This will be a short tip of the day where I will show you the way to convert a Rectangle or a Ellipse control to a Path control. If you are not familiar with Expression Blend and currently working with it to design your UI, this tip will definitely help you in various scenarios.
Let’s start with a small demonstration using Rectangle control. You can do the same for Ellipse too. Read to know more.
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.
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.
Last Wednesday (July 6th 2011) we explored a way to create a Circular loader using XAML without writing any line in the code behind file. Lot of you gave a good feedback and discussed various findings on the same.
I did some more investigation to create a different type of circular loader which you can include in your Silverlight, WPF and Windows Phone 7 applications where you are using XAML code. In this article, I will be guiding to create similar kind of Circular loader as shown above. This will be more simple than the previous one. Let's start our discussion and create one loader like this.
Many time we need to find out which Theme we are using in Windows Phone 7. Based upon the chosen theme we may want to set our own Theme for the application. So, how to find out that?
In this post, I am going to share you the Tip. Using it you will be able to identify the current theme of your Windows Phone 7 device. Read to know more.
On last Saturday (i.e. 9th July 2011) I delivered one hour session on "MVVM from Scratch using Silverlight" in Pune User Group's (PUG) Monthly meet. The session was full of demo and very little with slides.
In this post I will just recap the session for you to know what are the things I discussed there. I will also share the slides here, if you want to go through it offline.
The Weekly News Digest of Silverlight-Zone.com is out. This week we have total 71 article news posted in Silverlight-Zone on various topics like Silverlight, Windows Phone 7, LightSwitch and XNA. Like always, Windows Phone 7 articles are trending much than Core Silverlight articles. I think, to start viewing some new links on Silverlight, we have to wait more time for the next build of Silverlight 5.
In this post, I am going to share all the daily news digest so that, you can find the all the links posted there daily. Also, I am going to share the top 5 posts of this week (3rd July 2011 to 9th July 2011). Read to know more.
Sometime we need to know whether Network connectivity is available or not from our application. In Windows Phone 7, we have the required API exposed for the developers to detect the status of the network connection and take respective step based on that.
So how to detect it? In this small tip of the tutorial series, we will learn about the API and we will also see how this can be done using a small demo which includes code too. Read to know more about it.
If you are a XAML designer and creating controls for Silverlight, Windows Phone 7 or WPF, you may come in some situation that the custom properties for the controls are not properly organized by the developers. If you come into such situation forward this link to the developers and they may find it useful.
In this article, we will learn how to well organize the custom properties of your control so that, designers can easily search in appropriate location. Read to know more about it.
There are many instance when we have "Browser1" as the default browser in the system and we want our web application to be run inside a different browser (say "Browser2") from the Visual Studio IDE. To do this, we need to open the "Browser2" application and set it as default one, so that, the "Browser2" will start as the application handle from the IDE. After that, you have to revert back the default browser to "Browser1" by doing the same step.
This is really very difficult job. To simplify this thing, there is an Extension for the Visual Studio 2010 IDE. If you download and install that free extension, you will be able to do this very easily. In this post I will share the step and show you how this will improve your productivity.
Sometime we need to show a circular loader in WPF and/or Silverlight. We may need it in Windows Phone 7 too. In simple statement, we need to show a circular loader in various XAML applications like Silverlight, WP7 and WPF.
In this article, we will learn how to create a Circular Loader as shown in the screenshot. I will not use a single line of C# code to create this loader. Everything will be in the XAML file itself to keep the code behind file clean. Read to know more about it step-by-step and after reading this article, you will be able to create and use a circular loader like this. Source code is also available for download at the end of the page. Feel free to use it.
Input Scope of a TextBox defines the information related to the scope of the data provided by the input method and use to define the layout of the onscreen keyboard of the device. It is present in the "System.Windows.Input" namespace and exposed in TextBox as a property called "InputScope".
You might be wondering what is this property and why should one use it. Ok, let us discuss this in depth with a small sample. After reading this chapter, you will be able to understand it more and use it on your business requirement. Don't forget to share this tutorial links to others as this will help them to learn more.
