During last week (from 31st July 2011 to 6th August 2011) around 89 article links on Silverlight, Windows Phone 7, LightSwitch and XNA submitted in Silverlight-Zone.com.

 

In this digest post, top 5 popular links are on "Windows 8 and the Future of Silverlight", "7 reasons to be a WP7 developer", "What's new in Silverlight 5", "Smooth Streaming on WP7" and "Windows Phone SDK 7.1 - A Developer review". If you are worried about the future of Silverlight, never miss to read out the post by Identity Mine.

 

Read to know more about the popular posts and find out the daily news digest links. Follow us on Twitter and become a fan of our Facebook page to be updated on latest article links.

If you work in XAML pages, sometime you might noticed that the XAML page freezes for sometime while opening the page in design view. This is very annoying and many time it is responsible to crash the Visual Studio IDE. So what to do?

 

If you use Expression Blend to design the XAML page or don't want to open the XAML in design view, this small tip will help you to improve the performance of the IDE. Read more to know.

Few days ago, I published one article on "Application Library Caching in Silverlight 4". In that article, we discussed about Library Caching concept in detail with a small demo. We discussed various parts of the AppManifest to support this feature for 3rd party libraries. But sometime you may need this feature for your own custom libraries too to reduce the XAP file size by separating the external assemblies in their own ZIP file, which will download by the app when it is require.

 

Let us discuss on this topic today by a small example which will help you to understand how to prepare your dll library to support Library Caching by your application. Read more to learn about it.

Last week was a busy week in Microsoft Technology. We noticed lots of releases during the whole week and hence increased the no. of posts in Silverlight-Zone.com too. During the week, 24th July 2011 to 30th July 2011, we have total 87 new article and news links posted here on Silverlight, Windows Phone 7 and LightSwitch.

 

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 News of "WP7 Mango build 7712 release", News of "Microsoft gives WP7 developers a refreshed Mango build", News on "Windows Phone MVC release", "Collection of WP7 (Mango) Tutorials" and "A Story on LightSwitch in the not so distant future". Read out more to find out those links.

Few weeks ago, I published a post in my blog on "Default Browser Switcher Extension for Visual Studio 2010" and today that has been selected as "Articles of the Day" in Microsoft official site ASP.Net and showcased.

 

In that article, I described about a cool extension that you can download freely from the Microsoft Gallery. This extension will help you to improve the productivity if you are working as a web developer. That article demonstrates installation and uses steps-by-step. Read more to read about it.

Microsoft released Visual Studio LightSwitch 2011 on 26th July 2011. This is the first version of the product. You already known about this but those who are new to this product, let me tell about it first. This is a new tool for building data-driven Silverlight Application using Visual Studio IDE. It automatically generates the User Interface for a Data Source targeted for the desktop and cloud by writing a minimal code.

 

In this post, I am going to share the download links (both Web and Offline installer), as well as some good resources to jump start with this tool.

Sometime it is require to communicate between two local Silverlight applications. Though this situation is very limited but it may require as per your business deal. In such case, the local messaging mechanism comes into the place.

 

In this post, we will learn about this local messaging system using a small Silverlight application where we will have a sender project and a receiver project. At the end of the article, I embedded the demo which will give you more visibility on what we are going to do in the demo. Let's discuss more on this topic.

During the week 17th July to 23rd July, we have 68 new article links at Silverlight-Zone.com which consists of various topics like 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 "A Collection of WP7 (Mango) Tutorials", "3rd Part of Data Driven Application with MVVM", "Metro Theme Customization7", "Microsoft has 3 months to make or break Windows Phone" and "Excel like Filtering in Silverlight DataGrid".

 

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

It's definitely a great start of the day when you notice that one of your article has been selected as "Articles of the Day" in Microsoft's official site WindowsClient.net. This happened with me once again.

 

Few months ago I published one blog post describing a tip that helps to quickly close the open Visual Studio documents. There I also described how to customize the keyboard to assign shortcut for any Visual Studio commands. Read to know more.

Visual Studio LightSwitch is a new tool for building data-driven Silverlight Application using Visual Studio IDE. It automatically generates the User Interface for a Data Source without writing any code. You can write a small amount of code also to meet your requirement.

 

This eBook collects all 5 Chapters of Silverlight Show article series 'Beginners Guide to Visual Studio LightSwitch (Beta 1)' for your offline reference. In this post, I am going to share the Contents of this eBook. Also, there is a link to purchase the book. Read to know more about this.

