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.

Here comes the weekly news digest of Silverlight-Zone.com. During last week (i.e. from 7th August 2011 to 13th August) we have submitted 83 news links in Silverlight-Zone on various topics like Silverlight, Windows Phone 7, LightSwitch, XAML, MVVM and more.

 

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.

Sometime we need to detect the browser information of the user's computer where our Silverlight application is running. We can do this using the JavaScript but sometime it is useful to detect it from our Silverlight application. So, how to do it? Let us discuss this with a small simple example.

 

Read this post to know how to detect the browser information using the HtmlPage.BrowserInformation property.

"Why my Visual Studio debugger is not working for my Silverlight application?" - it's not a new question. People ask this several time in different forums. If you search on net, you may probably find the solution. But, in this post I am just sharing the solution once again for my blog readers and anyone on the net who may face similar issue in future.

 

In this post, I will share you 4 small tips. Just follow the steps from top to bottom and let me know which one resolved your problem. This tip might not be a new thing for you but don't forget to share to others. This could be useful for them.

All most all secured sites like bank websites asks you to close your browser window after you signed out from the web application. This is due to high security which actually removes all session details from the browser cache.

 

If you want to develop the same behavior in your Silverlight application, how will you do this? This post covers the code to implement the functionality of the same. Read to know more.

Few weeks ago Mr. Jim Moscater, Community Leader of DZone, contacted me saying that he really liked my WP7 & Silverlight related blog contents and wanted to invite me to join DZone's MVB (Most Valuable Blogger) program.

 

I am very proud to say that, I am now a MVB of DZone. So, what is this MVB Program? Read to know more about this.

During last week (from 31st July 2011 to 6th August 2011) around 89 article links on Silverlight, Windows Phone 7, LightSwitch and XNA submitted in Silverlight-Zone.com.

 

In this digest post, top 5 popular links are on "Windows 8 and the Future of Silverlight", "7 reasons to be a WP7 developer", "What's new in Silverlight 5", "Smooth Streaming on WP7" and "Windows Phone SDK 7.1 - A Developer review". If you are worried about the future of Silverlight, never miss to read out the post by Identity Mine.

 

Read to know more about the popular posts and find out the daily news digest links. Follow us on Twitter and become a fan of our Facebook page to be updated on latest article links.

If you work in XAML pages, sometime you might noticed that the XAML page freezes for sometime while opening the page in design view. This is very annoying and many time it is responsible to crash the Visual Studio IDE. So what to do?

 

If you use Expression Blend to design the XAML page or don't want to open the XAML in design view, this small tip will help you to improve the performance of the IDE. Read more to know.

Few days ago, I published one article on "Application Library Caching in Silverlight 4". In that article, we discussed about Library Caching concept in detail with a small demo. We discussed various parts of the AppManifest to support this feature for 3rd party libraries. But sometime you may need this feature for your own custom libraries too to reduce the XAP file size by separating the external assemblies in their own ZIP file, which will download by the app when it is require.

 

Let us discuss on this topic today by a small example which will help you to understand how to prepare your dll library to support Library Caching by your application. Read more to learn about it.

Last week was a busy week in Microsoft Technology. We noticed lots of releases during the whole week and hence increased the no. of posts in Silverlight-Zone.com too. During the week, 24th July 2011 to 30th July 2011, we have total 87 new article and news links posted here on Silverlight, Windows Phone 7 and LightSwitch.

 

In this weekly news digest, I am going to share the popular 5 posts of the week and links to all the daily digest pages. Most popular posts are on News of "WP7 Mango build 7712 release", News of "Microsoft gives WP7 developers a refreshed Mango build", News on "Windows Phone MVC release", "Collection of WP7 (Mango) Tutorials" and "A Story on LightSwitch in the not so distant future". Read out more to find out those links.

Few weeks ago, I published a post in my blog on "Default Browser Switcher Extension for Visual Studio 2010" and today that has been selected as "Articles of the Day" in Microsoft official site ASP.Net and showcased.

