Here comes the weekly digest of Silverlight-Zone.com. During last week, we have submitted 83 article links on various technologies like Silverlight, LightSwitch, Windows Phone 7 etc. In this post, find the top links. Also, the link towards daily news digest is also available at the end of the post.

Top 5 posts were from @Debug_Mode, @jmarbutt, @kunal2383, @twmurph and @TimHuckaby. Don’t miss to read out those posts. If you have blog and you are writing article/posts on the said technologies, please share us the link below (as comment) and we will make sure to include them to spread all over the social networking sites.

Kolkata Geeks invites you to join our weekly online session. We are going to present online sessions in weekly basis so that people lives outside of Kolkata can join us and even participate or contribute to the community. We believe that community cannot be grown individually, but by the people in the community. So we, from behalf of KolkataGeeks community, we invite you to join us to our online session and participate to our community.

Session Title: How to Increase Performance of Web Apps using jQuery
Date: Sunday, Nov 27, 2011 from Time: 2 PM (IST) Duration: 1 hour (2PM to 3PM)

My friend, Mr. Abhimanyu Kumar Vatsa (aka. @itorian) published a Free eBook on “Razor View Engine in MVC 3”. I appreciate the effort that he had contributed to publish this eBook and hence sharing this book details and downloadable link in this post, so that, it can reach to maximum people and they will get benefit from it.

Vatsa had demonstrated it in simple fashion (Step-by-Step), that a beginner can understand properly. Continue reading and download the PDF file freely. Also, don’t forget to share this to your friends and colleagues.

When the power of HTML5 on Windows 8 was first showcased, we have seen a lot of rumours on the future of Silverlight. Many online article mentioned that, it is the end of Silverlight. Some said Microsoft is going to stop the development of Silverlight after this Silverlight 5 release and there will be no Silverlight 6 in future. Is it really so?

Let us discuss this topic here. I am not going to write an article this time. We will have a discussion on this topic, your career goal on this platform and what your customers say about it. There are plenty of gifts for you to win. Among them one will be Telerik Ultimate Collection license and the other will be a Pluralsight Annual Plus Subscription from me. So, take part of the discussion, hear from other users voice, discuss and win cool gifts.

Here is our weekly digest post of Silverlight-Zone.com. During 13th November to 19th November, we have submitted 69 new posts in our database. Find the top 5 posts running on the site here. Also, we have links to daily digest pages. If you missed one, you can easily find it here.

If you have blog and you are writing article/posts on the said technologies, please share us the link below (as comment) and we will make sure to include them to spread all over the social networking sites.

On last Saturday, 12th November 2011, I presented 1 hour Technical session on “Windows Phone 7” in Kolkata Developer Conference. The event was organized by Microsoft User Group Kolkata (KolkataGeeks). It is the premier technical event for technology professionals at Kolkata interested in learning, connecting and exploring latest Microsoft technologies.

In this post, I will recap my Windows Phone 7 session. I will also share the Session Slides (PPT), Demos and related Article links. Some snaps of the event will also be available at the end of the post.

Here comes the weekly news digest of Silverlight-Zone.com for the week 6th November 2011 to 12th November 2011. Once again the “Future of Silverlight” hit the developers. Lots of rumours we have seen during the week on Silverlight. Still waiting to hear about the future from the voice of Microsoft.

Find the top 5 posts made by Mike James, John Callaham, @maryjofoley, @JeremyLikness and @Telerik. Also find out the daily news digest links, if you missed any one during last week.

On 12th November 2011 (Saturday) I will be presenting Technical Session on “Windows Phone 7” at Kolkata Developer Conference (DevCon) 2011 organized by Microsoft User Group Kolkata (KolkataGeeks). It is the premier technical event for technology professionals at Kolkata interested in learning, connecting and exploring latest Microsoft technologies.

This is also going to be community Launch event for Microsoft Office 365. So be there and enjoy the flavour of cutting edge Microsoft technologies. Read out more to find about the session details.

Behaviors are most demanded feature to include in Silverlight, Windows Phone 7 and/or WPF applications to implement proper MVVM pattern to do some UI level actions. These are pluggable on demand and don’t need any other extra code to integrate. Just a simple XAML change and you are done.

