Today Morning (1st October, 2010) when I noticed the mail with the Subject line: “Congratulations on receiving the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) Award”, I was really surprised. This is the biggest Award in my Life. I am really feeling very proud once I got the MVP Award from Microsoft.

Did you ever want to run an application from your local resource inside your HTML page? If so, you will face some issues. It will never run any application from local resource directly. It may ask you to download the file before running it. This is due to browser security issue as the code runs inside the browser sandbox.

 

So, what to do for this? In this post, I will describe you the steps resolve to do this. Read the complete post in order to learn the same.

Recently, I wanted to detect the Silverlight version for one of my on going R&D. I wanted to detect the version from batch file and depending upon that I wanted to execute one file. Searching over internet I came to know that, HTML Application has some additional power for execution of any local file as it runs under fully trusted mode. I did more research on HTA files and successfully completed my basic analysis.

 

Here I will demonstrate you the process of detecting the Silverlight installation status using JavaScript from the .hta file. Read it and at the end, if you have any suggestion to improve the steps, please let me know.

Few days ago, in one my earlier post, I discussed about “Some Best Practices for Silverlight Application Development (XAML)” which got a huge hit by my readers. I got several feedbacks on that too. Someone from the community also suggested me to write some best coding practices on C#. This stroke my mind and hence decided to write some best practices about C# coding here from my past few years of experience.

 

For past few years, I learned a lot and tried to share best of them to the others who are new in the software development field. This post I contribute to those fellow members. Hope, I will get more feedbacks and/or suggestions here too.

In various forums (mainly in Silverlight.Net Forum) I have seen people asking a question: “How to implement Session Management in Silverlight?” The simple answer is: “Session Management is not available in Silverlight”. Why? If it is not there, how can we implement it?

Ok, If you are new to Silverlight, you need to know about this. Hence, I will describe you in this post about Silverlight Session Management. The targeted audience for this post is mainly the beginners of Silverlight. Read it and if you have any queries, let me know.

If you are a developer and want to get the “Telerik JustCode Developer License”, here is the chance for you. I am going to give you one license code absolutely Free which costs around $249. The registration process will end on 15th October 2010. Based on the registration, I will announce the Winner name on 20th October 2010.

So, why are you waiting for? Read the full post for the steps of Registration for this offer.

In my previous post “Introduction to Shapes in Silverlight 4” I introduced you with various types of Shapes available in Silverlight 4 and informed you that, I will post an article describing each one of them and here it is.

 

In this article, I am going to describe you about each shapes and the process to add them in our application (whenever you need). This article is for the Beginners, who don’t know much about the shape controls. If you have any suggestions/concerns please use the feedback section to let me know.

Oh! What a pleasant moment when you get some mail to your Inbox mentioning “Congratulations!! You are our monthly Winner for the month…”. Yes, today morning when I first opened my mailbox, I saw a mail from the WebMaster of www.dotnetspark.com saying that, I have been awarded as the Winner of the month of “August 2010” for contributing to the Silverlight community. What a surprise again!!!

 

Here is first couple of lines of the mail:

Dear Kunal,

Congratulations!! You are our monthly Winner for the month of August, 2010!!!

www.DotNetSpark.com proudly announces you as the monthly winner Award (August, 2010)  for your sincere and tremendous contributions towards all sections at www.dotnetspark.com.

Lastly, I will thank to all of my readers. Without their help and encouragement it was not possible. Also, thanks to dotnetspark team for selecting me as the Winner.

In earlier versions of Silverlight, there are very few shape controls like Rectangle, Ellipse available. But think on creating other shapes like Triangle, Polygon, Ring etc. If you need one of them in the earlier Silverlight version, how will you implement them? In my next article, I will describe about all these to you.

 

I think many of you know about these. But those who are not familiar with this, I am contributing it for them.

First of all, a Big Thanks to all my readers who continuously supported me during last six months by voting my articles in CodeProject. I also appreciate you for your regular feedbacks and suggestions to improve. I tried my level best to answer your queries in each article’s page.

 

Here, I am consolidating all the articles that I posted in my Blog and CodeProject for your further reference.

NDepend is a Visual Studio tool to manage .Net Code and achieve high quality product. Using NDepend, you can improve your code quality. You can find the unreachable code very easily using this tool. Not only this, it visualizes your code using Graphs & Treemaps. Hence, you can improve the quality of your Software by measuring the Code Metrices.

 

 

I just got a chance to explore NDepend Professional tool and found it little bit useful (as of now) for day to day coding life. Thought to share the same experience with you all. Though this is my first day exploring NDepend and hence don’t have so much proficiency or knowledge, but somewhat I felt it useful. Once I explore more, I will be able to tell more about it. In this post, I will describe about it and how to install as an Add-In to your Visual Studio IDE. Read it and share your feedbacks.

MVVM, which is an abbreviated form of (M)odel-(V)iew-(V)iew(M)odel is not new to you all. But there are someone who don’t know about it. If you are a Core ASP.Net developer you may know about MVC & MVP, may also know about MVVM which mainly used in WPF/Silverlight. For them, it is tough to remember about its concept.

 

In general in any of my discussions or presentations, I used to describe MVVM in a way which is very easier to understand and easy to recall. Hence thought, why shouldn’t I share this to you? That’s why writing this post. Read it. I hope that, you will enjoy it much while reading it fully.

In this Tips & Tricks, I will show you the steps by which you can get the Screen Resolution of Client’s PC in Silverlight Application. It is quite simple. You have to just call the HTML DOM object to receive the handle of the screen and from that you can easily get the Screen Resolution.

