Microsoft released a new preview build 17112, to the Windows Insiders in the fast ring. This build is from the Redstone 4 development branch and contains no new features rather than a bunch of fixes to make it ready for the next major release.

If you are a Windows Insider, check for updates to get the new builds. But before that, read the list of fixes and known issues in this build.

It gives me immense pleasure to announce that my second book, titled Windows Presentation Foundation Development Cookbook, has been published by Packt Publication. You can now buy this book from publisher's website, Amazon and will gradually be available on Flipkart.

If you are a beginner or an intermediate, and would like to learn about WPF, this book is for you. It covers almost all the topics that you need to learn.

Visual Studio 2017 provides you an easy way to upgrade your project's targeted language version, directly from the editor window. The Light Bulb, which is known as Quick Actions, automatically suggests you to upgrade the language version.

In this blog post, we will learn how to invoke it to perform the change for the associated project. Continue reading to learn more.

Do you know that, Microsoft Visual Studio allows you to select the default language version of your project? The advanced project settings helps you to control the targeted C# language by changing the compiler version.

By default, the compiler accepts all valid language syntax that it can support. But if you want to change it to point to a specific version, let's learn how to do that.

Microsoft released a new build (Windows 10 Preview Build: 17107) to the insiders in the fast ring. As we are heading towards the final release from the Redstone 4 branch, this build contains minimal changes but has numerous bug fixes to stabilize the forthcoming RTM build.

Continue reading to know what has been changed in build 17107. Don't forget to check the 'Known Issues' still present in this build.

Microsoft released a new update of Visual Studio 2017, which bumped up the latest build version number to 15.5.7. This new build contains few changes to Team Explorer focusing to Git, and fixes to some customer-reported issue.

To know about what has been changed and fixed in this release, continue reading this blog post. Don't forget to check the 'Known Issues' before upgrading.

If you are still using Windows Phone 7.x and Windows Phone 8.x devices, time to think now to switch to a new device. Microsoft, in a forum post announced that, starting 20th February 2018, they have stopped the notifications services in Windows Phone 7.5/8.0 devices.

That means, if you are still using those devices, you won't get any push notifications, live tile updates and you won't be able to use the Find my phone feature too.

During application development, we often use XML files. To use XML files, we need XML objects; and to create the XML objects, we need to write the classes and properties based on the XML nodes/attributes, which we do manually.

Do you know that Visual Studio already provides an option to automatically create the entire class structure based on the XML input? Let's discuss this today.

Microsoft is adding a new Power Plan policy to Windows 10 Pro workstations, to improve the performance of the computer. Along with Windows 10 Insiders Preview Build 17101, Microsoft previewed the same to the insiders in Fast Ring.

This change is expected to be available with the next major update of Windows 10, which is scheduled to release in Spring 2018.

Microsoft started rolling out the first Redstone 5 build (Windows 10 Insiders Preview Build 17604) to the Windows Insiders, who have opted into Skip Ahead. As there's a limited space into Skip Ahead and that's already filled, no new registrations are now being accepted.

If you are a Windows Insider in the Fast Ring, you already have a fresh preview build 17101, which is already started rolling out.