Today Tami Reller, Chief Marketing Officer for the Microsoft Windows business confirms the general availability and pricing of Windows 8.1 (Blue) at the JP Morgan Technology, Media & Telecom Conference in Boston.

The first public preview of next version of Windows 8 will be available during BUILD Conference going to happen at the end of June 2013.

It’s the sunny morning when I woke up from bed and opened my Surface to check the mails and tweets those I received while I was sleeping. In the collection of all unread mail, I noticed a mail with the subject line that says “Welcome to Nokia Developer Champion”.

At the very beginning I thought it as dream but now my dream comes true. Yes, I am now a Nokia Developer Champion from India and I am feeling very proud to announce it to you.

Last year we discussed “How to Capture a Screenshot as File in Windows 8?” which you will find useful in your desktop PC or laptop. You will also find that post useful in a Surface if you have a keyboard attached to it, because “Win + Print Screen” key combination is needed to capture the screen.

What about Microsoft Surface which does not have a keyboard attach to it? In that case, a touch keyboard will be require to press the keys but that will fill half of the screen.

In the last post “What is Two-Factor Authentication?” we discussed about various factors of authentication system including different examples. We also learnt about Knowledge Factor, Inherence Factor and Possession Factor.

Microsoft recently added a second step authentication mechanism in all their accounts as an extra security layer. This post will guide you to turn ON/OFF this security layer.

Two-factor authentication is a user authentication system where an user needs to provide two different factors to authorize the user’s identity. It is not a new concept and in many places we are knowingly or unknowingly using it for secure access.

There could be multiple factors too and that known as Multi-factor authentication. Today in this post we will learn basics about this type of authentication system.

Sometime the Visual Studio’s clean project command does not return as expected and maximum time people used to manually delete the bin, obj, Client Bin, Generated_Code directories to clean all the traces of previous build.

Here I will share a small batch code which will help you to clean up those directories by just a single click. Tune it up if you want to add few more directories in the list.

If you are a Win8Dev and building a Windows 8/WinRT application, you might want to download a file asynchronously from a web location. The job is very easy in Silverlight and in this case too but you just need to know the way, the APIs and the configuration settings.

Many developers already faced the difficulty to download a file in their WinRT apps and hence I thought to share the code with the API details in this post.

One of my friend, Abhishek Sur (Microsoft MVP, Client App Dev), recently published a book titled "Visual Studio 2012 and .NET 4.5 Expert Development Cookbook" covering basic usage of Visual Studio 2012 IDE, its various components and better utilization of the tool.

This post is just an announcement of the book and introduce you with the content of it. If you are willing to buy, find herewith the links of different store.

If you are using Telerik’s RadRichTextBox control in your Silverlight application, you might have noticed that the control exposes a format tool which pops up in the screen when you select some text inside the control. This is the same behaviour that you notice in Microsoft Word too.

But for some reason, you might want to hide that toolbar if you are building an application like notepad. This small post will cover the same for you.

These days Skype is a common platform for audio/video calling over internet. Many people uses it to connect with their family and beloved one, some other also uses it for business purpose to connect with their client.

Recently I noticed frequent crash in Skype and when tried to reopen, it was unable to login but was showing a message that I am already signed in to system. This post covers the solution to that.

It’s just 10 days when Visual Studio 2012 Update 2 RTM was released and now again, Microsoft released their next update pack named “Update 3”. This release is currently available under CTP (Community Technology Preview) first release.

Find herewith more about this release i.e. list of changes and the link to download it. Keep in mind that, it’s a CTP release and not ready for production environment yet.

If you are working with the Telerik’s RadRichTextBox control for Silverlight, you might come to a situation where as per your business need you might have to customize the default context menu of the said control. If you are looking for an way to add or remove context menu group, this post will help you.

Continue reading the post to understand the way this context menu has been structured. Once you understand the basics, it will be easy for you to do further modifications.

