question came up after the series in my blog. Someone asked why should one use Custom Control instead of User Control? Hence, let's extend the series and discuss about that. I apologise the delay of this post. I should explain this at the start of the series, but actually my goal was to explain you how to create and use Custom Control in Silverlight.

 

It is better to do it later than never. Also, you are now familiar with Custom Control creation. Hence, start describing it. You will come to know more about this here. As always, don't forget to share your feedback at the end of this page.

Here is the last chapter of the series for Silverlight Custom Control. In this article, we will learn how to access the template parts from code behind to do various operations in the UI front.

 

Hope, you read the previous three articles and familiar with the Custom control as of now. This article will help you to understand accessibility of the template parts from the code. So, let's start discussing now. Appreciate your feedback as always.