For some people, it is sometimes irritating when the "Output" window automatically opens up on the screen when building a project or solution in Visual Studio. For some people, it's the reverse case and they want to check the entire log while the build is running or the console application is running in debug mode.

In Visual Studio, you can control this behavior and ask the IDE whether to open it into view or not. It’s not specific to Visual Studio 2015 and is available since VS 2013. Let's see how to enable/disable it.

It happens many times (during the coding or code review process) when we need a bigger space in our favorite Visual Studio IDE to check/read the code completely. Closing all the other docked windows/panels, toolbars and then adding them one by one is really very difficult and time-consuming.

Visual Studio 2015 provides us an easy way to switch between a full screen and normal mode. This way, you don’t have to do extra work to create a bigger space. Continue reading to learn more on this topic.

If you are working in Visual Studio 2015 IDE, you might have noticed the “Quick Launch” search bar, which allows you to quickly navigate to common menus and settings. This is a handy tool that you will need while searching for some options or features within the popular IDE.

Today this post will cover how to enable/disable this “Quick Launch” bar. Continue reading to know these quick tips & tricks on Visual Studio 2015. Pass it on to your friends/colleagues.

Registry is the heart of Windows Operating System and all/most of the apps and games associates various values/data into the registry, which can be accessed at different point of time. Playing with Windows registry is very dangerous and hence general people should avoid or take special care while working with it.

In case you are a developer, you want to read/write/delete entries to/fro Windows Registry. This post will cover details and code snippets to delete an entire key tree from it. Continue reading to learn how to do it.

Sometime we need to find out details of running process which is external to your current process, might be a third party one. If you are currently looking for some code to find out details of a process, this post will definitely help you. Here we will learn, how to get the process description using C#.

Continue reading to learn about it. Also, sample code has been shared for you to understand it better. If you have specific query, drop a line in the comment section.

Microsoft now stepped one step forward to push Windows 10 to a major set of devices who are still using Windows 7 or Windows 8.x by marking the OS as “Recommended Update”. It’s still your decision whether to opt-in or opt-out. If you opt-in, you will of course get it as free.

It is still a right time to upgrade to Windows 10, but not mandatory. To know more about it and the upgrade process, continue reading this post.

I hope you read my previous post on “Building a Toast Notification with text for apps targeting Universal Windows Platform”. There we learned how to create a very basic toast notification. Continuing the series of posts, today we will learn how to add buttons within the notification.

Let’s begin with building toast notification with text and buttons. Stay tuned to learn creating more complex notifications in next blog posts of this series.

Microsoft started rolling out a configuration update to Windows 10 Mobile users who are in fast ring. This might be a step towards rolling out the Redstone update to the Windows 10 Mobile users. If you are already in the fast ring, you might have already got the notifications.

Windows Insiders chief, Gabriel Aul, in a tweet announced the availability of this update which will prepare your device for the next big update and improve all over the upgrade experience.

When downloading from a remote location, many time we need to know whether the file downloaded properly or not. There are many techniques to know about it but among them, one of the approach is to check the hash value of the file. The Cryptography APIs of .NET can help you to calculate the same.

Today in this post, we will learn how to calculate the hash value of file stored in local resource. Continue reading to learn more about the steps. Code has been shared.

If you are a developer and building apps or games for Windows 10, targetting Universal Windows Platform (aka. UWP), you might want to show toast notifications to the user of your app/game. You might also want to provide some additional content like textbox, button etc. to get specific inputs.

As part of this tutorial series, we are going to learn how to show custom toast notifications. Today let’s begin with building simple toast notification with text. Stay tuned to learn complex notifications in next blog posts.

You might have already hear about Clippy. Yea, that’s the Office Assistant that we had in those days. In earlier office versions it helped us with many quick tips to complete the job easily, having some nice animations. If you are fond of it and want to use it in your development environment, there is a cool ReSharper extension for Visual Studio.

Recently I came across it and thought to share with you more details about the extension as well as some snaps and the process to install it. The extension is also available as opensource project on GitHub. Continue reading to know more.

If you are a developer and developing code using Visual Studio IDE, you might want to learn the shortcut keys that our facorite IDE exposes to use. Mads Kristensen developed a Visual Studio extension and exported all the keyboard shortcuts of Visual Studio 2012, 2013 and 2015.

In this post, I am not only bookmarking the tool and link to the site, but also sharing the same with you. I hope, it will be useful for you in day to day development life.

Windows 10 SDK provides an easy to implement project template by which you can quickly create an app for Universal Windows Platform which you can use to run a hosted web app. You don’t have to create the whole app, if the site is already running. Just change few values in manifest file and your app will be running.

In this post, we will learn how to create a hosted web app targeting Windows 10 (without writing any code). Share your feedback and/or ask your queries, if any.

Microsoft recently released Windows 10 Mobile build 10.0.10586.63 to Windows Insiders in the fast ring. There’s not such noticable changes in this build, but I have noticed one cool feature that allows you to select and copy a portion of text from SMS messages easily by just tapping.

In this post, I am going to share you details about this with proper screenshot for easy understanding. I hope that, you will like it. Let us know, what you discover more on this build.

Most of the developers in the Microsoft platform uses C# as their programming language. C# is now matured to version 6 and has come with new features in its different versions. As a programmer, we should know all these features. This will not only help you in cracking interviews but also help you decide whether you should upgrade your project to latest.

If you are building apps/game for Universal Windows Platform, you might want to retrieve the device information where the app/game is currently running. You might use this information to log details about any exception and/or to do specific action based on device details.

In this post, we will learn how to fetch the device information in UWP apps. Continue to read about the APIs exposed by Microsoft SDK. Don’t forget to read my other posts too and share your feedback.

How many times we are in such a condition when our battery is going to die and we have to do some important calls or something else? If we poll for it, the count will be high. If you are a developer and building apps targeting Universal Windows Platform (aka. UWP), you might want to integrate the battery APIs already exposed.

This post will cover about the API today and we will learn how more about the API with proper demonstration. Continue to read more on this topic and don’t forget to check other posts on the same topic.

If you are a developer building apps for Universal Windows Platform, you might have noticed that, at the time of debugging there are some strings of digit getting display just under the title bar of the application. This is called as Frame Rate Counter, which displays frame rate and per frame CPU usage.

Today in this small blog post, we will learn how to enable/disable the Frame Rate Counter in your Universal Windows apps. Countinue reading to know more about it.

If you are a developer and building apps for Universal Windows apps, you might like to customize your app title bar to match your app theme. You can also change various colors of the buttons. Windows 10 SDK provides you to customize the title bar of Universal apps.

Today in this blog post, we will learn how to apply custom colors in apps built for Universal Windows Platform along with different other APIs exposed for it.

Let’s come to basics of programming today. It’s a common interview question asked during an interview and many time candidates become confused with the difference between using directive and using statement/block. Today we will cover this topic and discuss various difference among those.

To learn or brush up the basic concepts, continue reading more. I hope, this will clarify all your doubts. If any feedback, do share below in the comments section.