Here comes this week's News Digest of Silverlight-Zone.com. This time we have total 74 news items on various articles based on Silverlight, Windows Phone 7, LightSwitch etc. Also contains some tips and other posts on MVVM, XAML and Blend.

Most popular posts were "Silverlight Elevator Pitch", "War between Silverlight, HTML & Windows 8", "Bing Map Control for Windows Phone 7", "Is Silverlight Dead? No, it's not. It's the heart of WP7, Windows 8, XNA" and "All about WP7 Emulator".

Read more to find those interesting posts. Also, find the daily news digest links for the last week here, in case you missed the posts.

Last two days, we discussed about Windows Phone 7 Page State. We learnt about saving and retrieving state of a page whenever require. Page State defines the current visual state of application page. Page state is accessible within that page. But think about a condition where you want to save values to the state and want to access them across the application. Then what to do? You have the option to use the Application State in that case.

Application State stores data values which can be accessible by multiple pages. In this tutorial chapter, we will learn about Application State and in the next chapter, we will see an actual implementation of the same with a small demo. Read to know more about Application State.

Yesterday we discussed the basic theory on Windows Phone 7 Page State. We came to know what is this and when to use this. We also came to know the way to implement the state management. In this chapter of the tutorial series, we will learn more about Page State Management in Windows Phone 7.1 with a small application.

After reading this tutorial chapter, you will be able to store page state, retrieve and clear them on your need. Read to know more about this topic, share the link to others and ask any queries if you have at the end of the post.

Sometime you may want to save the values present in your page while switching from one page to another page, sometime you may want to store the values while switching application between foreground and background.

When you are switching from one application to the other, the first app enters into the deactivated mode. At that time you can store the current state of the page and display them back again by retrieving those values from page state once you return to the first app.

In this chapter we will discuss about the page state. This will help you to know the basics about it, very good for a beginner to jump start with it.

The Windows Phone 7.1 application lifecycle has been designed in a way that it can run multiple applications in the background. Today we will discuss about the Lifecycle of Windows Phone 7 (Mango) apps.

Here we will learn about various states of Windows Phone 7 application life cycle. This is an important chapter of the tutorial series to learn about the execution model before developing any application product. Read to know more about this topic and at the end don't hesitate to leave your feedback or queries if any.

Do you know that, you can now access local files and folders in Silverlight 5? Yes, you heard right. Earlier to Silverlight 5 it was only limited to trusted location like My Documents folder, means it was only possible to read/write in My Documents. Now using Silverlight 5 you can do such operation in any files or folders.

Let's discuss more on this topic. After reading this post, you will be able to read/write to/from any file in local file system. Also you will be able to get information about System Resources. Read to know more.

Today in this Windows Phone 7 Tutorial, we will discuss on Navigation Service and Navigation Context. We will create a small demo application to showcase the functionality of those class. We will navigate from one page to another and then again use the history to return back to the previous page.

In this chapter, we will use a case study of showing customer details in multiple page and using that demo we will learn about Navigation in Windows Phone 7 series. Read to learn more on it. Source code is available at the end of the post.

Yesterday I attended the PUG Event and delivered 1 hour session on Silverlight 5 Beta features. I demonstrated some important features too. Here in this blog post, I am going to share the "What's New in Silverlight 5?" slides. You can view it online and if you want, you can download to view it offline.

Also, I am sharing the demo projects that I used during the session. You can freely download them from the attached links. Earlier I published some articles on these features, sharing their links too so that, you can read them and understand in depth.

In the last chapter of the series, we learnt about Application bar and the uses of it using a small demo application. We described about Icon buttons and Menu items too.

You can add an application bar to your page both from XAML and code behind. There are some design guidelines for Application bar and a developer must know about these before designing and developing their Windows Phone application. In this chapter, we will discuss about them. Read to know more and don't forget to share them to your colleagues and followers.

Application Bar is a tiny toolbar for your page to do some specific operation. Using this, you can easily add a toolbar for your application pages. It is a combination of 1-4 icon buttons and/or a collection of menu items.

In my previous post, we already discussed about the class. Today we will discuss more on this topic. We will also create a small demo application to showcase the use of ApplicationBar. Read to know more and don't forget to share your feedback.

Yesterday, 1st June 2011 Microsoft demonstrated their next generation Windows Operating System at the D9 conference which internally called as “Windows 8”. It supports touch screen and can operate with/without a Mouse or Keyboard using the touch APIs and onscreen keyboard.

The video demonstrates the power of flexibility and dynamic user experience. To know more about it and watch the video demonstration of the first preview, read the complete post.