In this article, we will learn how to use the inbuilt “PlaySoundAction” behavior to add sound effect on button click. We will demonstrate it using Windows Phone 7 application. Read more to learn. Complete demonstration with images for each steps available.

Weekly News Digest of Silverlight-Zone.com is up once again. We publish this digest every Sunday. As regular, find herewith the “Top 5 Posts of the Week” and “Daily News Digests” links.

During the week, we submitted 71 article links related to Silverlight, Windows Phone 7, Metro, LightSwitch, XAML etc. We submitted these links from various authors. If you are also writing blog posts on those topics, please share us your blog link so that, we can contribute them to the site to reach out the already available good content to the vast readers. We welcome every feedbacks and suggestions to improve our site. Thanks to everyone for their support.

During October 2011, I have submitted 19 blog posts, among them 5 articles are there. I also received two awards from communities. In this post, I am going to share all the posts submitted here in my blog as separate category. This will help you to find out the proper post that you are searching in my blog.

As a short note, we (KolkataGeeks team) are proud to announce the Kolkata Developer Conference 2011 event. If you are in Kolkata, come and join the event; learn; discuss and win lots of goodies including Telerik Ultimate Collection license. Registration is going on.

Kolkata Geeks pleased to announce Developer Conference 2011 (DevCon) on Saturday, 12th November 2011. Developer Conference is the premier technical event for technology professionals in Kolkata interested in learning, connecting and exploring latest Microsoft technologies.

I am attending this event. Are you? Don’t forget to attend my Technical Session on Windows Phone 7. Read more to find out more about his event agenda, venue and timing.

Here comes the weekly news digest of Silverlight-Zone.com. This week i.e. 23rd October to 29th October, we have submitted 61 article links in our database and the total link count raised to 3255 till now. Thanks to Michael Crump and Silverlight Gal for their contributions towards Silverlight-Zone community portal.

In this post, I am going to share the popular 5 posts of this week, which were visited mostly by our readers. Also, sharing the Daily News Digest links of the week. If you missed them earlier, you can find them here.

Few days ago, I started with a Tutorial series on Project Management using Telerik TeamPulse tool and discussed on Agile Scrum using that tool. We learnt about the Telerik product which is built on top of Silverlight. We learnt how to create new project and the steps to create your Sprint or Iteration.

Today in this fourth chapter, we will learn how to create new Stories and respective Tasks for that Story. Plenty of screenshots available to understand. Feedbacks are always appreciated.

On 3rd October 2011, I had started a giveaway contest of “SQL Wait Stats Joes 2 Pros” book authored by Pinal Dave, Microsoft Evangelist and Founder of SQLAuthority.com. The contest ended on 21st October 2011.

We received no. of participants in the contest and after reviewing all the entries, I have randomly picked up two Winners, who will receive signed copy of the “SQL Wait Stats Joes 2 Pros” book. Congratulation email will be send out to the winners requesting their shipping address. Find out whether you are the lucky winner of the contest.

Here comes the “Weekly News Digest at Silverlight-Zone.com. During this week (16th October 2011 to 22nd October 2011) we have submitted ~67 news items in Silverlight-Zone. I appreciate the time of our Contributors who spent some of their valuable time to help the Silverlight-Zone community grow.

Read more to find out the top 5 posts of the week which were top visited by our readers. As usual, I am also posting the Daily News Headline links of this week. You may find it useful in case you missed them.

Follow us on Twitter and Facebook to keep you updated on latest posts on Silverlight, Windows Phone 7, LightSwitch, XNA stuffs. We want some more contributors who can voluntarily help us to serve already available good links to the community.

Boryana Miloshevska published this eBook “Silverlight for Windows Phone Toolkit in Depth” in WindowsPhoneGeek.com. The book includes hands on guide with code to demonstrate all the controls available in the Windows Phone 7.1 Toolkit (August 2011).

Click “Read More” to know about this book and find the links to download the eBook for Free. Hope this book will be a great help to you. Don’t forget to visit the book’s page to say a “Thanks” to the Author of the book.