Recently I had started exploring Windows Phone 7 with first Mango update and accumulated a no. of beginners tutorial in my blog. In this post, I am going to share all the chapters of the series as "31 days with WP7" - a must needed guide for a beginner who wants to learn about Windows Phone 7 programming.

 

Hope, this will be helpful to you to understand the basics before jump start to the application development. This post is on popular demand and I am dedicating this to all my blog readers. Thank you everyone for your support.

The weekly news digest of Silverlight-Zone.com released. We have 63 new article links posted in Silverlight-Zone on different topics like Silverlight, Windows Phone 7 and LightSwitch. In this post, I am going to share the top most 5 links as well as the daily digest links for your reference.

 

This week (10th July 2011 to 16th July 2011) top post was on the future of Silverlight and whether Silverlight is really dead. This post was made by Stephan Forte. A good discussion on Silverlight and XAML. If you are still in doubt, read this post. There are also other topics from James R. Borck, J. Prosise, Owen Williams and Suprotim Agarwal on Silverlight and WP7. Read more to find the links.

Many time we need to change the layout type of any panel present inside the page. This is mainly a designers job but sometime developers need to change them on their requirement. In that case, people need to find out the start and end tag of the panel and change them accordingly. This is little bit a tricky process.

 

In this post, I am going to share you the easy process to switch between different layout types. If you are a designer or using Expression Blend, you are already familiar with it. But for a newbie, I think it will be a great help.

Last Wednesday (July 6th 2011) we explored a way to create a Circular loader using XAML without writing any line in the code behind file. Lot of you gave a good feedback and discussed various findings on the same.

 

I did some more investigation to create a different type of circular loader which you can include in your Silverlight, WPF and Windows Phone 7 applications where you are using XAML code. In this article, I will be guiding to create similar kind of Circular loader as shown above. This will be more simple than the previous one. Let's start our discussion and create one loader like this.

Many time we need to find out which Theme we are using in Windows Phone 7. Based upon the chosen theme we may want to set our own Theme for the application. So, how to find out that?

 

In this post, I am going to share you the Tip. Using it you will be able to identify the current theme of your Windows Phone 7 device. Read to know more.

On last Saturday (i.e. 9th July 2011) I delivered one hour session on "MVVM from Scratch using Silverlight" in Pune User Group's (PUG) Monthly meet. The session was full of demo and very little with slides.

 

In this post I will just recap the session for you to know what are the things I discussed there. I will also share the slides here, if you want to go through it offline.

The Weekly News Digest of Silverlight-Zone.com is out. This week we have total 71 article news posted in Silverlight-Zone on various topics like Silverlight, Windows Phone 7, LightSwitch and XNA. Like always, Windows Phone 7 articles are trending much than Core Silverlight articles. I think, to start viewing some new links on Silverlight, we have to wait more time for the next build of Silverlight 5.

 

In this post, I am going to share all the daily news digest so that, you can find the all the links posted there daily. Also, I am going to share the top 5 posts of this week (3rd July 2011 to 9th July 2011). Read to know more.

Sometime we need to know whether Network connectivity is available or not from our application. In Windows Phone 7, we have the required API exposed for the developers to detect the status of the network connection and take respective step based on that.

 

So how to detect it? In this small tip of the tutorial series, we will learn about the API and we will also see how this can be done using a small demo which includes code too. Read to know more about it.

If you are a XAML designer and creating controls for Silverlight, Windows Phone 7 or WPF, you may come in some situation that the custom properties for the controls are not properly organized by the developers. If you come into such situation forward this link to the developers and they may find it useful.

 

In this article, we will learn how to well organize the custom properties of your control so that, designers can easily search in appropriate location. Read to know more about it.

There are many instance when we have "Browser1" as the default browser in the system and we want our web application to be run inside a different browser (say "Browser2") from the Visual Studio IDE. To do this, we need to open the "Browser2" application and set it as default one, so that, the "Browser2" will start as the application handle from the IDE. After that, you have to revert back the default browser to "Browser1" by doing the same step.

 

This is really very difficult job. To simplify this thing, there is an Extension for the Visual Studio 2010 IDE. If you download and install that free extension, you will be able to do this very easily. In this post I will share the step and show you how this will improve your productivity.