Visual Studio 2017 is going to be release on 7th March 2017. Twenty years ago, on 28th January 1997, the first version of Visual Studio was launched. Over the years, it grew rapidly and became a first choice for the developers.

Microsoft in a blog post announced the release date, along with the 'Launch Event' (starting 8:00 AM PST on 7th March) to share the latest innovations from Visual Studio, .NET, Xamarin and Azure.

Microsoft announced the availability of Windows 10 Insider Preview Build 15031 for PCs. If you are a Windows Insiders in the fast ring, check for Windows Update to get the notification. It's one steps towards the release of Windows 10 Creators Update and contains few new features, bug fixes.

Before downloading the build, don't forget to check the fixes and most importantly the known issues currently available in this build.

There could be some possible business needs for your .NET application to read the text contents from a Microsoft Word document. This can be simply done using the APIs exposed in the dll named 'Microsoft.Office.Interop.Word.dll'.

Let's have a quick look on how to do it using C#/.NET. Also find the complete source code shared here for your easy reference.

Microsoft released Windows 10 Insiders Preview Build 15019 for PCs. If you are an insider in the fast ring, check for updates to see the new update notification. It is a successor to build 15014, released last week. The new build focuses more on ‘Gaming Features’ which is going to come in Creators Update.

Checkout the new/enhanced features along with the known issues before installing this build. If you are not comfortable to install, give it a pause.

There are several instances when we need to make a comma separated text values from an excel column. There are different but pretty lengthy process that you can find, which will eat a no. of your valuable time to process the same.

So, what to do? Today we are going to learn a quick and easiest way to copy a column of data to a comma separated list. Continue reading to know more.

System Security is always a concern of PC users. Windows 10 provides you in-built protection from viruses and malware threats. In general, if you are using latest Windows 10 updates, you don't need to spend on another antivirus program for normal home usages.

Along with Windows 10 Creators Update, Microsoft is going one more step ahead to secure your PC further with a comprehensive dashboard 'Windows Defender Security Center'.

Microsoft announced a new preview build 15014 for fast ring Windows Insiders. This build has a ton of fixes and few enhancements for both PCs and Mobile devices. In a blog post today, Dona Sarkar, also announced the delay in releasing the 'My People' experience in Creators Update.

In this post, know about the key features/improvements that's part of this build. Also, checkout the other improvements and fixes, known issues etc. before installing it.

The Windows 10 Creators Update is going to bring a new feature to control the 'Blue Light' emission from your screen. This is going to help the people who use computers for a long time, especially during the night time.

In this post, we are going to learn how to change the Windows 10 settings to control the blue light of your screen in order to reduce the strain on your eyes.

Along with Windows 10 Insiders Preview build 15002, Microsoft added a new feature for Windows 10 Creators Update, that will allow you to group your start screen tiles to a folder. Tile folders are a way for you to organize and personal your tiles in Start.

In this post we will see how to group the tiles to a folder and access them. Continue reading my other posts on Windows 10 Creators Update to see what’s coming next.

It happened some time when a forced device driver update caused serious problems to Windows installation. This may happen when your device doesn’t support the driver updates that has been pushed and thus no simple way to block them.

With the Windows 10 creators update, Microsoft will allow you to include/exclude the driver updates during Windows update. Continue reading to know more.

As we are going towards the release date of Windows 10 Creators Update, Microsoft started pushing more builds with no. of new features and enhancements. Earlier this week, they released build 15002 for PC; accompanied by build 15007 for PC and Mobile.

Though the said two builds were released for fast ring insiders, instead of pushing it to slow ring Microsoft now published the ISO image for build 15002.

Just after 3 days of announcement of Windows 10 Insiders Preview Build 15002 for PCs, Microsoft announced one more build for fast ring users. The new build is numbered as 15007 and targeted for both PCs and Mobile devices. The new build has no. of new features/enhancements.

Before downloading the new build, check out the features list as well as the known issues currently available in this build. Continue reading to know further.

You may already know that, Microsoft has aired the Windows 10 Insiders Preview Build 15002 for PC. If you are a Windows Insider in the fast ring, you may have already received the first update of year 2017. This build has a number of new features and improvements.

Among all these, Microsoft had added option to temporarily pause Windows 10 update. In this blog post, we are going to discuss on this topic and the way to pause/resume it.

Recently in a blog post, we discussed, how to detect whether an assembly is digitally signed using the C# programming language and System.Management.Automation.dll from Microsoft. That was one way to get the status of the digital signing.

Today we will learn another method to detect the same without using any additional dll references in our project. I hope that, it will much more interesting to learn.

Dona Sarkar, the chief of Windows Insiders, in a blog post announced the availability of Windows 10 Insider Preview Build 15002 for PC with a bunch of new features and enhancements. It's a step towards releasing the 'Windows 10 Creative Update' in the month of April.

