Here comes this week’s (1st January 2012 to 7th January 2012) news digest on Silverlight, Windows Phone 7, LightSwitch and Metro UI. We have submitted ~63 new article links at Silverlight-Zone.com.

Read more to find out the top 5 posts of the week. Also, find out the daily digest links here. Sharing those here too, in case you missed those it will be helpful. Subscribe to our daily newsletter to get those links directly delivered to your inbox.

Today in this blog post, I am going to start up few Windows Phone 7 tips which will be handy for you if you are a beginner and just started exploring your device.

In this first tips & tricks, I will show you how to pin an application from your application list to the start screen of your Windows Phone 7 device. As I told, this post is absolutely for the beginners.

I received an offer from uCertify to review their Exam Preparation Kit and I have accepted that challenge and now I am reviewing 70-515 Exam .NET 4.0 Preparation Kit (PrepKit) from uCertify. Initially it looks simple, intuitive and very user friendly in terms of User Interface.

As soon as I am done with the full review I will post the review report for you all. But for now, I am sharing some information about the product in this blog post. Continue reading to know further about it.

I am very happy to announce that, www.silverlight-zone.com has completed it’s first anniversary today. We officially launched this portal on 1st January 2011 and continuing our efforts to submit article news daily.

I appreciate the efforts made by the contributors of this community portal and the followers of Silverlight-Zone. Without their support this journey could be very difficult.

This post is not just the celebration of 1 year completion, we are also announcing our first “Contributor of the Month” award. We are happy to see such contributors on-board.

Here comes the “Weekly News Digest” of Silverlight-Zone.com during 25th December 2011 to 31st December 2011. During the week, we have submitted around 43 new posts to our portal by digging through the net.

In this post, find the popular 5 posts of the week, as well as popular 5 posts of the month. Also find the daily digest links at the end of the post.

We have also completed our 1 year today and the anniversary post is coming up shortly. Stay tuned to my blog for details.

Here comes the “Monthly Summary” of posts published during December 2011. I have submitted 16 blog posts on mixed juice. In this post, I will summarize them category wise, so that, you can find them very easily.

December was a great month for me. I started a video tutorial series on Windows 8 Metro style application. If you didn’t watch them, find the links in this post. Follow my blog for latest articles, tutorials, tips and contests. “Like” my Facebook page for all Technical updates. Wish you a Happy New Year.

My friends, sincerely, I will never stop wishing that your journey through this world will be touched by kindness, inspired by wisdom, graced with understanding, and kept safe from all harm.

Wishing you not just happiness but pure joy, not just wealth but Heaven's treasures, not just silence but God's peace. May this new year bring you all the blessings every day in your life. Wish you and your family a Happy and Prosperous New Year.

“Betty Wallpapers” is a small Windows Phone 7 application developed by my friend Jebarson Jebamony (aka. Jeba), Microsoft India. Using this application, you can search and download wallpapers and images from the web. It allows to search images with any key. It also has a settings panel, where you can configure various options related to your search parameter.

The installer of this application is less than 1MB in size and supports Windows Phone 7.5 or higher. You can install the Trial version (which has few settings OFF by default) and if you like it, purchase it from the Marketplace to support the development.

Today I received this “Security Alert” from Microsoft via email and thought to share this with you. If you are using ASP.Net in your server, read this post to know about it to keep your server in good health from this DoS Attack. Sharing the email as it is in this post.

Microsoft is aware of detailed information that has been published describing a new method to exploit hash tables. Attacks targeting this type of vulnerability are generically known as hash collision attacks. Attacks such as these are not specific to Microsoft technologies and affect other web service software providers. This vulnerability affects all versions of Microsoft .NET Framework and could allow for an unauthenticated denial of service attack on servers that serve ASP.NET pages.

In our last video tutorial “What is the Lifecycle of Windows 8 Metro Style Application?”, we learnt how the Windows 8 metro style application life cycle works using a small video demonstration of states.
 
In this video tutorial we will see a practical example of it using the already available metro applications. Continue to watch the video tutorial series.

You might know that, I have been awarded as Most Valuable Blogger (MVB) by DZone in August 2011. Today I received the MVB Certificate from them. In this post, I am sharing the same with you.

And again, thanks to all of you for your continuous support. Stay tuned with me on Twitter, Facebook and my Blog.

“Fun with Silverlight 4” authored by Rajesh Lal illustrates more than 100 features in Silverlight using a simple problem/solution approach. It takes one feature at a time and guides you in progressive journey where you begin by using the basic components, then by creating graphics and animations.

I am feeling Proud to be the Technical Reviewer of the book and will recommend everyone to purchase this book to keep it as reference. In this post, find my review note, link to purchase it from Amazon store and the Table of Contents. Hope, this book will help you in your day to day work.

Here comes the Weekly Digest (18th December to 24th December) of Silverlight-Zone.com. During this week we have submitted 65 article links at Silverlight-Zone on various topics like Silverlight, Windows Phone 7, Metro Style Applications.

