Microsoft Released Silverlight 5 Beta yesterday during MIX11 conference. It has a great new features set. Among them, most demanded feature was Debugging Data Bindings in XAML. In this article, I will step you through the complete debugging feature in Visual Studio for Silverlight 5 XAML page.

 

Read the complete article to know more about it and gather knowledge on the debugging feature with a simple code walkthrough. At the end, don't hesitate to leave your feedback. Queries are welcome. I will try to answer you as much as I can.

All of you are familiar with Silverlight and know how to create a Silverlight project. This post is not for the people, who already worked in Silverlight, but for the people who are very new in this technology and start to work as fresh to make their hands dirty. Also, creating this post to refer the project creation in my upcoming tutorial series.

 

If you are a beginner to Silverlight, read this post to know how to create a Silverlight  project.

Scott Guthrie announced availability of Silverlight 5 Beta at MIX11 conference. We already know what is coming on Silverlight 5 beta during Silverlight Firestarter. It's time for us to download the first Beta of Silverlight 5 and make our hands dirty with those bits.

Read the post to get the downloadable links of Silverlight 5 Beta Tools for Visual Studio 2010 and Expression Blend Preview for Silverlight 5. Install them and start doing your hands dirty with the bits.

Visual Studio Async CTP Service Pack 1 has been released which extends Visual Studio 2010 which provides a new streamlined syntax for Asynchronous development. This version of Async CTP is compatible with Visual Studio 2010 SP1.

 

Read the complete post to find out the download link and installation instructions.

Microsoft just announced Internet Explorer Platform Preview 1 in MIX11 keynote event. It is now available for download today. This will be the next version of Microsoft’s industry-leading Web browser and the deep native HTML5 support delivered in Internet Explorer 9.

 

Find more about IE10 Platform Preview in this post. Also find the download link at the end of the post.

In this post, I am going to give a Tip of using Expression Blend to create a Gradient color from any color pattern. Sometime, you might have a color pattern that you have to use in your UI and don't know how to pick the exact color to your UI. This simple post will help you to understand it properly.

After reading this post, you will be able to pick any gradient color from a pattern and use as easily as 1-2-3. Hope, this will help you. Feedbacks are always appreciable.

In this post, I am going to share Top 5 posts of this week at Silverlight-Zone and the weekly digest of Daily News Headline. During this week top posts made by Michael Crump, Kunal Chowdhury, Paul Stovell, Dhanajay Kumar and Manas Patnaik. Good job guys. Read to find out the links.

That's a good question came up after the series in my blog. Someone asked why should one use Custom Control instead of User Control? Hence, let's extend the series and discuss about that. I apologise the delay of this post. I should explain this at the start of the series, but actually my goal was to explain you how to create and use Custom Control in Silverlight.

 

It is better to do it later than never. Also, you are now familiar with Custom Control creation. Hence, start describing it. You will come to know more about this here. As always, don't forget to share your feedback at the end of this page.

Here is the last chapter of the series for Silverlight Custom Control. In this article, we will learn how to access the template parts from code behind to do various operations in the UI front.

 

Hope, you read the previous three articles and familiar with the Custom control as of now. This article will help you to understand accessibility of the template parts from the code. So, let's start discussing now. Appreciate your feedback as always.

Microsoft officially announced the expected release time for the Silverlight 5 Beta. Yes, it will be available next week during MIX11. This information was shared in Microsoft Silverlight Team's Blog post "Standards-based web, plug-ins, and Silverlight".

 

So a new era to this technology is coming next. Only few more days we have to wait before trying out the latest components which are coming in Silverlight 5. Read the full post to find out the link to Features list in Silverlight 5.

Continuing to our 2nd chapter of the series here on Silverlight Custom Control. In this chapter we will discuss on dynamically setting the Content and other properties to our Custom Control that we implemented earlier. After reading this article, you will be able to create properties and set content dynamically to your control.

 

So, lets start describing them and learn something again today. These series of posts are mainly targeted for beginners but anyone can read it to refresh their learning. Don't forget to leave your comment at the end of the post. Any queries, please drop a line. I will try to help you as early as I can.

This is a continuation to my previous post "How to create a Custom Control in Silverlight?" In this tutorial part, we will discuss on the template and modify our basic template to give a better look as per our need. In this chapter, we will learn about template Part and how to modify the existing template.

 

Read out more to learn in depth about Custom Control in Silverlight. This will benefit you not only for Silverlight but for WPF and Windows Phone 7 development too. At the end, never forget to provide your feedback.

I am working on Silverlight since 3 years and during the initial period I had a fear on creating Custom control. I was more confident creating UserControls during first one and half year of my job. But when I started working on custom controls, I came to know the power of custom control and all the fear gone out of my eyes.

