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.