On coming Saturday, 9th July 2011, I am going to take an hour session on "MVVM from Scratch using Silverlight" in the Pune User Group's (PUG) monthly meeting. The session will start from 10 AM and will continue for one hour. Also there are two more sessions on Windows Phone 7 and Parallel Programming.
In this one hour session, I will demonstrate what is MVVM pattern, how a designer/developer will get the benefit of using it. I will also demonstrate how this will help you to clear up the code behind file and make a fully loosely coupled & maintainable code. Read more to find the Agenda and Venue of the event. Entry is FREE, hence you can join it directly at the venue. Will meet you there.
Here comes the weekly digest of Silverlight-Zone.com from 26th June 2011 to 2nd July 2011. We have completed 6 months of this site with more than 2000 news items. We received some good feedback too including a huge hit to the site. This motivates us to serve you better in future.
In this post, I am going to share the top 5 posts of this week. Windows Phone 7 is trending in this site. Top 5 posts are "The news of distribution of WP7 Mango to developers by Microsoft", "Windows 8 Rumour to Future for WP7", "A Screen Recorder application in WP7", "Hosting HTML App in WP7 Mango" and "Betting the House on LightSwitch". Read to find out these links as well as the link to daily news digest of the week in case you missed to read them.
Microsoft released Windows Phone SDK 7.1 Beta 2 on 29th June 2011. Earlier it was named as Windows Phone Developer Tools. While releasing the beta 2 version of the Software, they renamed it to Windows Phone SDK 7.1.
Today I downloaded the SDK and installed it in my laptop. Sharing the same experience here just in case you want to read it. This will also help a beginner to kick start on the same.
Last three days we learnt about the new feature of Windows Phone 7 (Mango) called "Local Database Support". Yesterday we discussed it in depth by building a small demo application. While working with the demo you might noticed that, we used a connection string to connect with the local database present in the Windows Phone storage.
In this post, we will discuss more on the connection string. After reading this post, you will be able to know what are the various types and parameters available for connection string.
In the last two chapters of the tutorial series, we discussed about the local database support in Windows Phone 7 (Mango). We learnt how to create a DataContext class from existing SQL CE database and also we learnt about the issues that arises once we add the class file in the project to build. We learnt the steps to resolve those issues too.
In this article, we are going to discuss about the CRUD operations that we can do using the DataContext class with a small application. We will learn how to create and delete a database, we will also learn how to insert or fetch records. After reading this tutorial you will also be able to do other operations like edit, search etc.
In this post, find the link to download the Beta 2 SDK of Windows Phone 7.1 (Mango) which includes both the web and standalone offline installer. Also find the links towards new and breaking changes.
Hope you read my previous post on Windows Phone 7.1 (Mango) local database support. If you didn't read the earlier post, you need to read it before reading this one. You can find it here: "Create DataContext". That will give you the basic context about the same.
In this post (I will rather calling it as a Tip), we will configure the project by adding the generated DataContext class and in the next post, we will learn what are the various CRUD operations we can do with a sample application. That will give you complete visibility to this new feature implementation.
Do you know that, Windows Phone 7.1 (Mango) now supports local database? Yes, you can now use local database inside your Phone 7 device and use it to CRUD operations. You can now create a DataContext class from an existing database and use it as the entry point class to do DB operation.
In this chapter we will learn how to create a DataContext class for local SQL CE database. At the end of this tutorial our data context class will be ready for further DB operations.
Last two days we learned about Accelerometer class, it's base class and the accelerometer tool that comes with the Phone emulator. Hope those posts gave you some basic idea about it.
Here in this post, we will learn the use of this feature with a small demo application. We will also learn how to use the phone to write application that depends on the gravitational force applied to the sensors. This will give you better idea to create game application that will work when the user moves his phone device.
Here comes the weekly news digest of Silverlight-Zone.com from 19th June 2011 to 25th June 2011. We have submitted 72 article links during the week on various topics like Silverlight, Windows Phone 7, LightSwitch, Expression Blend and even Windows 8.
