It happens sometime that a specific theme like Light or Dark looks good in some application. In such case, you have to specify all the colours manually to background foreground etc. This is very hectic job. Is there any easy way doing this?
Yes, we have. Jeff Wilcox simplified this process by releasing a ThemeManager library (open source) for you which you can use in your app and force a specific theme for your Windows Phone application.
While working with some folder specific operations and console window, I learnt a new thing (I would rather say it as trick) today i.e. how to open console window in that specific folder path without using any special tricks in Windows Registry or typing the full path in console.
Today in this blog post, I am going to share the same trick with you. In case you find it useful, drop a line below.
When working a lot on Windows Phone Emulator, it is sometime easy to use the computer keyboard to perform some specific tasks instead of tapping onscreen display on the Emulator. Sometime, it is also require to know the keys when you don’t have the hardware buttons in emulator.
Here I am sharing all the keyboard shortcuts which the Windows Phone Emulator supports. I am sure, this will be handy to have while developing apps.
As a WPDev, you might want to provide your users an option to change the Lock Screen of their Windows Phone 8 device. It can be from a locally stored images within the app XAP, a RSS feed, Camera Roll and/or periodically from a push notification.
In this blog post, we will learn how to integrate the functionality in your app to simply load and set the lock screen background from a set of images available within the app xap.
Style inheritance in XAML? Sounds funny? No. If we have inheritance in classes, CSS styles; then why not in XAML styles? There are many such occasions when we need to copy the same style in multiple templates/styles of a control.
In this post, we will learn how to use a single piece of style and use it in other place to inherit the common styling. If you are using XAMLs excessively, this might be a very good topic for you.
Have you ever lost in your way while coding in multiple files inside Visual Studio and want to recover some piece of code that you changed but not yet pushed to your TFS code repository? Have you ever wonder if there was a mechanism by which you can actually track the changes in your code file?
Then here is the solution for you. There is a nice VSIX extension named “Auto History” that could help you in this case. Let’s discuss more about this.
If you are a Windows Phone app developer and building a Camera application, you might want to know whether the user pressed the shutter key half or full. In general pressing the shutter key half sets the focus to an object and pressing it completely captures the view.
In this short blog post, we will learn how to subscribe for the shutter key press events and identify whether the user pressed it half or full.
You might have already known that, the UK firm named BSkyB raised a complaint against Microsoft infringing the name of their online cloud storage service “SkyDrive” and then a settlement was made providing Microsoft a time to change the brand of their service.
Today, General Manager of Microsoft consumer apps & services Ryan Gavin announced that, they are soon going to rename their popular cloud storage service “SkyDrive” to “OneDrive”.
If you are a WPDev and building Windows Phone app and/or game that uses primary or secondary (front facing camera), you might need to check whether the device supports either or both of them. Windows Phone SDK provides APIs to check for supported camera type.
In this blog post, we will discuss about this API and learn how to know whether the phone supports either or both of those camera types.
Microsoft released the RTM version of Visual Studio 2013 in October 2013 and after that, this is the first release of an update for it named “Visual Studio 2013 Update 1”. This version includes a set of fixes for the issues and improvements requested by the users.
Here I am sharing the download links for you to download and install the update before it pops up in the Visual Studio update notification area.
How many of you want to check the available free space in your Windows Phone device? It is very simple to get the details from the settings page. But think about a case where you want to check the free space from your app and want to chose some logic to notify the user.
In this small but useful post, we will discuss about the API and will share a small piece of code, which will allow you to know the available free space in user’s phone device.
Another good news for the Nokia Lumia (Windows Phone 8) users. From today, Nokia started rolling out Lumia Black update to it’s entire set of Windows Phone 8 devices, a big update after Amber. This update consists of new features and apps for you.
You will get this update notification within a few days, based on your residing country, carrier and device. To know more about this update, continue reading.
Good news to all Windows Phone 8 users. Greg Sullivan, the director of Windows Phone public relation, confirmed in an interview that all Windows Phone 8 users can upgrade their device OS to Windows Phone 8.1 (which is most likely going to release this spring, as per different source).
It’s not yet confirmed what are the new things coming with WP8.1, but surely there will be something new for the consumers.
Windows Phone by default provides the inbuilt mechanism to support Clipboard Copy, Paste functionalities and shows the proper icon in any TextBox control. But in some case, you may need to handle the copy experience explicitly.
This small post will discuss about the API and the code that you can use in your Windows Phone application. Continue reading.
Sometime we need to provide an encryption mechanism to protect user data in phone and/or sharing the data over internet to a database. Data security should be always maintain by a developer to protect the content of the application that the user enters.
If you are building an app and looking for some way to implement the mechanism, here is a wrapper class for you to do encryption and decryption of a string literal easily.
Microsoft released a new set of Windows Phone 8 emulators for the Windows Phone developers to support development environments for both WP8 Update 2 and Update 3 release. If you are targeting your apps for a large screen display, must try out them in the new emulator before submitting for certification.
Let’s discuss little on the new set of emulators in this post. You will also find the appropriate links towards the Microsoft Download Centre to install them in your development environment.
New Year is the time to remember all the memories we share, all the fun things we did, all the secrets we poured out for but never regret the follies of the past as we reminisce about the year gone by. Now that time came to celebrate with all of you.
Wish you and your family a Happy and Prosperous New Year 2014. May God make you more knowledgeable in the coming year and give you more prosperity than ever.
If you are working on Silverlight and/or WPF project and using Telerik RadControls library, you might be aware of RadDiagram and RadDiagramToolbox. When you add gallery items in RadDiagramToolbox, by default it comes in three columns.
In some business scenario, you might want to increase or decrease the no. of columns in the RadDiagramToolbox. This small blog post will help you in this.
It’s a Christmas time. Santa could be near your house to knock your door. If you are a Windows Phone user, you will get an additional 20 GB free SkyDrive storage to use in 2014. Microsoft is floating a Redemption Code over email to claim your extra space.
Check your emails to see whether you received it. Don’t worry if you didn’t receive it yet, you will surely get it soon if you are a Windows Phone user.
Today in this blog post we will discuss about Compass APIs available in Windows Phone SDK. After reading this post, you will be able to use your Windows Phone’s device sensors and build some apps and/or games for your targeted users.
Before using the compass in your game, make sure to check whether the device supports it or not. The SDK provides APIs to check that too. Let’s start discussing about it.
If you are part of DVLUP program of Nokia, you might have noticed that, all Windows Phone 8 challenges have the same requirement “Employ Fast App Switching”. This is more likely same as “Fast App Resume”. So, what is this and how can you configure your app to support fast app resume?
In this small post for WPDev, we will discuss a bit about it and the simple process to configure your WP8 apps and/or games to process “Fast App Resume”.
If you are building Location Aware app for Windows Phone 8, you might want to check whether the Location Service is enabled/disabled in the system and based on that, you can take appropriate steps asking user to enable that.
If you are one of such developer, this small but handy blog post will help you to figure out the status of the Location Service. Continue reading to know further about it.
Windows Phone 8 GDR 3 is already there for the developers to try out the new features that are coming in this update 3. Among them, one is orientation lock. If you already installed WP8 GDR3, you might have already seen the Rotation Settings page.
If you are a WPDev, you might want to add an option in your app to launch this settings page. In this post, we are going to discuss how to do this programmatically.
You might have used maps in your Windows Phone applications to help the user navigate from one place to another place. Windows Phone 8 supports downloading of maps for a specific place and/or country. If you want your user to easily navigate to download maps page, this post will help you.
Windows Phone 8 SDK exposes MapDownloaderTask, which will help you for this easy navigation. Continue reading for more information on this.