If you are a Windows Insider in the fast ring PC build, checkout this big update to experience it before the final public release. Make sure to checkout the bugs list before installing.

Digital signatures are the public-key primitives of message authentication. In common words, hand written signatures are defined to put authenticity of a file. In digital word, it’s the digital signature binds a person/entity to the digital data.

In this blog post, we will learn how to detect whether an assembly (.dll or .exe) is digitally signed. We will use .NET/C# to identify the same. Continue reading to know more on this topic.

Life is a journey which never ends until we stop breathing. During the journey, we are learning something new forgetting the older ones. Year comes and goes… never waits and that’s the nature. We are now at the eve of saying ‘Bye’ to 2016 and welcome the new year.

We did many things in 2016 with a hope to do more in the coming year and deliver our best to our work. Thanks you everyone for all your support and feedback to my articles.

Continuing the series of blog posts on WPF ListView/GridView control, today we will learn how to set the background color (more precisely, ‘the Style’) of a WPF ListView/GridView control’s row based on some specific parameter passed as the data.

You may want to give your user a proper visual by providing a different style to that specific row. Let’s discuss with a simple example.

In general case, the header/title of a WPF ListView/GridView columns are aligned in the center and hence in many cases you will need to align the column header/title to left or right (based as per your business requirement).

Today we will learn how to do this in the XAML itself by creating a proper style for the column header. Continue reading to know the trick.

Sometime it's a question asked by people "What's the best antivirus product?" or "Do I need to install any 3rd party antivirus product on Windows 10?" etc. Ok, to answer this query, you must understand how much security you actually need.

In this post, I am going to answer this. Also, sharing some Microsoft recommended 3rd party good products which you can run (not mandatorily) as a primary antivirus software.

As we learnt, the 'ListView' control provides you the base to display a set of data items or records in a WPF application. In last blog post, we learnt how to group the records in WPF ListView/GridView controls and design the UI to group using the Expander control.

Today in this small blog post, we will learn how to sort the records easily. You can either choose to sort from XAML or code, but here we will discuss how to do it from code.

If you want to display more information in a small space of a webpage, you want to use 'Toggle panel'. This way user only have to click on a link or a tab (based on your design) to display the information within that less space. The other pane will collapse automatically to give a toggle effect.

In this tutorial, we will learn how to create the effect in a HTML web page using only CSS. We will not use any JavaScript for this. Continue reading to learn more.

Many time we need to show a set of records grouped by a specific field. If you are building Windows app using WPF control, it is very simple to implement using the List View control that we already discussed in the last blog post.

Today we are going to discuss how easy it is to add support for grouping in the list. Continue to know about it and implement the same with a simple example.

The 'ListView' control provides you the base to display a set of data items in a WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) application in different layouts or views. In case you are working to show a dataset in your WPF app, this post will help you to get started with it.

In this blog post, we will learn about the ListView control with a basic layout followed by advance layout with a GridView. Continue reading further.

In the last blog post, we discussed the C# code to detect whether any antivirus product is already installed in the system. In today's blog post we will learn how to retrieve the installed antivirus software name from the Security Center.

Continue reading to grab the source code and discuss more on the API set exposed by the Framework. If you have any queries, do let me know.

Many time during app development, developers need to find out whether any Antivirus software is installed in client's operating system. In case it is installed, we may want to know the installed antivirus software name.

If you are looking for such code (using .NET/C#), you came to the right place. Here we are going to see the code to retrieve this information.

If you have a big solution with so many projects in it, the all new 'Visual Studio 2017' provides a new feature called 'Lightweight Solution Load', that helps to reduce the solution load time and substantial improvement in memory usage.

Today in this blog post, we are going to discuss about this feature along with the option to enable or disable the 'Lightweight Solution Load' feature.

There could be some possible business cases where we need to insert a HTML element inside a post. This should not be a static one but a dynamically injected at the middle of the article. So, what to do in such case? How can we insert it by writing some code?

Today in this blog post, we are going to see the same with the help of jQuery code. This will not only reduce the burden of writing huge code, but also give a better performance.

Earlier we discussed about 'git add' to add files to index, 'git mv' to rename or move files. We have also discussed about 'git commit' to push the changes to staging. Now what to do if one wants to remove a file from working tree and index?

We are today going to discuss on this topic. We have a command 'git rm' to handle this case. Let's start today's discussion, part of the 'Git Tutorial Series'.

The all new 'Visual Studio 2017' IDE, which was released as 'RC (Release Candidate) bits' during the Microsoft's Connect() event, introduces a new installation experience. If you have already installed the bits, you might have experienced that.

As it is currently in RC build, let me describe the new installation experience here to help others to know about it before they finally start using it.

