Recently thought to take some break from core Silverlight programming and start learning something new. As I will be working on Silverlight in office, hence decided to start exploring Windows Phone 7 in my off time. Though, it is also in Silverlight, but there we can learn something new apart from the actual Silverlight development. Now onwards, I will write about Windows Phone 7 programming and whatever I will explore, will post here in my blog.

Jump started with my first exploration to create a "Hello World" application in Windows Phone 7.1 (Mango) public Beta. This is the first post of the series. As a beginner I will be contributing to the series and if something that I can improve in any of the posts/demos, please let me know by providing your inputs using the Comment box. Hope this series will help the beginners to learn about it.

Here comes this week's News Digest of Silverlight-Zone.com which contains approximately 76 new News items on various topics like Silverlight, Windows Phone 7, LightSwitch, XNA etc. It also contains lots of posts including MVVM, XAML, Blend etc.

This week most popular posts are on "Powerful 3D WP7 Application" by Paul, "Google Maps for WP7" by Naveed Tejani , "Mango Training Course" by Abhishek Baxi, "XAML Tips" by Michael Crump and "Basics of MVVM" by Paul Sheriff.

So, read out those posts and get knowledge on them. Also find links for Daily News Headlines of this week.

Microsoft released the public beta version of Mango (Windows Phone 7.1) Developer Tools on 24th may 2011. In this post, I am going to share some of the new features that has been released with the Windows Phone 7.1 (Mango) Public Beta. You might already know about those from various resources but wanted to share some of them in my blog.

If you not yet downloaded the developer tools, Download Windows Phone Developer Tools 7.1 Beta. Read the complete post to know more about the new features.

Silverlight 5 has another new feature called Ancestor Relative source binding. It was already available in WPF and has been newly introduced in Silverlight 5 beta. Using this, you can now bind to the relative ancestor elements very easily.

Let's discuss it with a small example where we will create a Control Template for a Button and bind it's Tag property to the actual element to display text, instead of setting the Content property. Read to know more.

Windows Phone 7.1 Developer Tools (code named "Mango") Beta has been released on 24th May 2011. It contains a no. of new features (more than 500) including Internet Explorer 9 and Skype inbuilt in the OS. Find more about the features here. You can use this new Beta Tools to develop applications targeted to both 7.0 and 7.1 OS version. Remember that, it is still in Beta stage (i.e. development stage) and hence you can't use it for production.

In this post, find the links from where you can download (both Web & Standalone/Offline installer) and install the Developer Tools 7.1 Beta release.

In my previous post that I did yesterday, I discussed about the Multiple Windows Support in Silverlight 5 Beta and there I mentioned that though it is a wonderful feature but there are some things that I didn't like. Though it is still in beta, so it is currently in development stage and may be the team is working on it.

Let's read the post to know the points those I didn't like or want in the future versions. Those are my personal opinions only and looking forward to see them implemented in future releases of Silverlight 5.

Multiple Window support is one of the important feature in Silverlight 5. Using this you can have additional top level Window on top of your trusted Silverlight Out-of-Browser application. Yes, you read correct. It only works in Out-of-Browser Silverlight application and hence you cannot open it inside a browser.

So, what is this new Window and how to use it in our application? Let's have some discussion on it. After it you will be able to know about it more.

Saturday, 21st May 2011 was the 3rd day at MVP Open day. We attended various sessions during the whole day. We had a lots of Fun there at night. Started the day at Microsoft India Development centre and ended at Ista hotel, as usual.

In this post, I will share some information of this day including some snaps. Session details will not be available due to Non Disclosure Agreement.

Here is the Weekly news digest at Silverlight-Zone.com and we have 56 new posts submitted during this week. By this week, we have completed 1,13,346 hit since 1st January 2011. Till now we have a huge 1587 posts in our database. We have collected all these links from various web sites and delivered to you daily as a news digest. It's our passion to deliver the good contents to you daily to a single location.

Follow us for daily news and keep supporting us. We share all these posts to Twitter and Facebook whenever a new link has been submitted. Follow us in Twitter @SilverlightZone to be up-to-date.

Yesterday (20th May 2011) was the 2nd day at MVP open day. It was with full of session in various tracks and also lots of fun during the whole day and night. We had a small trip to Golconda Resort at Hyderabad in the evening which was more entertaining and refreshed our energy.

In this post, I am going to share some info with you, so that, you will be able to know what happens at MVP Open day. BTW, the session details will not be covered here as they are part of MVP Non-Disclosure Agreement.

MVP open day is an exclusive event especially organized for Asia pacific and greater China MVPs. All MVPs from different region join there and have a great time with others. They enjoy attending some sessions, funs and networking between each other.

MVP open day was started yesterday (19th May 2011) at Hyderabad, India. This is my first time at MVP Open day and I really enjoyed it there. In this post, I am going to share my first day experience at the MVP Open day event.

Do you know that, we can now search text present in ComboBox and ListBox? This feature was not available in earlier version of Silverlight. To implement it, we had to write custom behavior. Now if you are using Silverlight 5, you can easily use this feature without writing any piece of code.

In this Tip we will discuss about it. We don't have to add any extra code, because it is now the default behavior of those control. Read to know more.

Continuing to our discussion on Silverlight 5 features. In earlier post, we discussed about Text Advancement in Silverlight 5. In this post, we will discuss on another new feature called Binding on Style Setter. This feature is very useful for the XAML designer. If you are a XAML designer, you must be aware of this cool new feature.

Read the complete post where we will discuss how we can bind to a Style Setter.

Silverlight 5 has now support for Multi Column Text. By using this feature you will be able to show your text content in column wise. If you are working for a news publisher company or want to publish your text content in column format, this feature will help you definitely. If you implemented this in your application, your text content will automatically position itself in next column if user resizes the application.

So, want to learn about it? Let's discuss on it with a simple example. Read to know more.

Do you aware of the Line Stacking Strategy of Silverlight TextBlock control? If not, this post will help you to understand it and after that you will be able to use it whenever require.

So, what is this strategy? Was it available in earlier version of Silverlight or a new feature implemented in Silverlight 5? Let us discuss it in depth.

Here is our weekly news digest of Silverlight-Zone.com. In this week, we have contributed total 64 posts collected from various web sites and delivered to you daily as a news digest. It's our passion to deliver the good contents to you daily to a single location.

Follow us for daily article news and keep supporting us. During the week 8th May 2011 to 14th May 2011, most visited posts are on a discussion of Windows Phone and Android war, Google Map support in WP7 using the bing control, Expression Blend to build WP7 user interface, new mango features and azure for Windows phone notification support. Read to know more about this articles.

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.