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

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

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

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

Here comes this week’s (1st January 2012 to 7th January 2012) news digest on Silverlight, Windows Phone 7, LightSwitch and Metro UI. We have submitted ~63 new article links at Silverlight-Zone.com.

Read more to find out the top 5 posts of the week. Also, find out the daily digest links here. Sharing those here too, in case you missed those it will be helpful. Subscribe to our daily newsletter to get those links directly delivered to your inbox.

Today in this blog post, I am going to start up few Windows Phone 7 tips which will be handy for you if you are a beginner and just started exploring your device.

In this first tips & tricks, I will show you how to pin an application from your application list to the start screen of your Windows Phone 7 device. As I told, this post is absolutely for the beginners.

I received an offer from uCertify to review their Exam Preparation Kit and I have accepted that challenge and now I am reviewing 70-515 Exam .NET 4.0 Preparation Kit (PrepKit) from uCertify. Initially it looks simple, intuitive and very user friendly in terms of User Interface.

As soon as I am done with the full review I will post the review report for you all. But for now, I am sharing some information about the product in this blog post. Continue reading to know further about it.

I am very happy to announce that, www.silverlight-zone.com has completed it’s first anniversary today. We officially launched this portal on 1st January 2011 and continuing our efforts to submit article news daily.

I appreciate the efforts made by the contributors of this community portal and the followers of Silverlight-Zone. Without their support this journey could be very difficult.

This post is not just the celebration of 1 year completion, we are also announcing our first “Contributor of the Month” award. We are happy to see such contributors on-board.

Here comes the “Weekly News Digest” of Silverlight-Zone.com during 25th December 2011 to 31st December 2011. During the week, we have submitted around 43 new posts to our portal by digging through the net.

In this post, find the popular 5 posts of the week, as well as popular 5 posts of the month. Also find the daily digest links at the end of the post.

We have also completed our 1 year today and the anniversary post is coming up shortly. Stay tuned to my blog for details.

Here comes the “Monthly Summary” of posts published during December 2011. I have submitted 16 blog posts on mixed juice. In this post, I will summarize them category wise, so that, you can find them very easily.

December was a great month for me. I started a video tutorial series on Windows 8 Metro style application. If you didn’t watch them, find the links in this post. Follow my blog for latest articles, tutorials, tips and contests. “Like” my Facebook page for all Technical updates. Wish you a Happy New Year.

My friends, sincerely, I will never stop wishing that your journey through this world will be touched by kindness, inspired by wisdom, graced with understanding, and kept safe from all harm.

Wishing you not just happiness but pure joy, not just wealth but Heaven's treasures, not just silence but God's peace. May this new year bring you all the blessings every day in your life. Wish you and your family a Happy and Prosperous New Year.

“Betty Wallpapers” is a small Windows Phone 7 application developed by my friend Jebarson Jebamony (aka. Jeba), Microsoft India. Using this application, you can search and download wallpapers and images from the web. It allows to search images with any key. It also has a settings panel, where you can configure various options related to your search parameter.

The installer of this application is less than 1MB in size and supports Windows Phone 7.5 or higher. You can install the Trial version (which has few settings OFF by default) and if you like it, purchase it from the Marketplace to support the development.

Today I received this “Security Alert” from Microsoft via email and thought to share this with you. If you are using ASP.Net in your server, read this post to know about it to keep your server in good health from this DoS Attack. Sharing the email as it is in this post.

Microsoft is aware of detailed information that has been published describing a new method to exploit hash tables. Attacks targeting this type of vulnerability are generically known as hash collision attacks. Attacks such as these are not specific to Microsoft technologies and affect other web service software providers. This vulnerability affects all versions of Microsoft .NET Framework and could allow for an unauthenticated denial of service attack on servers that serve ASP.NET pages.

In our last video tutorial “What is the Lifecycle of Windows 8 Metro Style Application?”, we learnt how the Windows 8 metro style application life cycle works using a small video demonstration of states.
 
In this video tutorial we will see a practical example of it using the already available metro applications. Continue to watch the video tutorial series.

You might know that, I have been awarded as Most Valuable Blogger (MVB) by DZone in August 2011. Today I received the MVB Certificate from them. In this post, I am sharing the same with you.

And again, thanks to all of you for your continuous support. Stay tuned with me on Twitter, Facebook and my Blog.

“Fun with Silverlight 4” authored by Rajesh Lal illustrates more than 100 features in Silverlight using a simple problem/solution approach. It takes one feature at a time and guides you in progressive journey where you begin by using the basic components, then by creating graphics and animations.

I am feeling Proud to be the Technical Reviewer of the book and will recommend everyone to purchase this book to keep it as reference. In this post, find my review note, link to purchase it from Amazon store and the Table of Contents. Hope, this book will help you in your day to day work.

Here comes the Weekly Digest (18th December to 24th December) of Silverlight-Zone.com. During this week we have submitted 65 article links at Silverlight-Zone on various topics like Silverlight, Windows Phone 7, Metro Style Applications.