Here comes the weekly news digest at SilverlightZone.com. During last week (9th October 2011 to 15th October 2011) we submitted 63 news posts on Silverlight, Windows Phone 7, LightSwitch and Visual Studio 11. We have also seen the launch of Windows Phone 7 in India.

As usual, here in this post, I am going to share the top 5 posts of the week followed by the links towards Daily News Digest. If you missed to read some posts, you can find them here. Follow us on Twitter and Facebook to receive regular update on the latest article news posted daily.

I am feeling very glad to announce that, INETA community has been awarded me with their “Annual Community Champion Award” for the Q3 of 2011. It’s a big honor to receive this award from INETA community. I can’t express my excitement to acknowledge this award.

I’m finding that my community work is rewarding me in various ways. It’s definitely a great year for me when I have been awarded by different portals. Over the past 2-3 years, I was connected with so many influential people who helped me to build my career.

Finally received my Microsoft MVP Certificate and Kit yesterday. The kit consists of the MVP ring for 2011, MVP pin and the MVP ID-Card. You might already know that, I have been awarded 2nd time as Microsoft Silverlight MVP. To read about it, you may visit my post “Awarded Microsoft MVP (Silverlight) for the Second Time - October 2011”.

In this post, I am sharing some snaps of the MVP 2011 ring and the Certificate.

Last day we discussed about “Silverlight Page Navigation Framework” where we understood the basic concept. We learnt how to add pages in the project from the template and the root of the page xaml. We also learnt about the assembly which we need to use to develop a navigation application using Silverlight.

Today in this post, we will discuss about Uri Mapping which will help you to implement the navigation application very easily. You will also be able to hide the actual Url of the page. We will discuss about each point in brief with a simple example continuing from previous post.

Let us start with a three days tutorial series on Silverlight Navigation Framework. Today in this post, we will discuss about Page Navigation Framework in Silverlight. Here we will learn what the Page is, how to kick start with navigation framework and details about this.

This post will help to understand the basic knowledge of it. You will find it handy while developing your Silverlight application. Next two days, we will learn how to map a page URL and pass parameter to the page using a small and simple example. Continue reading to learn more about it.

Today posting the last week’s news digest of Silverlight-Zone.com. During last week (2nd October 2011 to 8th October 2011), we have submitted ~76 news links in SilverlightZone on different topics like Silverlight, Windows Phone 7 and LightSwitch.

It’s our effort to share the already available good content to you. As usual, this post will cover the Popular 5 Posts of last week and link towards daily news digest for your reference. Share us your thoughts and views about Silverlight-Zone.com. We are eager to hear something from you. Your continuous support matters to help the community grow.

Sometime we want to show the System Information to the user, whether it is an Application or a simple Game. We need to show those system specific information to the Windows Phone 7 user by using an System page. So, in such case, how will you fetch those information and show them to the user?

Well, this post will help you to understand it and let you know about this data in Windows Phone 7 device. Read to learn more about this topic.

The root class of the Windows Phone 7 page includes two attributes called “Orientation” and “SupportedOrientations”. Those are actually enum values and provides you option to set the orientation of your page programmatically.

Today in this post we will describe about it in depth. If you are new to Windows Phone 7 programming, you will find this tip handy to understand about the page orientation on Phone page. Read to know more about this.

Silverlight 5 Toolkit is now available in CodePlex site. This is the first version of Silverlight 5 Toolkit targeting Silverlight 5 RC build. This is also a first release of Silverlight Toolkit after April 2010. It took more than one year to release this bits. No Silverlight 4 toolkit available yet.

In this post, I am going to share the downloadable location as well as the new components available in this release. Read to know more about them.

Do you work on SQL Server as a SQL developer or administrator and want to gain some good knowledge on SQL Wait Stats and Parallel Execution from SQL Guru Pinal Dave? Then this post will help you to win a hard copy of his book.

Pinal Dave, who is a Microsoft Evangelist published a book “SQL Wait Stats Joes 2 Pros” recently. He accepted my request and going to giveaway 2 copies of his book to my blog followers. Read more to register for the contest and Win the book Free.

Here comes this week’s news digest of Silverlight-Zone.com. This week starting 25th September 2011 to 1st October 2011, we have submitted 69 new article links on various topics like Silverlight, Windows Phone 7, LightSwitch, XAML and Metro.