During this week, top news was on Windows 8 Rumour to Windows Phone 7 future followed by several Windows Phone 7 related articles. In this post, I am going to share the top 5 posts as well as the links to daily news digest at Silverlight-Zone.com. Read to know more.
Yesterday, we came to know about Accelerometer of Windows Phone 7. We also learnt about the structure of the Accelerometer class and it's base class. Now, it's the time to see how to run the same inside the Phone emulator. In this post we are going to see the accelerometer tool that comes with the Phone 7 emulator.
Read more to know how to run the accelerometer tool and what customization we can do with this tool. This will be beneficial for you when we discuss more about the topic with a sample application.
Accelerometer defines the force applied to the Windows Phone 7 device which can be used to determine the measure of direction that has been applied by the user by moving the device. This values are represented as a 3D vector coordinates in X, Y and Z axis. Using the Accelerometer class present in the library, we can programmatically control the device's 3D acceleration.
In this article we will learn about the class that we will use to demonstrate the same feature. Read to learn more about it.
Last two days, we learnt about Alarm and Reminder class present for Windows Phone 7 application development. We came to know about the class structure and demoed the implementation with small application created in step-by-step process. We also learnt about the use of Task while discussing the same.
In this tutorial chapter we will learn more about the tasks present for Mango devices. After reading this part you will be able to understand the different tasks and their uses. Read more to learn about them with visual code snippet and huge screenshots.
Yesterday we discussed about the Alarm class and also demonstrated the use of it using a small demo app. Today in this post we will learn about Reminder class and will see the structure of the same. We will also demonstrate the implementation with a small demo.
Like Alarm class, Reminder class is also part of the "Microsoft.Phone.Scheduler" namespace and inherits the same base class. Let's read more about it and explore each and every step to create a simple Windows Phone 7 Reminder application.
Windows Phone 7.1 now supports scheduled tasks which runs even the application is not running. We can now schedule a task and when the bell hits, it starts executing the said task. In this chapter of the tutorial series, we will explore this using the Alarm class.
Alarm class creates an instance which runs in the background using the task agent and at the specified time, it will raise the event to execute. If your application is not running at that time too, it will execute and show the alarm screen. Read to know more about the class with a small demonstration.
In our last chapter of Windows Phone 7 Tutorial, we learnt about detecting network information using the static class called DeviceNetworkInformation. We also demonstrated it with a small demo application.
In this new chapter of the tutorial series, we will learn how to detect the device information using the APIs present inside the SDK. We will learn how to detect whether any Keyboard has been installed with the device, whether the device is running under battery or using any external power supply. We will also learn the way to detect about the memory of the device and other device information.
Read more to know about the class and it's properties with a small demonstration of the code.
During the week 12th June to 18th June, we posted 63 new article links at Silverlight-Zone.com which consists of 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 "Google Maps for WP7 using Bing Map control", "HTML5 and Silverlight5 discussion", "Tips & Tricks on Office with Mobile 7", "HTML5 based WP7 Application" and "Release date for WP7 Mango devices".
Read more to find those interesting posts of this week and the digest links in case you missed them.
User can now detect the mobile operator and other network information's in Windows Phone 7.1 Mango devices programmatically. The new APIs to detect these information will help you to identify the mobile operator, availability of network, Wi-Fi access etc.
Let's jump into deep drive to know more about these APIs and the integration to your application using a small demo. Read to learn about it.
If you are developing any Windows Phone 7 application form and using the Emulator to run the app, you may find this tip very useful. A first time user who feels very annoying to click the mouse button to enter text using the phone emulator can hide the onscreen keyboard and use the computer's keyboard after reading this tip.
Read to know more about the small tip which will make your life even easy.
Mobile phones have very limited resource as compared to a desktop PC and hence it is very difficult to run multiple applications simultaneously. Also, suppose if multiple resources run simultaneously, it will eat up the battery life and make your phone stop working after certain period of time.
So what to do? To overcome this situation, tombstoning comes into picture. It saves the current data and then moves the app to the background or closes the app after saving all the data. This calls as Tombstoning. In this post, we will discuss on the same.