In this post, I am going to share the top 5 posts of the week. Top viewed posts were from actuary21c, Evan Hutnick, Glen Gordon, @mbcrump and @kunal2383. Read more to find out the top 5 links. Finally Merry X-MAS to all of you.

It’s Christmas time and I just wanted to say “Thank You” to you for your support and feedback through out the year. It’s been a pleasure to stay tuned with such awesome friends in my life. Though I know many of you virtually over the cyberspace, but we had a great bonding over the past year.

I wish you and your family an wonderful Holidays during the Christmas and a Happy New Year 2012. May god give you all the pleasure in coming year. A small video greetings has been included in this post. I hope, you will like it.

One month ago, I started a discussion thread “What is the Future of Silverlight?” and received a good amount of feedback on the future of the same. Some provided positive feedback and some had negative feedback.

As declared earlier, I am going to announce the Winners name from the discussion thread here, as I wanted to giveaway some licenses to my blog readers on the eve of X-MAS. Click more to see if you are one of the lucky winner to Win Telerik or Pluralsight license. All the best!!!

Today in this Video tutorial, we will learn about the Lifecycle of Windows 8 Metro style application. We will also learn what are the various states available during the Lifecycle.

Let’s start discussion followed by the video tutorial. An easy way of representation has been added in the video. Let me know your feedback. Don’t forget to share this to your friends and ask their feedback too.

Microsoft is launching Windows Phone Camps in Pune and Chennai during December 2011. It is a brand new event for designers and developers to interact with domain experts. Each session will take you deeper in the world of Windows Phone application design and development.

Don’t wait, just register for the free event now and avail this opportunity to learn more and more from the experts. Ask your queries and experience the bigger event with them.

You might know that, Silverlight 5 has been already released by Microsoft. During the previous releases of Silverlight 5, I have published many articles on it. Here in this post, I am clubbing all of them so that, it will help you to find them in a single page as a great resource to start with Silverlight 5.

Here is a collection of Silverlight 5 Tutorials that you may want to read while working with the Silverlight 5. Find all the links that I have published in my blog. Do you have any feedback or queries? Don’t hesitate to write at least a single line in the Comments Section.

Hope you gone thru my previous video tutorial “How to Create a Windows 8 Metro Style Application using Visual Studio 2011?”, where I demonstrated about Windows Metro Style Application templates, creation of project and it’s project structure. There we also demonstrated one simple “HelloMetroStyleApplication” sample.

In this video tutorial, we will learn about “Package.appxmanifest” file which resides in the Metro application project directory. We will discuss step-by-step about each property page and XML content of this manifest file.

People often asked me to start a Video Tutorial series on Windows 8 Metro Style Application development using Visual Studio 2011 and here is first part of the series. The series will include the video tutorial as well as some text to give you easy access to the code.

In this first part (10 mint Video Tutorial), we will learn how to get started with the Project and also we will learn the project structure. Later we will have a small demo to show you how to develop your first “Hello Metro Style Application” using Visual Studio 2011 IDE. Continue to the tutorial to learn more.

Here is the post on Weekly News Digest at Silverlight-Zone.com. During the week (27th November 2011 to 3rd December 2011), we have submitted ~65 new article links collected from different blog feeds. The posts were on Silverlight, Windows Phone 7, LightSwitch and WinRT Metro.

In this post, find the top 5 posts of the week, also sharing the most popular 5 posts of the month near to the end of the post. On regular basis, sharing the daily news digests links at the end. We had a news on the release of Silverlight 5, which didn’t happen last month. Read more to find out all the popular links.

Here comes our “Monthly Summary” post. During November 2011, I have submitted 12 blog posts here and this is the summary post of those blog threads categorized item wise. Find all the posts that I have published. In case you missed any one of them, this will help you.

As a quick note, stay tuned to our (KolkataGeeks) weekly webcast. All details are available in this page. Follow us and stay tuned on the cutting edge technologies.

Do you want to integrate the network connection settings page (like: Airplane, Bluetooth, Cellular and/or WiFi) in your Windows Phone 7 application? Then this article will help you step-by-step to understand and integrate it.

Connection Settings page are those, where you can configure your connection types and various parameters of the connection. Windows Phone 7 SDK exposes the APIs for you to integrate them in your application. In this tutorial, we will discuss about these with a nice demo. Read further to know about these settings page and integration steps to the application.

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.

Expression Blend 5 Preview Ultimate is now available for Silverlight 5 Release Candidate. It supports only Silverlight 5 projects including Sketch Flow. You can install it side-by-side with Expression Blend 4. For more information, visit Microsoft Download Centre.

Direct link: Download Microsoft Expression Blend 5 Preview for Silverlight 5 RC

Friends, as I mentioned last 2-3 days, the day finally arrives when I am going to Kick-Off the Giveaway contest for you. Yes, you heard correct. Telerik is going to give you a FREE License of RadControls Library for Silverlight which you can use for both Silverlight and LightSwitch application development. The prize value of the License of this library is $799 and you can get this absolutely FREE. Just you have to follow some simple steps to Win this license.