In this post, I am going to share the top 5 posts of the week. Top viewed posts were from actuary21c, Evan Hutnick, Glen Gordon, @mbcrump and @kunal2383. Read more to find out the top 5 links. Finally Merry X-MAS to all of you.

It’s Christmas time and I just wanted to say “Thank You” to you for your support and feedback through out the year. It’s been a pleasure to stay tuned with such awesome friends in my life. Though I know many of you virtually over the cyberspace, but we had a great bonding over the past year.

I wish you and your family an wonderful Holidays during the Christmas and a Happy New Year 2012. May god give you all the pleasure in coming year. A small video greetings has been included in this post. I hope, you will like it.

One month ago, I started a discussion thread “What is the Future of Silverlight?” and received a good amount of feedback on the future of the same. Some provided positive feedback and some had negative feedback.

As declared earlier, I am going to announce the Winners name from the discussion thread here, as I wanted to giveaway some licenses to my blog readers on the eve of X-MAS. Click more to see if you are one of the lucky winner to Win Telerik or Pluralsight license. All the best!!!

Today in this Video tutorial, we will learn about the Lifecycle of Windows 8 Metro style application. We will also learn what are the various states available during the Lifecycle.

Let’s start discussion followed by the video tutorial. An easy way of representation has been added in the video. Let me know your feedback. Don’t forget to share this to your friends and ask their feedback too.

Microsoft is launching Windows Phone Camps in Pune and Chennai during December 2011. It is a brand new event for designers and developers to interact with domain experts. Each session will take you deeper in the world of Windows Phone application design and development.

Don’t wait, just register for the free event now and avail this opportunity to learn more and more from the experts. Ask your queries and experience the bigger event with them.

You might know that, Silverlight 5 has been already released by Microsoft. During the previous releases of Silverlight 5, I have published many articles on it. Here in this post, I am clubbing all of them so that, it will help you to find them in a single page as a great resource to start with Silverlight 5.

Here is a collection of Silverlight 5 Tutorials that you may want to read while working with the Silverlight 5. Find all the links that I have published in my blog. Do you have any feedback or queries? Don’t hesitate to write at least a single line in the Comments Section.

Hope you gone thru my previous video tutorial “How to Create a Windows 8 Metro Style Application using Visual Studio 2011?”, where I demonstrated about Windows Metro Style Application templates, creation of project and it’s project structure. There we also demonstrated one simple “HelloMetroStyleApplication” sample.

In this video tutorial, we will learn about “Package.appxmanifest” file which resides in the Metro application project directory. We will discuss step-by-step about each property page and XML content of this manifest file.

People often asked me to start a Video Tutorial series on Windows 8 Metro Style Application development using Visual Studio 2011 and here is first part of the series. The series will include the video tutorial as well as some text to give you easy access to the code.

In this first part (10 mint Video Tutorial), we will learn how to get started with the Project and also we will learn the project structure. Later we will have a small demo to show you how to develop your first “Hello Metro Style Application” using Visual Studio 2011 IDE. Continue to the tutorial to learn more.

Here is the post on Weekly News Digest at Silverlight-Zone.com. During the week (27th November 2011 to 3rd December 2011), we have submitted ~65 new article links collected from different blog feeds. The posts were on Silverlight, Windows Phone 7, LightSwitch and WinRT Metro.

In this post, find the top 5 posts of the week, also sharing the most popular 5 posts of the month near to the end of the post. On regular basis, sharing the daily news digests links at the end. We had a news on the release of Silverlight 5, which didn’t happen last month. Read more to find out all the popular links.

Here comes our “Monthly Summary” post. During November 2011, I have submitted 12 blog posts here and this is the summary post of those blog threads categorized item wise. Find all the posts that I have published. In case you missed any one of them, this will help you.

As a quick note, stay tuned to our (KolkataGeeks) weekly webcast. All details are available in this page. Follow us and stay tuned on the cutting edge technologies.

Do you want to integrate the network connection settings page (like: Airplane, Bluetooth, Cellular and/or WiFi) in your Windows Phone 7 application? Then this article will help you step-by-step to understand and integrate it.

Connection Settings page are those, where you can configure your connection types and various parameters of the connection. Windows Phone 7 SDK exposes the APIs for you to integrate them in your application. In this tutorial, we will discuss about these with a nice demo. Read further to know about these settings page and integration steps to the application.

Here comes the weekly digest of Silverlight-Zone.com. During last week, we have submitted 83 article links on various technologies like Silverlight, LightSwitch, Windows Phone 7 etc. In this post, find the top links. Also, the link towards daily news digest is also available at the end of the post.

Top 5 posts were from @Debug_Mode, @jmarbutt, @kunal2383, @twmurph and @TimHuckaby. Don’t miss to read out those posts. If you have blog and you are writing article/posts on the said technologies, please share us the link below (as comment) and we will make sure to include them to spread all over the social networking sites.