Supreet Tare posted a thread on MSDN Forum to help him binding a 2nd Level Collection in Silverlight DataGrid control. As he didn't find any good solution there, he asked me on Twitter to give a solution to him for the same. I did a small investigation and came up with a solution for him.
In this post, I am going to describe the problem, as well as solution to this. Hope this solution will be helpful to you too and hence sharing in my blog. Read more to find out the solution.
Last couple of days we discussed about Page State and Application State of Windows Phone 7 (Mango). We learnt various ways of saving state of the page or application. After reading those chapters, you might have question in your mind that how to save the state of the application before closing the application and once you comeback again, you should get them back.
If you are familiar in Silverlight, you should have answer to this. Yes, we can use Isolated Storage to save the state of the app and read values whenever require in future.
In this tutorial, we will discuss about this with a simple demo code. If you are new to Isolated Storage, you will be able to learn how to use it directly in Windows Phone. Read to know more.
On last Saturday we learnt about basics of Application State in Windows Phone 7 Application. We discussed about the steps to pass value from one page to another using the Application State. In this chapter, we will learn more on the same with a small and simple demo.
So, read to know about it and learn the way of sharing data between pages using state. At the end, please provide your feedback. Don't forget to share it to the community.
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.
In our last post of the series, we learned about the base class "Page" and Here in this post we will learn about "PhoneApplicationPage" which is root of any Windows Phone 7 page. Before jumping to the core in depth, a beginner must know all these things. As I am also exploring these for the first time, sharing the same knowledge with you.
I hope that, these series of posts will be helpful to a beginner. If you want to know more about PhoneApplicationPage class, read this post to learn about it.
Silverlight-Zone.com completed it's 5 months with more than 1,700 news items. Thank you everyone for supporting us all the time. In May, we aggregated 308 posts in Silverlight-Zone and shared all these links over Twitter and Facebook page to reach out to maximum people.
In this post I am going to share you the best picks of the month. Top rated posts were on Windows Phone 7 by Doug Holland, Naveed Tejani, Paul, Amit Chatterjee and Abhishek Sur. Read to find out the top links.
In my previous post, we discussed on how to create a Windows Phone 7 application and what are the different parts of the MainPage.xaml. We also created a small and simple HelloWorld application as the quick start. I guess, now we are comfortable to create a basic application with a good UI (if you already know how to design a XAML page).
It's time to explore more in depth about the page. In this post, we will discuss about the base class called "Page". Read to know more about it.
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.
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.
ImplicitDataTemplate is a new feature in Silverlight 5. Using ImplicitDataTemplate, you can declare multiple Data Templates for your control and based on the data type, you can load the proper data template automatically.
In this article we will discuss on the same step by step with a good example. Read the complete article to know it in depth. Do you have any queries, let me know. Feedbacks are always appreciated.
Silverlight-Zone.com completed it's 4th month with a huge posts on Silverlight, Windows Phone 7, XAML etc. This month was the best month for those technologies. During the MIX11 event in this month Microsoft released it's first beta of Silverlight 5. They also released the Async CTP for Silverlight and WP7 and many more.
In this post I am going to share the best picks of the month as well as top links of the week. In this month top visited post was from Michael Crump where he demonstrated creating his own website using Silverlight. In this week the post from Abhishek Baxi received a huge hit where he listed out all Windows Phone developer resources. He called it as "Mother of all Lists".
Read out the whole post to find out the top links of the month and the week.
Today, I received my Code Project MVP Certificate by courier. This is my first MVP Certificate from CodeProject. Feeling very proud to be part of the Global MVP team. I am happy that, my contribution towards community and their regular support gave me the chance to achieve this. This recognition I will contribute to each and every supporter of mine, who helped me in various way to achieve this award.
In this post find the certificate that I received.
Here we have the weekly news digest of Silverlight-Zone.com. In this week, we have accumulated many posts (52) on Silverlight and Windows Phone 7. It's our effort to bring all good links for you, so that, you don't have to dig the internet for articles on the said technologies.
