Microsoft launched Visual Studio 11 Beta and .Net Framework 4.5 Beta with lots of new, enhanced and improved features. Jason Zander, announced the availability of Visual Studio 11 beta and .Net Framework 4.5 beta in his Weblog on 29th February 2012.

 

Continue reading this post to find out the links towards the Web Installer as well as the Offline / Standalone Installer of Visual Studio complete suite.

Here comes the “Monthly Summary” of February 2012. During February 2012, I have published 11 blog posts with mix categories. In this post, sharing all the posts in category wise sorted for you, so that, you can find them easily from here.

 

In February, I published three Windows Phone 7 applications which are absolutely free to download. I am sharing them here for your easy access.

My 3rd Windows Phone 7 application called “Untiny URL” is now available in WP7 Marketplace. This application extracts the shortened URL and previews the complete URL in the screen.

 

Don’t forget to try it out and provide your valuable ratings and feedback in the marketplace. Find out more about the application and marketplace URL.

Here comes my 2nd Windows Phone 7 application in the Marketplace named “Easy Connect” to provide you easy access to the connectivity settings page in your device. Finding each page in the settings is little bit difficult and hence here is my application to help you.

 

Find details about the application and the free downloadable links from Windows Phone 7 marketplace. Don’t forget to review the app and share your feedback.

My first Windows Phone 7 is now in the Marketplace. It is a small application to fetch images and provide option to the user to save that image to the WP7 device so that you can set it as Phone background.

 

Find the link mentioned below in the post and download it in your WP7 mobile for free. Don’t forget to provide your Review.

The Microsoft .NET platform, originally introduced in 2002, is mature and it provides developers with great options for creating software that can meet the requirements of any project. With many options, though, it can be difficult for today’s .NET developer to choose the correct .NET technologies for a project.

 

Addressing this problem, Telerik has assembled its senior technical leaders to produce the Microsoft Platform Guidance 2012. This document attempts to provide prescriptive guidance for .NET developers trying to determine the best .NET technologies to use for specific software challenges.

If you have a Windows Phone 7 device and you are a WP7Dev, you may want to develop and test your WP7 application inside your device. All the time, the simulator doesn’t help us to test our application and hence you need the hardware device. The Phone 7 by default comes as a locked for development, but if you want, you can easily unlock it for testing and debugging purpose.

 

In this small post, I will help you to understand each steps in detail. Continue reading to be familiar with the process.

If you are using Windows Phone 7 and want to activate the “Call Waiting Service”, this post will help you. You might came to this page by search engines if didn’t find any settings to activate this service in your phone. This post is not related to any sort of programming but just a small usages tips.

 

Continue reading and activate the service right now if you are searching for this.

Microsoft Windows Phone 7 camps now in your city. If you are in India, you can now join the WP7 Camps in 6 major cities across India. Starting from 17th February to 29th February it will happen in Delhi, Bangalore, Indore, Ahmedabad, Mumbai and Trivandrum.

 

If you are in near by cities and want to join the camp, find the date and address in this post. Enjoy the event with Windows Phone influencers and learn more from them.

Sometime we may need to download images from external location to our Windows Phone 7 Media Library. Few days ago, I tried to implement the same in one of my application. Initially, I thought that it is very easy to implement but later noticed the complexity. I did few R&D with Mayur Tendulkar to implement the same and came up with a solution. Thanks to Mayur for helping me out.

 

It this post, I will discuss the way of implementation of it with the full code snippet. Continue reading to check out the downloading mechanism of external images to Media Library.

Busy Indicator is a tool which you can add in your Silverlight or WP7 application to show a loading indication to your user while doing some sort of operations. This is just to let the user know that something is going on.

 

Here in this article, we will learn how to use Telerik BusyIndicator control in your Windows Phone 7 and let the user know that some operations are going on in the background.

Here comes the most popular 5 posts of the week (29th January 2012 to 4th February 2012) at silverlight-zone.com. This week most viewed posts were from Daniel Rubino, @f5Debug, SilverSpot, Barry Lapthorn and Joe Mayo.

 

Read more to find out the popular links read by the developer community. Don’t forget to follow @SilverlightZone on Twitter. Become a “Fan” of our Facebook Page by clicking the “Like” button to stay updated. Subscribe to our Newsletter in case you want to get digest mail notification.

It’s time for you to sharpen your .Net Ninja skills. The latest Telerik release is just around the corner and Telerik has tons of new stuff to show off. If you are eager to see the new bits and sharpen your .NET skills, be sure to sign up for Release Webinar Week.

