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.

After the release of Visual Studio 2012 Update 3 (RTM) in 26th June, Microsoft released the 4th Update to the web today, the 13th November 2013. Within this timeframe, they also released couple of intermediate release of the Update 4 for beta testing and bug fixes.

This includes the latest cumulative series of feature additions and bug fixes. If you are waiting for the final release of Update 4, it’s the time to update your IDE with latest set of features & fixes.

XAML Spy is the visual runtime inspector for Silverlight, WPF, Windows Phone and Windows 8 Store applications which provides direct access to UI visual tree, runtime UI modifications to check/set different properties temporarily, monitor events, extract package contents and much more.

With the release of XAML Spy version 2, the company introduced a light weight Free version for the XAML designers/developers to play with their XAML files. Read more to grab your copy.

Windows Phone 8 Update 3 (aka. GDR 3) preview already released for developers to build and test their applications and games. There are few features in this release that you might want to add in your app. For this, you need to check whether the device already has GDR3 installed.

In this small post, we are going to discuss how you can check whether the Updated 3 (GDR 3) has already been installed in the user’s device.

Programming is an art to implement the ideas into software which end user uses to accomplish their job easily. Writing articles for the programmers needs patience and skills to help the other clarify their doubts. There are lots of blogs and sites which already helps programmers day-by-day.

It’s about an year ago a team of passionate programmers took an initiative to compile a newspaper named “The Programmers” with valuable articles. If you are a developer, don’t forget to grab the copy.

While working on an application last weekend, I was in need to pass an object as query string parameter to the other page of my Windows Phone application. NavigationService does not allow you to pass any complex object.

Then I found a cool idea by which you will be able to send the whole object to the other page. In this blog post, I am going to share you the trick.

If you are a Silverlight application developer and using Telerik RadDiagram control, you might have seen that you can zoom and pan the diagram control and move it to any boundary. In some scenarios, we need to restrict it to a positive quadrant.

In such case, based on your business logic, you have to restrict the diagram to some quadrant value. In this small post, we will learn how to set it’s viewport to a specific bounds.

Ambiguity is the ability to express more than one interpretation in normal way. This can happen in any manner; in our code too. If you are working on WCF RIA Services in Silverlight, you might encounter this issue too with class references.

Today in this blog post, I will share you a small trick by which you will be able to fix this error in your Silverlight project. Continue reading to further discussion.

Microsoft released Windows 8.1 RTM and Windows RT 8.1 RTM on 17th October for general public to update their Windows 8 system. Many people already updated their Surface RT devices but as an exception, few people reported on Twitter and Forums that they are not able to update their RT devices.

If you are unable to update your Surface RT or unable to find the update in Windows Store, you are one of them who are victim of a small issue reported by Microsoft.

Here comes an opportunity for Windows Phone Developers to try out the GDR3 update before it reaches to the actual consumers. If you are a WPDev, you can now download Update 3 in your unlocked WP8 device and test your applications against it.

Windows Phone 8 GDR3 comes with a plenty of features and enhancements including bigger screen resolutions, screen rotations and more. Read to get the GDR3 bits in your device.

So Microsoft finally came up with an official list of new features in Windows Phone 8 General Distribution Release, named as GDR3. Also, they are now opening a “Developer Preview Program” for the WPDev’s to test their apps against the new OS build before it comes to consumer.

In this post, I am going to share you the set of features that you are going to see in the next update of your Windows Phone 8 device.

Here comes my another application for Windows Phone users, named “Place Explorer”. The app is currently available in Windows Phone Store for free. Using this app, you will be able to find out the favourite places around the city near your current location for food, drinks, shopping, accommodations etc.

Find out more details about the app and a downloadable link to install in your Nokia Lumia series of Windows Phone 8 devices.

Last month as part of the 5th anniversary celebration of my blog (www.kunal-chowdhury.com), we organized a big contest where we had lots of licenses and subscriptions valued $50,000 above to give away. Thanks to all the Sponsors who came up to celebrate with us.

Now the time came to announce the winners of the contest. Are you excited to know who are the winners? You might be one of them too. Let’s check out the list.