Though there are various new topics, but still people are worried about the future of Silverlight and hence we noticed a significant hit on those posts. Don’t be panic, this is a cover story now since last three weeks. Read this post to read out the top 5 links.

I am feeling very proud to announce that, I have been awarded as Microsoft MVP (Most Valuable Professional) for the second consecutive year. Feeling good to say that I am still holding the second Silverlight MVP tag from India.

1st October is an wonderful day to me. In 2010, I received this award for the first time with a holding of second Silverlight MVP of India and still continuing with that. My sincere thanks to my MVP Lead, all Community friends and my Parents. Without all of their support it was quite difficult to get.

Also a warm Congratulation to all new and renewed MVPs of this quarter.

During September 2011, we have seen a no. of product releases by Microsoft including Silverlight 5 RC, Expression Blend 5 Preview, Windows 8 Developer Preview, Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview and Windows Phone 7.1 SDK Final. It was a busy month, no doubt. I also did a no. of posts (26) in my blog which has 15 articles.

In this post, I am going to share all the posts submitted here in my blog as separate category. This will help you to find out the proper post that you are searching in my blog.

That’s a good question asked by Alan in my last post “Why the Frame Rate Counter is not available in my Windows Phone 7 Emulator?” Ok, to answer to this query, there could be some different issues/solutions for this.

Let’s discuss more on this query here. If you are facing the same issue, this post might help you. There could be different possibilities too. If you have different solution, please use the comment link to submit your approach here.

Microsoft released Windows Phone 7.1 SDK tools yesterday, 28th September 2011. It’s in RTW release, that means, it is released to web. Cliff Simpkins announced the release of the Windows Phone SDK 7.1 in Windows Team Blog.

In this post, find the link to download the RTW version of Windows Phone 7.1 SDK (Mango) which includes both the web and standalone offline installer for all separate languages.

While working with Windows Phone 7 emulator, you might noticed that, in debug mode it shows some numeric values at the right side of the screen. So, what are those values and why that numeric bar is available in debug mode?

The bar represents numeric values for Frame Rates to debug Memory usage by your WP7 application. In this post, we will briefly discuss on this topic. Read further to learn more about this Frame Rate Counter.

Few days ago, I did a Giveaway contest of Telerik RadControls for Silverlight and LightSwitch here “Telerik RadChartControl for LightSwitch Application - Day 3 - Giveaway Contest” and received a good nos. of tweets from people who attended this contest to Win the license.

Today in this post, I am going to announce the Winner of the contest. Read the post to check whether you are the lucky Winner of the Telerik License.

In Windows Phone 7, the System Tray is the small bar across the top of the screen in Portrait mode. It displays the Signal strength, Current time and Wi-Fi connection strength.

In this post, we will learn more about Windows Phone 7 System Tray. It is easy to write code to show or hide the tray. We will use a small demo to demonstrate it.

Are you facing any issue deploying your Windows Phone 7 application in the emulator or, are you facing any issue while opening the Windows Phone 7 emulator? Is it stating some System Error while finding “MFPlat.dll”? If you are facing the similar issue, this post will help you. Do bookmark this post and share to others, so that, if anyone is facing the same will resolve it easily.

In this post, I will tell you the background of the issue and the solution to fix this problem. If you have any other alternative, do share it here and help the other person. Read more to find out the issue and it’s solution.

Fourth week of the month and I came with the Weekly News Digest of Silverlight-Zone.com. Since last 2 weeks, top posts were on the future of Silverlight. Is Silverlight dead or still it is alive? Read more on this topic from various Silverlight authors.

In this post, I am also going to share the daily news digest links of the week. In case you missed to read this week’s post, you can find them here. Stay tuned @SilverlightZone on Twitter for daily updates. We are also available on Facebook. Like our facebook page to stay tuned on the updates.

In Windows 8 if you installed Visual Studio 11 separately, you may notice the error “Tool makepri.exe cannot be found. Please install Windows Modern SDK” while building Metro Style Windows application. What is that and how to resolve this issue?

In this post I will discuss about this issue and will also give you the solution. If you are facing the similar issue, read to find out more.

