These days almost everyone has a smartphone for Net surfing, Music, Games, Messengers, Official works and many more. If you use the device and subscribe to many services, it will consume more battery power and drain quickly than expected.

 

In this post we will discuss how to increase the battery power of Windows Phone series devices while in standby mode. If your device battery is draining quickly, check out the solution.

Published by on under Tips | WP7

Microsoft Visual Studio 2013 RC (Release Candidate) is already there and I hope, many of you already downloaded it and started exploring the new features and enhancements part of the release candidate. Visual Studio 2013 provides us a better way to handle XAML pages.

 

In this blog post, we will learn the new feature introduced to better commenting XAML codes inside Visual Studio 2013 IDE. You will definitely like it.

Published by on under Visual Studio 2013 | VisualStudio

It’s a month to celebrate on various occasions and I want to celebrate them with all of you. This month was the special time when I saw the first sunlight, this month was the special month when my blog www.kunal-chowdhury.com was first launched. Not only those, we reached a special milestone of 2 million hits with 2,500+ Twitter followers and 3,500+ Facebook fans.

 

As we are approaching the 5th anniversary with a long journey all together since 2008, I want to celebrate it with lots of excitements and thus came up with a set of goodies/licenses especially for you. Let’s take part in this giveaway and win those goodies from us.

Published by on under GiveawayContest |

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If you are working in Visual Studio to design XAML pages for your Silverlight, WPF, Windows Phone or Windows 8 Store application, you might have noticed that, sometime the Visual Studio IDE freezes for a long time and sometime it crashes.

 

I faced this issue many time and later found some way to recover from that freeze to continue working. In this post, going to share you the trick. I hope this will help you.

Published by on under Silverlight | Tips

Sometime while working with map control in Windows Phone, we may need to calculate distance between two GeoCoordinates. The Windows Phone 8 SDK already provides you the required API for you to calculate the distance very easily.

 

If you are looking for a piece of code to do the same, here is the small post for you to understand the API and the way to use it in your app.

Published by on under WP7 | WP7DEV

In a blog post today, S. Somasegar announced the availability of Visual Studio 2013 Release Candidate (RC) and .NET Framework 4.5.1 which is now available for download and has “Go Live” license. You can install Visual Studio 2013 RC on top of preview release or along with Visual Studio 2012.

 

This post will provide you details about Visual Studio 2013 RC and downloadable links. If you have MSDN/TechNet subscription, you can also find it in your subscription page.

Published by on under News | Visual Studio 2013

Microsoft announced the availability of Windows 8.1 RTM version for the MSDN and TechNet subscribers today. That means, if you have any one of the MSDN or TechNet subscription, you will be able to download it from your subscription page.

 

General availability of Windows 8.1 will be on 18th October 2013. If you hold a Windows 8 installation, you will be able to upgrade to Windows 8.1 from Store after that.

Published by on under News | Win8

Visual Studio 2013 Preview is already here and many of you already downloaded it and started exploring the new features and enhancements introduced in this version. Few people asked me that, they are not able to build Windows Phone 7 applications in Visual Studio 2013 even after installing the WP7 SDK.

 

So, what is the issue? How can we build Windows Phone application that targets OS 7? This short post is for those developers who are seeking this information.

Published by on under Visual Studio 2013 | VisualStudio

Everybody wants to protect their code from unauthorized reverse engineers. Isn’t it? For this, a company or a developer needs a Obfuscation tool to add huge noise bits in the generated executable and encrypt it to make sure the disassembler can not read it.

 

There are many tools in the market and I did some research with few of them. Among them, I liked the “Crypto Obfuscator” tool from LogicNP Software and thus thought to write a review of it here.

Published by on under .Net | Crypto Obfuscator

Everyone wants to update their phone’s operating system whenever a new update comes up with new features and applications etc., isn’t it? Recently Nokia started rolling out an Amber update with new features and applications to it’s entire set of Lumia series and will be available to all users by end of September.

 

Yesterday I received the update and at a first glance, it was just amazing. In this post, I will share you some noticeable changes in Amber update for Nokia Lumia.

Published by on under Lumia | Nokia

As a developer working inside Visual Studio IDE, there comes many scenarios when we need to position our code few lines above or below the other. Sometime such kind of refactoring of code is quite obvious to execute the code properly.

 

Considering this case, Microsoft came up with a new enhancement in Visual Studio 2013 where you will be able to position your code easily just using shortcuts. Let’s see what it can do.

Published by on under Tips | Visual Studio 2013

Here I continue the series of “What’s new in Microsoft Visual Studio 2013?” and today I will be covering an ultimate tip that a developer working with Visual Studio must know. This will not only help you but will improve your productivity while coding.

 

In this post, we are going to talk about “Peek Definition Window” that comes with Visual Studio 2013. What does it do? Let’s check out it.