 

It's around 2 years, I am working on it and every time I am exploring some great stuffs. Though it's a long time since Silverlight launched; still, I am seeing the same fear on others and hence decided to write a good series on it (explaining all the details), which will be beneficial for beginners.

 

In this tutorial part, we will discuss on "How to create a Custom Control in Silverlight". This is very basic and will be helpful for a beginner. Don't hesitate to leave your feedback at the end. If you have any query/suggestion/feedback drop a line here. I will try to answer you as early as possible.

In this post, I will share you some important Shortcut keys of Microsoft Expression Blend 4. If you are working with Expression Blend 4, this will definitely help you to improve your daily productivity work. Keep the list with you always to best use of the Shortcut keys in Blend 4 while designing your XAML page.

 

If you have more shortcuts, please share those to me and I will include them here as the key resource. Thanks for your support.

Today we have completed 3rd month of our activity in Silverlight-Zone.com and continuously trying to improve it. We are regularly updating the site with latest news on Silverlight, Windows Phone 7, LightSwitch, XAML, Expression Blend, XNA etc.

We are also publishing all those entries to Twitter and Facebook, whenever a new post has been submitted, keeping all followers up-to date. Find out more about March 2011 in this post.

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.

 

 

LightSwitch is currently in it's Beta 2 stage. Read this post to know about the installation process of it. Also find the installer location to download it freely.

You might know that, LightSwitch is now in Beta 2 stage. Microsoft released it few days ago. I have a series of Tutorial on LightSwitch Beta 1 where we discussed on creating database tables using the LightSwitch table designer.

 

In this tutorial, we will discuss how to attach an existing database table available in your SQL server database. This was also available in Beta 1 release. This time we will discuss with the latest version. Read the full post and at the end leave your feedback.

Sometime your Silverlight application becomes too larger and creates a bigger XAP file. This causes issue while loading your XAP file for the first time as it increases the loading time for downloading the XAp. So, what will you do in this case? There is one answer: split your application in multiple projects which will create multiple XAPs and then use On Demand downloading feature.

 

Absolutely right, but you may sometime include 3rd party assembly references. In such case, storing them in a separate XAP and writing the code for downloading them on demand will be another hectic. So, what's the easy process? In this article we will learn the same. Read to know more and provide your feedback in case you need more information.

Microsoft is going to release Internet Explorer 9 RTM on Monday, 14th March 2011. Currently it is in Release Candidate and if you want to try it out, can download the RC version from net. Internet Explorer 9 has lots of new features and enhancements which will give you much faster and secure web experience.

 

In this post, we will discuss about the history of Internet Explorer which will include various Internet Explorer versions and their features.

On 23rd January 2011, I declared a contest to Giveaway 4 licenses of DevComponents DotNetBar for Silverlight, each costs around $219. The contest was for 1 month and was ended on 28th February 2011.  As mentioned in that post, I am going to declare the Winners in this post. Read to know more about the Winner.

You all might know about ReSharper tool. The current stable version of ReSharper is v5. The ReSharper team is currently working on their development to release the next version of ReSharper i.e. v6.

The new version of ReSharper has some cool new features like JavaScript, CSS and XAML support. It is currently in the early development stage and user has right to try out the new features and give feedbacks to improve them.

Yesterday I installed the new EAP release and tried out some cool feature. Among them one is: "Color support in XAML page". In this post, I am going to describe it to you. Read out the full post to learn about it.

Today we have completed 2nd month of our activity in Silverlight-Zone.com and got a huge nos. of responses from the community. In two months we crossed 30K+ visitors count which is pretty good. Audiences are mainly from United States, India and United Kingdom, followed by France and Germany. I will appreciate everyone's contribution towards this blog to make it a great success.

 

Silverlight-Zone.com posts articles/news on Silverlight, Windows Phone 7, XNA, LightSwitch, XAML and Expression Blend etc. We are trying our level best to keep all of you updated on Silverlight-Zone.com. We are also publishing all those entries to Twitter and Facebook, whenever a new post has been submitted, keeping all followers up-to date. Find out more of February 2011 in this post.

The Add Reference dialog is not a new one in Visual Studio 2010 Productivity Power Tools, but in this release they updated this dialog with Multi Targeting feature. What is this multi targeting feature? If you are using the new Add Reference dialog of Productivity Power Tools since it was released, you might find that, some dlls are not available there if your project is targeting Client Profile.

 

 

This post will discuss about this. Now, using the updated add reference dialog you can see all dlls which are not available in Client Profile framework. This also give you option to add those assemblies in your project. So, let's discuss on it.

You might know about the Visual Studio 2010 Productivity Power Tools extension, which has several features on top of the Visual Studio's default IDE features. Recently, they released the new version which has some other benefits over the previous versions.

 

 

In this post, I am going to discuss on the Quick Find feature of the new Productivity Power Tools. Read the full post to know more about it.