Just 2 months after the release of Visual Studio 2012 Update 2 CTP release, Microsoft released the final version of Visual Studio 2012 Update 2 which also includes a single Blend version that can be used to build apps for Silverlight, WPF, Windows Phone and Windows 8 Store etc.

The update is freely available for you to download from Microsoft site. I am going to share the direct link here for you to get easy access link.

Are you a Windows 8 Application Developer? Are you building an app like audio/video player or game which needs to keep the display active when user is inactive in the system? Then you came to a right place where we will discuss how to keep the display on while idle.

This post details about the Windows 8/Windows RT API usage and code snippet to request the system to keep the display on. Continue reading to know more about it.

Are you a Windows 8 or Windows RT user? Are you looking for a code to change your Windows 8 lock screen programmatically? Then this post will be definitely helpful for you. Just follow the simple steps to write an application by which you can change it easily.

Windows 8 already exposes settings panel to change the lock screen of the Windows, but this post will help you to programmatically access that using the exposed APIs.

Almost two years ago we discussed about “Microsoft.Phone.Info.DeviceStatus” class to retrieve Windows Phone device information in your application. In addition to those, there are some more APIs to fetch more details which is available as extended properties set.

Today in this post, we will learn about the API and the way to fetch those additional details in your application. Continue reading to know more about it.

In the last blog post, we learnt “How to Share a Media File from WP8 using the ShareMediaTask?” which was a launcher available in Windows Phone 8 SDK. Similarly there are few more launchers available in the SDK by which you can launch WP8 specific applications programmatically.

Today in this blog post we will learn how to create an appointment in Windows Phone 8 using the API named “SaveAppointmentTask”. Continue reading for details.

If you are a Windows Phone 8 application developer, you might want to implement a functionality to share a media (say, a picture) from your media library or camera library. So, how can you do that? Windows Phone 8 SDK provides you an API by which you can implement the same easily.

Today in this post, we will learn about the API and the implementation steps in a Windows Phone application. If you are looking for it, this will be an ideal solution for you.

Last day we learnt “How to Integrate WP7.8, WP8 Live Tiles in your WP7.5 apps?” which was using the default APIs provided by Windows Phone SDK. That does not provide additional APIs like transparency, front and back content etc. to control the live tiles of your application.

In this post, we will learn how to customize the primary live tile of your Windows Phone 7.8 or 8.0 applications easily using the Telerik libraries.

The Windows Phone SDK update for WP7.8 is already there and many people already started receiving the WP7.8 OS update in their existing WP7.5 handsets. If you are a developer, you might want to integrate the new Live Tiles in your existing application to give it a good look.

In this post, I will guide you to update your existing apps to include the new live tiles. Continue reading to find out the step-by-step process to integrate it.

Few days ago while searching for a LightSwitch eBook for one of my friend, I found “LightSwitch Succinctly” authored by Jan Van where he describes about this tool’s uses and the need of it for your application development.

It’s a very good eBook for absolute beginner and available for free. I hope, this will really help you if you are judging to use LightSwitch in any one of your application.

A long time ago while developing a custom control, I wrote a piece of code which allows a developer to enter “Auto” as string to a custom property of type double. Yesterday, I was in a need to use the same functionality in one of my control.

That reminds me the previous implementation and fortunately I was able to get it from TFS repository. Thus I thought to share the same with you in case you need it in future.

For Windows Phone applications and/or Windows 8 Store applications we need metro icons and that’s very easy to create with Syncfusion Metro Studio 2. I am using this free tool for quite a long time in my apps as well as in my blog posts and am quite impressed with it.

Many people asked me several times about creating metro icons and thus I thought to share about it in today’s blog post. Here it goes for you.

Yield is a contextual keyword available only in certain contextual statements, mainly interacts with the foreach loop. It allows each iteration in a foreach loop to be generated only when needed. In this way it improves the performance of the query.

Today we will discuss about it with a small funny code. Let’s see how much we actually know about this keyword. If you can answer the output of the code, you already know about it.