In my last two articles on MEF i.e. “First Guide to MEF & Silverlight (Part - I)” and “First Guide to MEF & Silverlight (Part - II)” I described about the framework with the help of a Console Application and a Silverlight Application. Hope that gave you basic idea on it and what this MEF does.

 

In this article I will try to give you more knowledge on MEF & it’s benefit. This time, I will again use a Console Application which will give more visibility to the underlying scenarios. Hope, like the previous articles this will also help you to understand the framework better to use it in your future need.

In my previous article “First Guide to MEF & Silverlight (Part–I)” I discussed about MEF with a small simple console application. Hope that was useful to you to understand the basic knowledge of MEF. In this article, I will guide you to create a simple Silverlight application using the MEF. If you are new to MEF, I strongly recommend you to read my previous article to gain knowledge on the basic things of MEF like Importing, Exporting, Catalog, Container etc.

 

Read the complete article and at the end if you have any queries, please let me know. I will try to answer them as soon as possible. Always Appreciate your valuable feedbacks.

Visual Studio LightSwitch is a new tool for building data-driven application in Visual Studio IDE. It automatically generates the User Interface for a DataSource without writing any code.

 

 

Microsoft released their first Beta of Visual Studio LightSwitch for the MSDN Subscribers. If you are a MSDN Subscriber, download it from the MSDN Subscriber Downloads Page. The expected date for the public release will be on Monday, 23rd August. Visit the Visual Studio Light Switch Blog for more information on it.

MEF is a framework to extend your application and was introduced in .Net Framework 4.0 and Silverlight 4.0. Recently I got a chance to look around the MEF with Silverlight. I found it useful in various scenarios and thus thought to do something with MEF in Silverlight.

 

In this article I will first discuss little about the MEF framework to give you some basic knowledge on it and then will show you how to create a small HelloMEFWorld console application step-by-step. In the next article I will use it in a Silverlight application & showcase you the feature and functionality. Read through the whole article and use this extender in your application if you need. Don’t forget to share your feedbacks and suggestions as this helps me improve my articles in greater details and present more to you.

Several times we need to sort a collection based on some property name e.g. we have an Employee collection of type Person. Person consists of EmpId, Name, Age etc. Now as an user, I need to sort the collection in ascending or descending order either by EmpId, Name or Age. So, how can I do this?

 

In this post, I will describe you a simple technique by which you will be easily able to sort the collection without writing the implementation for each logic. Read the complete article and at the end if you have any suggestions, please don’t forget to share. Feedbacks are always highly appreciated.

In this Tips&Tricks, I will describe about changing the location of the output of your Silverlight application i.e. the .XAP file from it’s original “ClientBin” location to a different place. Developers sometimes need to put the XAP file in a specific directory based on their requirement. This trick will help them relocating the XAP file.

 

Read the full post & if you have any queries or suggestions, please let me know. Appreciate your feedbacks.

In my earlier three chapters of Silverlight Tutorial, I described about “Introduction to Silverlight”, “Introduction to Silverlight Application Development” and “Introduction to Panels”. I got lots of responses & wishes from my readers for the next chapter. I know, there was a big gap between these chapters and I am really apologizing to you. Thank you for your passion. Hope, this time also I will get more responses from you. Read the complete tutorial and provide your valuable feedbacks. You suggestions/comments are highly appreciated.

 

In this Chapter, I will describe you about some of the most common controls used in Silverlight. After the end of this section, you will be able to understand about those basic controls and their uses. Here I will guide you to understand some of the properties of each control and how to set them from both XAML & Code behind C# file.

I was working with WPF/Silverlight since March 2008 and learnt lots of things. I wrote lots of Articles on Silverlight and published in my Blog. Today I decided to share you some of the best practices you should follow while doing development in WPF/Silverlight. Hope, this will help you guys while writing XAML codes. Read and try to strict with the guidelines whenever you are modifying your XAML.

 

Feedbacks are always appreciated. Hence, don’t forget to leave your comments at the end. If you have any more points, please share it here. I will review them and add those here.

 

Update [08-Aug-2010]: On popular demand, I updated this post with some explanation on “Why?”.

In my previous article “Beginners Guide to Silverlight 4 PathListBox Control (Part-I)” I described about creating your very first PathListBox control in your Silverlight application followed by creating a Circular path to position the items in the circular edge. From that article, I think you are now familiar with it.

 

In this post, I will demonstrate you guys how to animate the items in a specific direction. This not only guide you for animation in PathListBox but also will help you understanding the StoryBoard creation (if you are very new to Silverlight). Read the whole article and at the end don’t forget to leave your comments.

Have you ever heard of PathListBox introduced in Silverlight 4 as Expression Blend 4 namespace? Yes, it is a new control added in the “http://schemas.microsoft.com/expression/2010/controls” namespace. You can use this to position your data, text, images or other controls in the way of a single or multiple path controls. You can use your jig-jag path to set your contents or you can use circular or rectangular path to organize your content.

 

In this article, I will guide you to understand the functionality of this control. Also, I will guide you step-by-step to create your first PathListBox control demo application. Here we will create the above two samples where the collection of texts will position them in proper location on the edge of the circular path.

 

Readout the complete post to learn about it and at the end, if you have any queries or comments, please let me know. I will try to answer your queries as soon as possible.

In my earlier post on “Interactive ToolTip using Visual Studio 2010 Productivity Power Tool”, I discussed about “Interactive ToolTip” feature which comes with the Visual Studio 2010 Productivity Power Tool. In this post, I will share information about the all new “Add Reference” dialog which is fully searchable for assembly reference.

 

 

If you didn’t install the Visual Studio 2010 Productivity Power Tool till now, you can download it from Visual Studio Gallery. You can also directly download it directly from here. Read the complete post to know more about the new “Add Reference” dialog.