In this article, I will guide you to setup a Windows 8 Virtual Machine in VMWare environment. Just follow the steps mentioned here and you will be done with the installation. I will use the 32bit Windows 8 Developer Preview ISO image to mount for the installation step. If you have bootable drive, you can directly use that.

The step-by-step process will show you creation of new Virtual Machine and then the installation of Windows 8 Developer Preview version in the VM. Read the complete post to find out more.

Last day we discussed on project creation in TeamPulse team management solution. If you didn’t yet read it, follow this post here: “How to Create a New Telerik TeamPulse Project?” where we discussed the project creation step-by-step.

Today in this article, we will use that project and will show you how to create Sprints/Iterations inside your TeamPulse project, so that, you can plan your sprint/iteration properly for your team. In the next article, we will learn how to use iterations and add stories for each sprint. Let’s discuss on the iteration creation and deletion of it in depth.

It was a busy schedule this week and we experienced the latest news in Microsoft front. In BUILD event, Microsoft released Windows 8 Developer Preview, Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview along with .Net 4.5 and Expression Blend 5 Developer Preview. After build session, people started discussing on the future of Silverlight and hence during the week this topic was top demanded.

Top posts were from @JeremyLikness, Scott M. Fulton, @mossyblog, Janvanderhaegen and Jonathan Allen. Find the top 5 posts of the week as well as daily digest links in this post.

Visual Studio 11 provides an integrated development experience that spans the entire lifecycle of software creation from architecture to code creation, testing and beyond. This release adds support for Windows 8 and HTML 5, enabling you to target platforms across devices, services and the cloud.  Find the link to download the standalone/offline installer (ISO) of the Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview.

Microsoft released Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview to the developer community. First they released it for the MSDN subscriber that means, it was available only for MSDN subscribers till the date it was announced. Now it is available for general public. You can now download it and start exploring the features. You can also start developing Windows 8 applications using this IDE.

In this post, I am going to share you the links for both MSDN and general public download. Grab it and start exploring.

Yesterday, in the post “TeamPulse - A Project Management Solution from Telerik”, we discussed about Telerik TeamPulse application. We discussed about installation requirements and also shared the links to download the TeamPulse.

In this post, we will learn how to create a TeamPulse project for your team, so that you can manage your stories, bugs and check the status of each individual story. Read more to learn about it.

TeamPulse is a project management solution from Telerik based on Agile best practices. You can manage your team project using this Silverlight based tool to actively collaborate between team members, track progress of project.

It is a web based Silverlight application, where you can track your project status and other information. In this post, I will share you details about this project management solution, link to download the installer and other stuffs. If you want to explore it, download the installer and setup the solution now.

Here comes the Weekly Digest post at Silverlight-Zone.com. During the week (4th September to 10th September) we have submitted many posts on Silverlight (especially Silverlight 5), Windows Phone 7, LightSwitch and other related stuffs. Our motto is to deliver the already posted good articles/news to you as a single medium. Your continuous support to this boosts the energy to serve the community better.

In this post, find out the Top 5 posts visited at Silverlight-Zone. Most of the top articles were on Silverlight 5. Vikram Pendse is above the list this time with his awesome article on Silverlight 5's PInvoke, followed by the big list of Silverlight 5 features by Community Program Manager Pete Brown. If you didn't read that post, you should read it to find out more.

Yesterday we discussed on Silverlight 5 RC Feature called PInvoke. Hope that was informative for you. We learned how to call system APIs from Silverlight application. We demonstrated this using In-Browser application, but you can use that for Out-Of-Browser too easily.

In Silverlight 4, if we wanted to access system drive or any files, we had to use the COM APIs and this was only applicable from Out-Of-Browser applications. In this article, we will show you the way to access system resources using PInvoke in Silverlight 5. You can call this directly from Browser applications as well as Out-Of-Browser applications. Read to know more.

Silverlight 5 RC (Release Candidate) has been already released. There are some new features already included in this build. Among them, one most important feature is PInvoke. PInvoke means Platform Invoke. By using this, you can directly talk to system resources without using COM APIs.

In this article, we will explore it more and show you how to open the "Run Dialog" directly from the Silverlight 5 application. Here also, we will use In-Browser application which you can easily port to Out-Of-Browser.