Microsoft is again back with their webcast series and this time they planned for both Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 sessions on the same day but in a different time slot. The webcast series will happen for five continuous days, 1.5hrs daily for each technology.

In this post, find the session details, time table and the link to register for the free webcast event. Take part of it and enhance your Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 skills.

As a Silverlight, WPF or WPDev you might be aware of the MessageBox class present in the SDK to show a message to the user and ask the user to interact with the application on some special cases. As a Win8Dev, you will find it missing in WinRT.

What to do? There is a class named MessageDialog which does the same thing but asynchronously in Windows 8 applications. If you are new to Win8Dev, you will find it useful.

It was the nice Friday morning when I woke up and picked up my Lumia 800 to check out the time, mails and tweets. I discovered a small little enhanced feature (possibly a bug) on my device. My device was in charging mode though it was not connected to power cable.

First I was not able to believe my eyes but after few minutes, I confirmed that as an issue and took up the camera to record it. Sharing it here…. just enjoy.

Memory Leakage in applications are most common and a developer maximum time does not care about it. There are various possibilities for Memory leakage and one of them is Events registered in applications which a developer unknowingly forgets to handle.

So, what are the cases where that could make problem and are there any proper solutions to tackle down this issue? Let us discuss on this topic today.

It is sometime difficult when you have a bunch of properties exposed from a class and you just need few of them while debugging a code block. Sometimes it becomes even more complex when you have a collection of that class.

Is there any easiest way to improve the code debugging in Visual Studio? Yes, there is. In this post we are going to learn this technique if you have never used it yet.

Microsoft released CTP (Community Technology Preview) version of Visual Studio 2012 Update 2 just few months after the release of Visual Studio 2012 Update 1. This new release comes with the Blend for Visual Studio which now supports all the major project templates.

If you are using multiple versions of Expression Blend, it’s time for you to upgrade to this release. Find out more about this release and download links.

Nokia rolls out the Windows Phone 7.8 update globally to it’s entire set of Windows Phone 7 devices which already have WP7.5 installed. It comes it some new features already available in Windows Phone 8 devices.

Among all the features, the most awaited feature that a WP7.5 user want to see in their screen is the all new Start Screen with those small, medium and large icons.

“What is Dispatcher object and why to use it in application?” - It’s a common question asked by beginners working in various XAML technologies like Silverlight, Windows Phone etc. I came to such instances many time when the developer has no clue about “Cross Thread Exception”.

That is the reason I wanted to publish this post mentioning the use of this Dispatcher object, mainly when you are getting an “Invalid cross-thread access” exception.

“Duck Typing” is not a common interview question but one of the interviewer in a panel may ask you this just to check your knowledge out of the common questionnaire. You might be already answered this in a different question but stucked here.

So, what is this “Duck Typing” and how this benefits a C# developer? Ok, let’s start discussing this in today’s blog post and I assume, you will find it interesting.

Above expectation, Microsoft released the WP7.8 SDK update for the Windows Phone 7 developers who wants to upgrade their apps to target the new WP7.8 OS rolling out after 31st January 2013. This update brings some prominent features like the new start screen.

In this post, I am going to share the downloadable links of the new SDK and the instructions to install this SDK update.

Many time we need to map objects between UI/Domain or Service/Domain layers. Mapping the objects between them is very hectic. So, are there any simplest mechanism by which I can map two objects? Is there is.

There is a AutoMapper class which you can use to map between two objects. This also provides option to do a custom mapping. Let’s begin with it and learn about it today.

Today while deploying one of my new Windows Phone 7 application to my unlocked WP7 device, I noticed that, it is not deploying it due to connection error though the device is connected properly and able to sync with the Zune Software.

Later after doing lots of brain storming I was able to fix the problem and thus sharing the solution here in case you came across similar issue while deploying.

In Windows Phone 7, we had four network settings page that we can invoke using the ConnectionSettingsTask. We had no other APIs to launch other settings page but in Windows Phone 8 Microsoft exposed few schemas for invoking these settings pages.