In this post find the most popular post of the week which were showcased in Silverlight-Zone.com. I appreciate everyone's contribution and support to Silverlight-Zone community. Thank you for your support all the time.
Today we already discussed about Multiple Click (ClickCount) in Silverlight 5 Beta, which was introduced recently. The step-by-step guide focused on how to implement the double click, triple click using the new ClickCount property. In that post we discussed that, there are some issues with this feature and in this post I am going to describe them for you.
Before working with this feature, you must know the pit-falls. This will help you to understand the issue and take care of your code. Read to know more about it.
Some time you need to know whether your user clicked a control once or double clicked it. Sometime you need to know how many click a user did in the UI control. In this post, you will learn about it.
Silverlight 5 Beta has been announced with newly added feature called ClickCount. It's a property added to the MouseButtonEventArgs. Using this you will be able to find out how many multiple click happened by the user.
Read the complete post to know about the implementation and the issues. Don't forget to provide our feedbacks at the end.
Here comes the Weekly Digest of Silverlight-Zone. This week was a great week. During the week Microsoft released a no. of products during the MIX11 event. Started with Visual Studio Async CTP Service Pack, Internet Explorer 10 Platform Preview, Silverlight 5 Beta etc.
In this post find the most popular post of the week which were showcased in Silverlight-Zone.com. I appreciate everyone's contribution and support to Silverlight-Zone community. This is India's first only Silverlight portal.
Microsoft Released Silverlight 5 Beta yesterday during MIX11 conference. It has a great new features set. Among them, most demanded feature was Debugging Data Bindings in XAML. In this article, I will step you through the complete debugging feature in Visual Studio for Silverlight 5 XAML page.
Read the complete article to know more about it and gather knowledge on the debugging feature with a simple code walkthrough. At the end, don't hesitate to leave your feedback. Queries are welcome. I will try to answer you as much as I can.
All of you are familiar with Silverlight and know how to create a Silverlight project. This post is not for the people, who already worked in Silverlight, but for the people who are very new in this technology and start to work as fresh to make their hands dirty. Also, creating this post to refer the project creation in my upcoming tutorial series.
If you are a beginner to Silverlight, read this post to know how to create a Silverlight project.
Visual Studio Async CTP Service Pack 1 has been released which extends Visual Studio 2010 which provides a new streamlined syntax for Asynchronous development. This version of Async CTP is compatible with Visual Studio 2010 SP1.
Read the complete post to find out the download link and installation instructions.
Microsoft just announced Internet Explorer Platform Preview 1 in MIX11 keynote event. It is now available for download today. This will be the next version of Microsoft’s industry-leading Web browser and the deep native HTML5 support delivered in Internet Explorer 9.
Find more about IE10 Platform Preview in this post. Also find the download link at the end of the post.
In this post, I am going to share Top 5 posts of this week at Silverlight-Zone and the weekly digest of Daily News Headline. During this week top posts made by Michael Crump, Kunal Chowdhury, Paul Stovell, Dhanajay Kumar and Manas Patnaik. Good job guys. Read to find out the links.
That's a good question came up after the series in my blog. Someone asked why should one use Custom Control instead of User Control? Hence, let's extend the series and discuss about that. I apologise the delay of this post. I should explain this at the start of the series, but actually my goal was to explain you how to create and use Custom Control in Silverlight.
It is better to do it later than never. Also, you are now familiar with Custom Control creation. Hence, start describing it. You will come to know more about this here. As always, don't forget to share your feedback at the end of this page.
Here is the last chapter of the series for Silverlight Custom Control. In this article, we will learn how to access the template parts from code behind to do various operations in the UI front.
Hope, you read the previous three articles and familiar with the Custom control as of now. This article will help you to understand accessibility of the template parts from the code. So, let's start discussing now. Appreciate your feedback as always.
Microsoft officially announced the expected release time for the Silverlight 5 Beta. Yes, it will be available next week during MIX11. This information was shared in Microsoft Silverlight Team's Blog post "Standards-based web, plug-ins, and Silverlight".