Published by on under Tips | Visual Studio 2013

If you have already installed and used Visual Studio 2013, you might already noticed that every class and method has “x references” marked on top of it, where ‘x’ is a counter. These are called as “Reference Counter” and provides you information about the uses.

 

It’s a new feature in Microsoft Visual Studio and will definitely help the developers to find out the referenced count easily. In this blog post, we will discuss about this in detail. Keep reading.

Published by on under Tips | Visual Studio 2013

Tripura is a small hilly state in Northeast India, occupying an area of approx. 4,051 sq. mi (10,490 sq. km). The state is surrounded by Bangladesh on the north, south and west border. The Indian states of Assam and Mizoram lie to its east. The state capital is Agartala.

 

Those who want to know about the state, it's districts, culture, tourist places and hotels can download this app which will provide you more details about the state. Get the free downloadable links in this post.

Published by on under DZone | Windows Phone Apps

Recently I got a chance to write a guest blog post on Telerik’s official site and the topic was “How to Export content from RadRichTextBox to a variety of formats in WPF or Silverlight”. Thanks to the Telerik XAML Team who gave me this opportunity.

 

The article covers the simple steps to export the rich text content of the Telerik RadRichTextBox control. This could be an additional benefit to the end users who are using Silverlight or WPF app.

Published by on under Silverlight | Silverlight5

Visual Studio 2013 Preview is already available for download and probably the RTM version will come up soon later this year (no expected date yet). Microsoft came up with a set of new features in this release of Visual Studio IDE.

 

Among them, the first feature that you will notice in VS2013 is the synchronization of appearance, settings, keyboard shortcuts etc. across all devices that you use. Let’s have a first glance to it.

Published by on under Tips | Visual Studio 2013

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We had a great event on 10th August on Windows Phone application development in our C# Corner Chapter meet. We had a no. of enthusiastic attendees this time in our event and everyone enjoyed the sessions a lot. Thanks to everyone who attended. Looking forward for your participation in the coming days.

 

In this post I am going to share the agenda, pictures and slides. Also, I am announcing the date of the next monthly meet. Don’t forget to register for the event and join us in September.

Published by on under C# Corner | Events

How to Start, Stop, Recycle IIS application pool programmatically?

IIS application pool defines a set of web applications and their corresponding worker processes to provide a convenient way to administer a set of web sites and applications. Sometime developers need to programmatically start, stop or recycle the IIS application pool.

 

In this post, we will learn how to programmatically call the directory service to invoke the start, stop and recycle operation on IIS server.

Published by on under CSharp | DZone

Most of you have already used BusyIndicator control in your Silverlight or WPF application while communicating with server or processing a huge data. Sometime developers want to focus to a particular control like TextBox once the busyIndicator stops.

 

I noticed in various forums that developers really suffer a lot focusing to a TextBox at the end of the processing and when the busy indication stops. Let’s read the trick to resolve this.

Published by on under Silverlight | Telerik

Everyone wants to build their apps, whether you are a geek or not. And when you have a website or blog with RSS, it’s by nature to build a RSS phone of your blog. A developer who has knowledge of programming can easily start with that. But what about non-techie?

 

Microsoft has recently launched a tool called “App Studio” which will allow you to build a Windows Phone app without any programming skill. Today we will discuss how to use this tool.

Published by on under WP7 | WP7.8

It’s time for developers to easily build Windows Phone applications and host them in the Windows Phone Store (Marketplace). Microsoft came with a great online tool which will guide you to build WP apps in four easy steps. Though the app is currently in beta stage but you can create professional apps with it.

 

Not only that, Microsoft also came with some offers for the WPDevs which will encourage you to get started with building apps for Windows Phone community.

Published by on under News | Tips

It does not sound good but this is the real fact. If you have a Microsoft Surface RT device with Windows 8.1 Preview installed and facing issue with battery consumption while in standby mode, it’s time for you to turn ON the Bluetooth of your device.

 

Microsoft support team answered in a forum thread that it is a bug and the current solution to resolve the quick draining of battery is to turn on the Bluetooth.

Published by on under Surface | Tips

If you are a Silverlight application developer and working with Telerik’s RadRichTextBox control, you might have already used the InsertSymbolDialog that comes in-built with the control. This dialog provides you a direct API to insert symbols in your rich text box.

 

By default the said dialog opens in non-modal dialog and there are no easy way to make it modal. In this blog post, we will learn how to customize it to make a modal window for that.

Published by on under RadRichTextBox | Silverlight

Microsoft released Windows Phone SDK 8.0 Update for Windows Phone 8.0.10322 with four new emulator images to an existing installation of WP SDK 8.0. The new SDK version no is: 8.0.10322. You must have an existing WP8 SDK installed before installing this latest bit.

 

If you are a WPDev, don’t forget to download the latest SDK to test your apps. Find herewith the link to download the WP 8.0.10322 SDK update.

Published by on under News | WP8