In addition to the existing pages, now we have few more as addition. Today in this post we will learn how to open those settings page using proper URI schemes.

Welcome to the Interview Questions series on C#. Last week we discussed about “ref” and “out” keywords of C# with suitable example and I hope, that gave you clear understandings about those two parameter type.

This week we will discuss about struct and class as few people in Facebook asked me to clarify those two types.

You might be aware that, we now have a Team Foundation Service (TFS) on the cloud from Microsoft Visual Studio team, where you can host your source code for free (as of now, but they will charge you in future for this) and manage your project work in agile methodology.

Today in this post, we will learn how to connect Telerik’s TeamPulse tool with the Visual Studio Team Foundation Service (TFS) on the cloud.

Many time while working in our application module, we need to use “out” and “ref” parameters in various methods. Sometime you will face this question in front of interview panel too. So, what are those keywords and how they differ?

In this post, we will discuss the basics of C# to make you understand more about “out” and “ref” parameters which you will find useful.

It’s time to welcome the fresh New Year with fresh hope, fresh expectation. Forget the past and think ahead. Thanks to all my friends, family members, blog followers and the unknown persons with whom I am connected with virtually.

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.

My friend Abhijit Jana recently published a book “Kinect for Windows SDK Programming Guide”. The book covers step-by-step tutorial to demonstrate the API usage with well explanation and code sample for beginners.

Hence I thought to share this to my blog readers and followers in case it helps you to learn Kinect programming. Sharing herewith a sample chapter and other links.

If you are looking for a way to retrieve the current battery status of Windows Phone device, first let me inform you that the same is not available for WP7 device. But if you are looking for the same to implement in WP8 device, you can do it now.

Windows Phone 8 SDK exposes an API to retrieve the current battery status of the device which includes remaining percent and time. Let’s discuss more about it.

If you just installed Telerik’s Team Pulse solution for your TFS synchronization, you might face the following error message that says “The TeamPulse Integration Service could not load the required Team Foundation client libraries”.

You might already searched for a solution online and came here to resolve the issue. So, let us discuss how to resolve it.

In the last post we discussed “How to Crop an Image using the WriteableBitmap class”. If you didn’t read it yet, first try to understand that before reading this post as we are going to use it in this post very frequently.

Today in this post we are going to learn how to crop an image in different shapes like rectangle, circle or any other different complex shapes programmatically.

Some time we need to crop an image uploaded by user in Silverlight or Windows Phone applications. Sometime we also need to do a rotate transform or skew transform to the image before saving it. So, how to achieve it?

This blog post will cover the code with details using the WriteableBitmap class that comes with the SDK. Continue reading to know more about it.

Earlier days while working with Silverlight 2, it was very difficult to take a snapshot of the XAML page programmatically in Silverlight. Later WritableBitmap class helped us to take snapshot of any portion and save it as image.

Today I learnt something new to do this operation very easily using Telerik library methods and hence thought to share with you in this post.

Yesterday while working with Telerik’s RadHtmlPlaceholder control for Silverlight, I noticed that, it is unable to open certain websites and showing a message that says “The content cannot be displayed in a Frame”.

After doing an investigation, I came to know that, it is default behaviour of the control we can not handle. Let’s discuss more on the issue and the reason behind it.

Windows Phone 8 is already in the market and people having the Windows Phone 7 device is waiting for the WP7.8 update to test few features that is already available in the WP8 devices because the WP7 devices can not be upgraded with the WP8 operating system.

WMPoweruser reported some new features which we will get in WP7.8 update from a Nokia Customer Feedback page, but it is still not officially confirmed yet.

WMPowerUser reported a new update in Windows Phone Store which allows you to download Windows Phone applications from the store manually to your desktop and later install them in your mobile.

I am not sure how this will benefit the user and developers both but let’s jump to a discussion and check it out.