So a new era to this technology is coming next. Only few more days we have to wait before trying out the latest components which are coming in Silverlight 5. Read the full post to find out the link to Features list in Silverlight 5.
Continuing to our 2nd chapter of the series here on Silverlight Custom Control. In this chapter we will discuss on dynamically setting the Content and other properties to our Custom Control that we implemented earlier. After reading this article, you will be able to create properties and set content dynamically to your control.
So, lets start describing them and learn something again today. These series of posts are mainly targeted for beginners but anyone can read it to refresh their learning. Don't forget to leave your comment at the end of the post. Any queries, please drop a line. I will try to help you as early as I can.
This is a continuation to my previous post "How to create a Custom Control in Silverlight?" In this tutorial part, we will discuss on the template and modify our basic template to give a better look as per our need. In this chapter, we will learn about template Part and how to modify the existing template.
Read out more to learn in depth about Custom Control in Silverlight. This will benefit you not only for Silverlight but for WPF and Windows Phone 7 development too. At the end, never forget to provide your feedback.
I am working on Silverlight since 3 years and during the initial period I had a fear on creating Custom control. I was more confident creating UserControls during first one and half year of my job. But when I started working on custom controls, I came to know the power of custom control and all the fear gone out of my eyes.
It's around 2 years, I am working on it and every time I am exploring some great stuffs. Though it's a long time since Silverlight launched; still, I am seeing the same fear on others and hence decided to write a good series on it (explaining all the details), which will be beneficial for beginners.
In this tutorial part, we will discuss on "How to create a Custom Control in Silverlight". This is very basic and will be helpful for a beginner. Don't hesitate to leave your feedback at the end. If you have any query/suggestion/feedback drop a line here. I will try to answer you as early as possible.
In this post, I will share you some important Shortcut keys of Microsoft Expression Blend 4. If you are working with Expression Blend 4, this will definitely help you to improve your daily productivity work. Keep the list with you always to best use of the Shortcut keys in Blend 4 while designing your XAML page.
If you have more shortcuts, please share those to me and I will include them here as the key resource. Thanks for your support.
Today we have completed 3rd month of our activity in Silverlight-Zone.com and continuously trying to improve it. We are regularly updating the site with latest news on Silverlight, Windows Phone 7, LightSwitch, XAML, Expression Blend, XNA etc.
We are also publishing all those entries to Twitter and Facebook, whenever a new post has been submitted, keeping all followers up-to date. Find out more about March 2011 in this post.
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.
LightSwitch is currently in it's Beta 2 stage. Read this post to know about the installation process of it. Also find the installer location to download it freely.
You might know that, LightSwitch is now in Beta 2 stage. Microsoft released it few days ago. I have a series of Tutorial on LightSwitch Beta 1 where we discussed on creating database tables using the LightSwitch table designer.
In this tutorial, we will discuss how to attach an existing database table available in your SQL server database. This was also available in Beta 1 release. This time we will discuss with the latest version. Read the full post and at the end leave your feedback.
Sometime your Silverlight application becomes too larger and creates a bigger XAP file. This causes issue while loading your XAP file for the first time as it increases the loading time for downloading the XAp. So, what will you do in this case? There is one answer: split your application in multiple projects which will create multiple XAPs and then use On Demand downloading feature.
Absolutely right, but you may sometime include 3rd party assembly references. In such case, storing them in a separate XAP and writing the code for downloading them on demand will be another hectic. So, what's the easy process? In this article we will learn the same. Read to know more and provide your feedback in case you need more information.
Microsoft is going to release Internet Explorer 9 RTM on Monday, 14th March 2011. Currently it is in Release Candidate and if you want to try it out, can download the RC version from net. Internet Explorer 9 has lots of new features and enhancements which will give you much faster and secure web experience.
In this post, we will discuss about the history of Internet Explorer which will include various Internet Explorer versions and their features.
On 23rd January 2011, I declared a contest to Giveaway 4 licenses of DevComponents DotNetBar for Silverlight, each costs around $219. The contest was for 1 month and was ended on 28th February 2011. As mentioned in that post, I am going to declare the Winners in this post. Read to know more about the Winner.