 

This 3-day event is packed with hour-long webinar sessions on the coolest new features shipping with the Q1 2012 release.  Release Webinar Week will be held on February 20 – 22, so mark your calendars and win some cool stuffs from Telerik.

Here comes the “Monthly Summary” of January 2012. During January 2012, I have published 16 blog posts with mix of mood. In this post, sharing all the posts in category wise sorted for you, so that, you can find them easily from here.

 

January was a great month for me. Celebrated 1 yr. of silverlight-zone.com. My Telerik and Codeproject MVP awards were renewed in this month. Also, I had a chance to visit Florida to attend the Telerik Influencers Summit. It was a hectic time at the end of the month.

This is another small guest post on SQL Server submitted by Joydeep Das. In the previous post, he described about "Join Hint in SQL".

In this post, he will guide you to illustrate the concepts of Database Compression on SQL Server 2008. It is the concepts behind the compression only. For details level of learning you need to follow the MSDN or any MS Notes.

Read more to understand the concept from Joydeep and don’t forget to ask your SQL Queries in the comments section.

Here comes the weekly Silverlight-Zone digest for the week 15th January 2012 to 21st January 2012. This week major posts were on Silverlight and Windows Phone 7.

Popular posts were from Christine L., who showcased "Water ScrollViewer", a must read if you didn't yet read; followed by Steve Adey, Stephan Wick, @dotMorten and @mbcrump. Read the complete post to find out the popular 5's and links towards the daily news digest, if you missed any one issue, you can get it here.

We all know the process to embed a Silverlight application inside a Webpage using div and object tag. When we create a new Silverlight application project, those tags automatically generates by the IDE inside the html and aspx pages.

In many cases we need to dynamically add the Silverlight application inside a webpage. In this post, we will learn the process to host it using JavaScript. Looks interesting? Read to know more.

Pune User Group in association with Microsoft is hosting a 4 days FREE training program for technology professionals in Pune. In this training program, attendees will learn about application development for Microsoft Windows Phone devices.

Registration for this training program is absolutely FREE for any technology professional, who wants to learn Windows Phone Application Development. Continue reading this post to know more about this program, session agenda and venue details. At the end, submit 3 applications and claim your FREE Windows Phone 7 device. See you all there.

Few days ago, I received an offer from uCertify to review their Exam Preparation Kit and then I started reviewing 70-515 Exam .NET 4.0 Preparation Kit (PrepKit) from uCertify. In the previous post “I am reviewing 70-515 Exam .NET 4.0 Preparation Kit from uCertify” I shared few information about the product and informed that, I will share in-depth report after the review period.

 

Today in this blog post, I am sharing the complete review report of the Preparation Kit. Read how it will help you to prepare yourself for the Exam. Also, there is a contest available for you. Participate in the contest to win a Free License from me.

Here comes the weekly news digest of Silverlight-Zone.com. We submitted around 60 new links during 8th January 2012 to 14th January 2012 in our Silverlight or WP7 portal.

 

Read more to find out which are the top 5 posts of the week. Also sharing the daily digest links at the end of this post.

This is a small guest post on SQL Server submitted by one of my friend Joydeep Das. In this post, he will guide you to understand the basics of Join hint and when to use that.

 

He will also guide you on various types of Join hint used in SQL Server with algorithm and code example. So, why are you waiting for? Read more to understand the concept from Joydeep and don’t forget to ask your SQL Queries in the comments section.

Few days ago, I started with the Windows Phone 7 tips and published a post on “How to Pin an Application to the Start Screen?” where we demonstrated how to pin an application for easy access.

 

Today in this post, we will learn how to unpin the pinned application from Windows Phone 7 start screen. So, read on to learn it. Again, this is a beginner level tips & tricks to start with Windows Phone 7 device.

Yippee!!! That’s a very good mail came up in my inbox late night which I read just now in the morning. Yes, I have been re-awarded as Codeproject MVP 2012 for my contribution towards the Codeproject portal. This is the 2nd continuous year when I received this award.

 

My sincere thanks to all my friends, GIT members of Codeproject for their continuous support through out the year. Also my sincere thanks to my parents. Without those it was very tough to achieve.

It was an awesome moment to speak at “Microsoft Monday” today. I delivered one hour session on “LightSwitch for Business Application Development” in front of a great people of Mahindra Satyam.

 

In this blog post, I am going to share the slides that I used in the presentation. Those who participated and/or didn’t get chance to attend it, can go through the slides from here for reference.