As a Windows 8 Store application developer, we need to store and retrieve data to and from XML file stored in the application directory. There are various ways to store data in XML but this post will cover a simplest way to do that.

Here we will use a 3rd party extension in our application as assembly reference and use their XmlDeSerializer class to handle it easily. Keep reading to know more about it.

The Windows 8 Software Development Kit (SDK) contains header libraries and a set of tools which you can use to develop Windows Store apps using technologies like Visual C#, Visual Basic, Visual C++ and/or JavaScript.

Recently a new version of the SDK has been published which you can grab from here. Also it has a new version of the WACK to validate your Windows 8 Store application branding.

Last month Microsoft released Windows Phone 8 SDK and now they are organizing a 10 hours online webcast to train you in WP8 application development. In this webcast you will learn more about development from the experts.

In this post, find the session details, time table and the link to register for the free webcast event. Take part of it and enhance your Windows Phone skills.

The “Clipboard” is a user driven set of functions that enables an application to transfer data between applications or within an application. Windows 8 Store SDK defines a set of APIs to handle the OS clipboard in your application.

In this continued series of Windows 8 Store application development tutorial, we will learn more about the API and the way to integrate the Clipboard in your WinRT application.

This is the continuing series of the Windows 8 Store application development tutorial and in this chapter, we will learn about creating and updating the live tiles of your WinRT application. There are 46 different types of tile templates available which we will go to learn today.

A live tile is one of the best way to provide a good experience to your application which you will find in your Windows 8 Start screen. Continue for further reading.

If you are a Windows 8 Store application and/or game developer, you may want to provide feature to share text, graphics, links or game score cards to Facebook, Twitter or Email. Windows 8 SDK provides those APIs to implement the feature in your application.

Today in this chapter of the Windows Store Tutorial series, we will discuss more about the API methods and how to integrate it in your application. Continue reading.

Many time we need to access files and folders from our applications. The Windows Store apps SDK provides us Asynchronous APIs to use for this service to query files and folders. You have to be familiar with async await calls in order to get started with this.

This post is part of the Windows Store Application Development Tutorial series. Today we will learn how to handle files and folders in your Windows 8 metro applications.

Microsoft recently released Windows Phone 8 SDK which you can install in your Windows 8 Pro x64-bit version to get started with the development process with Visual Studio 2012. Keep in mind that, your CPU should support Hyper-V and SLAT in order to run the WP8 emulator.

Today in this post we will have a quick look into the new WP8 SDK template, the project structure and improved manifest file.

Second Level Address Translation a.k.a. SLAT is a technology introduced in Intel and AMD processors. Recently released Windows Phone 8 SDK needs it to run the emulator 8 in your Windows 8 system.

So, what is this SLAT and how to check whether your CPU really supports it? In this post, we will discuss this with you.

As mentioned in yesterday’s Windows Phone 8 launch event, Microsoft publicly released the WP8 SDK for developers. You can now build apps targeting Windows Phone 8 devices. You will be also able to program for Windows Phone 7 devices in Visual Studio 2012 now.

In this post, I am sharing the downloadable links of both web and offline ISO versions. Go through the System Requirements first before downloading and installing it.

If you are familiar with Windows Phone applications, you might be already aware of Application Bar. Application Bar is used to provide users with quick access to an application’s most common tasks, which are basically hidden when they are not needed.

Today in this chapter we will learn more about Application Bar in Windows Store apps along with integration and design guidelines.

In earlier Windows versions, we were missing this great feature of CD/DVD mounting. To achieve this, we had to install 3rd party software tools and was always demanded as in-built feature in Windows.

Windows 8 now has this feature and you can now easily mount any ISO image to create a virtual CD/DVD ROM in your PC. Continue reading it to know how to do this.

Many of us need to integrate settings page in our applications. All we generally do is by creating a separate page in our project. But Windows 8 provide us a separate settings panel in Charm bar which you can use for your settings page.

In this post we will learn more about it from scratch and integrate it to our demo application. Also, we will learn how to invoke the charm bar to show the settings panel.