Windows Phone 7.1 now supports scheduled tasks which runs even the application is not running. We can now schedule a task and when the bell hits, it starts executing the said task. In this chapter of the tutorial series, we will explore this using the Alarm class.

Alarm class creates an instance which runs in the background using the task agent and at the specified time, it will raise the event to execute. If your application is not running at that time too, it will execute and show the alarm screen. Read to know more about the class with a small demonstration.

In our last chapter of Windows Phone 7 Tutorial, we learnt about detecting network information using the static class called DeviceNetworkInformation. We also demonstrated it with a small demo application.

In this new chapter of the tutorial series, we will learn how to detect the device information using the APIs present inside the SDK. We will learn how to detect whether any Keyboard has been installed with the device, whether the device is running under battery or using any external power supply. We will also learn the way to detect about the memory of the device and other device information.

Read more to know about the class and it's properties with a small demonstration of the code.

During the week 12th June to 18th June, we posted 63 new article links at Silverlight-Zone.com which consists of Silverlight, Windows Phone 7, LightSwitch, XAML and Blend.

In this weekly news digest, I am going to share the popular 5 posts of the week and links to all the daily digest pages. Most popular posts are on "Google Maps for WP7 using Bing Map control", "HTML5 and Silverlight5 discussion", "Tips & Tricks on Office with Mobile 7", "HTML5 based WP7 Application" and "Release date for WP7 Mango devices".

Read more to find those interesting posts of this week and the digest links in case you missed them.

User can now detect the mobile operator and other network information's in Windows Phone 7.1 Mango devices programmatically. The new APIs to detect these information will help you to identify the mobile operator, availability of network, Wi-Fi access etc.

Let's jump into deep drive to know more about these APIs and the integration to your application using a small demo. Read to learn about it.

If you are developing any Windows Phone 7 application form and using the Emulator to run the app, you may find this tip very useful. A first time user who feels very annoying to click the mouse button to enter text using the phone emulator can hide the onscreen keyboard and use the computer's keyboard after reading this tip.

Read to know more about the small tip which will make your life even easy.

Mobile phones have very limited resource as compared to a desktop PC and hence it is very difficult to run multiple applications simultaneously. Also, suppose if multiple resources run simultaneously, it will eat up the battery life and make your phone stop working after certain period of time.

So what to do? To overcome this situation, tombstoning comes into picture. It saves the current data and then moves the app to the background or closes the app after saving all the data. This calls as Tombstoning. In this post, we will discuss on the same.

Supreet Tare posted a thread on MSDN Forum to help him binding a 2nd Level Collection in Silverlight DataGrid control. As he didn't find any good solution there, he asked me on Twitter to give a solution to him for the same. I did a small investigation and came up with a solution for him.

In this post, I am going to describe the problem, as well as solution to this. Hope this solution will be helpful to you too and hence sharing in my blog. Read more to find out the solution.

Last couple of days we discussed about Page State and Application State of Windows Phone 7 (Mango). We learnt various ways of saving state of the page or application. After reading those chapters, you might have question in your mind that how to save the state of the application before closing the application and once you comeback again, you should get them back.

If you are familiar in Silverlight, you should have answer to this. Yes, we can use Isolated Storage to save the state of the app and read values whenever require in future.

In this tutorial, we will discuss about this with a simple demo code. If you are new to Isolated Storage, you will be able to learn how to use it directly in Windows Phone. Read to know more.

On last Saturday we learnt about basics of Application State in Windows Phone 7 Application. We discussed about the steps to pass value from one page to another using the Application State. In this chapter, we will learn more on the same with a small and simple demo.

So, read to know about it and learn the way of sharing data between pages using state. At the end, please provide your feedback. Don't forget to share it to the community.

Here comes this week's News Digest of Silverlight-Zone.com. This time we have total 74 news items on various articles based on Silverlight, Windows Phone 7, LightSwitch etc. Also contains some tips and other posts on MVVM, XAML and Blend.

Most popular posts were "Silverlight Elevator Pitch", "War between Silverlight, HTML & Windows 8", "Bing Map Control for Windows Phone 7", "Is Silverlight Dead? No, it's not. It's the heart of WP7, Windows 8, XNA" and "All about WP7 Emulator".

Read more to find those interesting posts. Also, find the daily news digest links for the last week here, in case you missed the posts.

Last two days, we discussed about Windows Phone 7 Page State. We learnt about saving and retrieving state of a page whenever require. Page State defines the current visual state of application page. Page state is accessible within that page. But think about a condition where you want to save values to the state and want to access them across the application. Then what to do? You have the option to use the Application State in that case.

Application State stores data values which can be accessible by multiple pages. In this tutorial chapter, we will learn about Application State and in the next chapter, we will see an actual implementation of the same with a small demo. Read to know more about Application State.