The contest will stay for just 5 days. Don't wait. Time is running out. Read the complete post and attend the contest to win this $799 controls library. Who knows, you will be the Winner!!!

Yesterday in the blog post "Telerik RadChartControl for LightSwitch Application - Day 1 - Setup the Screen", we discussed about the prerequisite, setting up project, creation of Table and Screens for LightSwitch application. We created a simple screen of data grid from some data present in the table.

In this post, we will discuss on integration of Telerik Chart control in LightSwitch application. This will not only help you Telerik control integration but will help you to add your own UserControls into the screen. Don't forget to take part in the Giveaway, which Telerik is doing for my blog readers.

If you are working on LightSwitch application, you may probably need to use UserControl or you may need to use Telerik controls or any other 3rd party controls. So, in such case, how will you add UserControls in LightSwitch application?

In this article series, I will show you how to add a UserControl in LightSwitch app using the Telerik RadChartControl. This will give you basic understandings of the use of RadChartControl.

At the end of the series, there will be a Giveaway of Telerik RadControls for Silverlight, which you can use for both Silverlight and LightSwitch application development.

Last week, Microsoft released Silverlight 5 Release Candidate (RC). If you didn't yet download the bits and try out the new features, read the post "Silverlight 5 RC is now Available". During the week, we submitted blog posts from various sources to Silverlight-Zone.com on Silverlight, Windows Phone 7, LightSwitch, XNA and other similar categories.

In this blog post, find the top viewed 5 posts @SilverlightZone. "The WP7 Motion API" was the popular post. Read more to find out the complete list, as well as the Archive links of Daily News Headline.

As of now, you might know that, Silverlight 5 RC (Release Candidate) has been released by Microsoft on 1st September 2011. If you are not aware of that, or if you didn't yet download the latest bits of Silverlight 5, visit "Silverlight 5 Release Candidate is now Available - Download Silverlight 5 RC" to know about this release as well as download the installer to start developing your applications.

So, what's new in this release of Silverlight 5? There are many but in this post, we will discuss about some changes in the Application settings for Elevated Trust for Out-of-Browser and In-Browser applications. What's that? Read more to know about this.

It's the early morning, when I received a mail from Telerik MVP Lead (Community Relations Manager) Holly Bertoncini stating that, I have been awarded as Telerik MVP for the Q2 of 2011. This is because of my contribution towards the Telerik (Silverlight) community.

Feeling good to add an additional MVP tag to my profile. Thanks to Telerik team for considering my work to reward me as an MVP. Also thanks to all my readers & followers, who supported me all the times.

Silverlight 5 Release Candidate is now available from Microsoft. They just released the RC build to public. You will be able to download it freely from Microsoft Download Center.

In this post, I am going to share the link of the Silverlight 5 RC Tools for Visual Studio 2010. Download it and start building your application. Make sure that, it's not in "Go-Live" license, so you can't deploy the Silverlight applications build with this release to production. This build is just for the developers to give the developers a chance to test their applications before they release the final version.

The SQL developer needs to be able to create processes for the working database by using one of the many programming objects (like functions, stored procedures, constrains, or triggers). By creating objects that talk with SQL you simply the way other programs (like applications or web pages) can interconnect. These eternal programs only need to call on the names of your programming objects by name rather than needing to submit large pieces of advance code.

With SQL Programming Development (Volume 4 of 5) in the SQL Server Joes 2 Pros development series, you learn how programming objects work in SQL Server. This book has been authored by Rick A. Morelan, Pinal Dave and Jessica Brown. If you are a SQL Developer, you may like the series of the book.

Today Microsoft showcased Ribbon UI support in Windows Explorer of Windows 8. This features a nice look and feel to the User Interface by providing all the recommended tasks in one place using the Ribbon bar. We are all familiar with Ribbon bar which is currently present in Microsoft Office but this is the first time when they integrated it to the Windows OS by default.

I am really very excited to see this in Windows 8 and thought to share it with you. Hope you will also like it. Read the post to know more about it and also find the useful links and video at the end of the post.

Here comes the weekly news digest of Silverlight-Zone.com. During last week (i.e. from 21st August 2011 to 27th August 2011) we have submitted 78 new links in Silverlight-Zone on various topics like Silverlight, Windows Phone 7, LightSwitch, XAML, MVVM, XNA and more.

Most popular post was "Fundamental MVVM" from John Papa. 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.

Few days ago, I published a XAML Tips "How to Convert a Rectangle to a Path Control using Expression Blend?". Today in this post, we will discuss on another tips similar to that post. In this post, we will discuss on the steps to crop an element to give a desired output.

This post will help a beginner who just started designing XAML using Expression Blend. Hope, this small tip will help you to understand it in better way. Read to know more on this topic.

Windows Phone 7.1 SDK Release Candidate (RC) is now available for download. Microsoft released this version with “Go Live” license, that means, you can now build production applications and submit them to the Marketplace. This build also empowers the developer to build applications and games both for WP7.0 and WP7.1 devices.

In this post, find the link to the web installer and standalone/offline installer. Download, install and start building your games or applications.