As a WPDev, sometime we want to show a callout type information box or a notification popup within the Windows Phone application to the end user. Building such type of control needs a lot of effort before using that in an application.

Infragistics came up with their own control to help the Windows Phone developers to save their effort building it from the scratch. Today we are going to discuss it here with step-by-step code snippet.

In your Silverlight application, you might want to detect whether network connection is available and then based on the result, you might want to do a service call or disable few buttons. This is a most wanted feature by the Silverlight developers.

So if you are looking for code, this post will help you to understand the APIs and integrate the same in your Silverlight applications.

Infragistics announces their NetAdvantage webinar series which will be held from 23rd April 2013 to 25th April 2013. The webinar series will cover most of their controls which includes Ignite UI, Windows Forms, XAML controls, NucliOS for iOS and Windows UI.

This post will cover a brief about the agenda and a link for you to register to the webinar series. As the seats for this webinar is limited, register for it now.

Just 2 months after the release of Visual Studio 2012 Update 2 CTP release, Microsoft released the final version of Visual Studio 2012 Update 2 which also includes a single Blend version that can be used to build apps for Silverlight, WPF, Windows Phone and Windows 8 Store etc.

The update is freely available for you to download from Microsoft site. I am going to share the direct link here for you to get easy access link.

Are you a Windows 8 Application Developer? Are you building an app like audio/video player or game which needs to keep the display active when user is inactive in the system? Then you came to a right place where we will discuss how to keep the display on while idle.

This post details about the Windows 8/Windows RT API usage and code snippet to request the system to keep the display on. Continue reading to know more about it.

Are you a Windows 8 or Windows RT user? Are you looking for a code to change your Windows 8 lock screen programmatically? Then this post will be definitely helpful for you. Just follow the simple steps to write an application by which you can change it easily.

Windows 8 already exposes settings panel to change the lock screen of the Windows, but this post will help you to programmatically access that using the exposed APIs.

Almost two years ago we discussed about “Microsoft.Phone.Info.DeviceStatus” class to retrieve Windows Phone device information in your application. In addition to those, there are some more APIs to fetch more details which is available as extended properties set.

Today in this post, we will learn about the API and the way to fetch those additional details in your application. Continue reading to know more about it.

In the last blog post, we learnt “How to Share a Media File from WP8 using the ShareMediaTask?” which was a launcher available in Windows Phone 8 SDK. Similarly there are few more launchers available in the SDK by which you can launch WP8 specific applications programmatically.

Today in this blog post we will learn how to create an appointment in Windows Phone 8 using the API named “SaveAppointmentTask”. Continue reading for details.

If you are a Windows Phone 8 application developer, you might want to implement a functionality to share a media (say, a picture) from your media library or camera library. So, how can you do that? Windows Phone 8 SDK provides you an API by which you can implement the same easily.

Today in this post, we will learn about the API and the implementation steps in a Windows Phone application. If you are looking for it, this will be an ideal solution for you.

Last day we learnt “How to Integrate WP7.8, WP8 Live Tiles in your WP7.5 apps?” which was using the default APIs provided by Windows Phone SDK. That does not provide additional APIs like transparency, front and back content etc. to control the live tiles of your application.

In this post, we will learn how to customize the primary live tile of your Windows Phone 7.8 or 8.0 applications easily using the Telerik libraries.

The Windows Phone SDK update for WP7.8 is already there and many people already started receiving the WP7.8 OS update in their existing WP7.5 handsets. If you are a developer, you might want to integrate the new Live Tiles in your existing application to give it a good look.

In this post, I will guide you to update your existing apps to include the new live tiles. Continue reading to find out the step-by-step process to integrate it.

Few days ago while searching for a LightSwitch eBook for one of my friend, I found “LightSwitch Succinctly” authored by Jan Van where he describes about this tool’s uses and the need of it for your application development.

It’s a very good eBook for absolute beginner and available for free. I hope, this will really help you if you are judging to use LightSwitch in any one of your application.