 

In that article, I described about a cool extension that you can download freely from the Microsoft Gallery. This extension will help you to improve the productivity if you are working as a web developer. That article demonstrates installation and uses steps-by-step. Read more to read about it.

Microsoft released Visual Studio LightSwitch 2011 on 26th July 2011. This is the first version of the product. You already known about this but those who are new to this product, let me tell about it first. This is a new tool for building data-driven Silverlight Application using Visual Studio IDE. It automatically generates the User Interface for a Data Source targeted for the desktop and cloud by writing a minimal code.

 

In this post, I am going to share the download links (both Web and Offline installer), as well as some good resources to jump start with this tool.

Sometime it is require to communicate between two local Silverlight applications. Though this situation is very limited but it may require as per your business deal. In such case, the local messaging mechanism comes into the place.

 

In this post, we will learn about this local messaging system using a small Silverlight application where we will have a sender project and a receiver project. At the end of the article, I embedded the demo which will give you more visibility on what we are going to do in the demo. Let's discuss more on this topic.

During the week 17th July to 23rd July, we have 68 new article links at Silverlight-Zone.com which consists of various topics like Silverlight, Windows Phone 7, LightSwitch, XAML and Blend.

 

In this weekly news digest, I am going to share the popular 5 posts of the week and links to all the daily digest pages. Most popular posts are on "A Collection of WP7 (Mango) Tutorials", "3rd Part of Data Driven Application with MVVM", "Metro Theme Customization7", "Microsoft has 3 months to make or break Windows Phone" and "Excel like Filtering in Silverlight DataGrid".

 

Read more to find those interesting posts of this week and the digest links in case you missed them.

It's definitely a great start of the day when you notice that one of your article has been selected as "Articles of the Day" in Microsoft's official site WindowsClient.net. This happened with me once again.

 

Few months ago I published one blog post describing a tip that helps to quickly close the open Visual Studio documents. There I also described how to customize the keyboard to assign shortcut for any Visual Studio commands. Read to know more.

Visual Studio LightSwitch is a new tool for building data-driven Silverlight Application using Visual Studio IDE. It automatically generates the User Interface for a Data Source without writing any code. You can write a small amount of code also to meet your requirement.

 

This eBook collects all 5 Chapters of Silverlight Show article series 'Beginners Guide to Visual Studio LightSwitch (Beta 1)' for your offline reference. In this post, I am going to share the Contents of this eBook. Also, there is a link to purchase the book. Read to know more about this.

Recently I had started exploring Windows Phone 7 with first Mango update and accumulated a no. of beginners tutorial in my blog. In this post, I am going to share all the chapters of the series as "31 days with WP7" - a must needed guide for a beginner who wants to learn about Windows Phone 7 programming.

 

Hope, this will be helpful to you to understand the basics before jump start to the application development. This post is on popular demand and I am dedicating this to all my blog readers. Thank you everyone for your support.

The weekly news digest of Silverlight-Zone.com released. We have 63 new article links posted in Silverlight-Zone on different topics like Silverlight, Windows Phone 7 and LightSwitch. In this post, I am going to share the top most 5 links as well as the daily digest links for your reference.

 

This week (10th July 2011 to 16th July 2011) top post was on the future of Silverlight and whether Silverlight is really dead. This post was made by Stephan Forte. A good discussion on Silverlight and XAML. If you are still in doubt, read this post. There are also other topics from James R. Borck, J. Prosise, Owen Williams and Suprotim Agarwal on Silverlight and WP7. Read more to find the links.

Many time we need to change the layout type of any panel present inside the page. This is mainly a designers job but sometime developers need to change them on their requirement. In that case, people need to find out the start and end tag of the panel and change them accordingly. This is little bit a tricky process.

 

In this post, I am going to share you the easy process to switch between different layout types. If you are a designer or using Expression Blend, you are already familiar with it. But for a newbie, I think it will be a great help.