Hopefully you are finding my posts on Git Basics helpful. As of now, as part of the Git Tutorial Series we learned about the changes, the commit to the staging area, viewing the working tree status and pushing the changes to the remote repository.

Continuing the series, today in this blog post, we will learn how to move or rename a file or directory in a Git workspace and update the Index. Also, visit Thoughtsoncloud to learn more about Kotlin programming and Android studio.

Microsoft has released the ISO image of the Windows 10 Insiders Preview build 14965, which can be downloaded from the Microsoft servers by generating the temporary link. Standard, Enterprise, Education and Home editions are available for download.

Read more to know further about the insiders build and grab the links to download the said ISO image (both 32-bit and 64-bit editions) from secure Microsoft servers.

Microsoft's Windows insiders chief Dona Sarkar in a blog post announces a new build 14971 for the fast ring PC users. If you are a Windows Insider on the fast ring, check for updates. It has a number of new things for you to try.

It also has a set of improvements and fixes; including few known issues. Download, install and check out if you can figure out any issues. Do report via the Feedback app.

During the Connect() developer event, Microsoft released Visual Studio 2017 RC (Release Candidate). The said post contains all the Microsoft server links to download the public build, which is a web installer and you need to connect to internet while installing.

In case you need an offline installer to download once and install in multiple systems, here's the post to generate the offline installer. Continue reading the know more about it.

During Connect() developer event on 16th November 2016, Microsoft announced the Release Candidate (RC) bits of next major version of Visual Studio named as 'Visual Studio 2017', which is already known to us as 'Visual Studio 15'.

In this post, I am going to share the direct download links of different editions of Visual Studio 2017 RC from Microsoft servers.

Do you know that, Microsoft has opened up the Skype software on web for everyone who wants to connect with the other and above all, you don't have to create any account, no need of separate download of the software.

By joining Skype as a Guest, you can quickly chat, do a voice call or video call without any hassle. It's going to be perfect if you’re new to Skype and don't have the time to create any account.

Microsoft Azure MVP Bootcamp, organized by Miracle Software Systems and Vizag Microsoft User Group (VzMUG), happened on 12th November 2016. I was one of the speaker of this event, invited by Miracle Software Systems to speak on Azure Platform.

I have given a 90 minutes session on 'Azure App Services and Overview to UWP', demonstrated in front of 100+ audiences. Here I am sharing my slides and few snaps from the event.

Is your Visual Studio instance returning error code MSB3073 while executing the post build event? If you faced such error message and already spent time on investigating the root cause, you came to a proper landing page.

Recently, I too faced it and later noticed the cause which I am going to document here to save your further investigation time. Hope that helps.

Microsoft today announced the new insiders program for Skype. This will allow enthusiastic community members to test it and provide feedback to shape and enhance the Skype experience. This will be currently available for Windows, iOS, Mac and Android platform.

If you are such a community user, you can sign-up for it. You can also request for other platforms like Xbox and Microsoft will get back to you soon.

Earlier we learnt how to fetch, pull and push the changes. We also learnt how to stash and clean your current working tree. But what if we want to reset the current HEAD to the original state and start from the beginning?

Today we are going to discuss how to do this with the ‘git reset’ command. Continue learning more about Git on my ‘Git Tutorial’ page.

Microsoft released a new Windows 10 insider preview build 14959 for mobile and PC. Dona Sarkar, in an official blog post, announced the availability of the new build for fast ring Windows 10 users. Checkout the post to know what’s new and improved in this build.

Read the known issues before downloading this build. If you are stuck at 0% downloading build 14951, wait for the timeout to happen before attempting to downloading this build.

I hope that, you are finding my posts on Git Basics/Git Tutorial helpful. In the last post on this series, we learned "How to stash the changes in a dirty working directory?". Today we are going to discuss how to remove untracked files.

Everyone needs to clean the working tree when some job is done or want to reset the directory. Let's learn how to do this using the command "git clean".

During the big event on 26th October 2016, Microsoft made the announcement of it’s next major release of Windows 10. They named it as ‘Windows 10 Creators Update’, which we already know as ‘Redstone 2’ update. This release is going to be more focused on 3D, mixed reality and more.

Though the giant company didn’t announce the release date, but it’s planned to release sometime in Spring 2017 as free update.

Windows 10’s registry editor finally receives an update with the Insiders Preview build 14942 aired on 7th October for the Windows 10 Insiders in fast ring. It will give added value to the power users while navigating through the registry paths.

In this blog post, we are going to see the changes part of the Registry Editor on Windows 10 which may come with the next big update.

I hope that, you are finding my articles on Git Tutorials helpful. Till now, as part of the Git Tutorial Series we learned about the changes, the commit to the staging area, viewing the working tree status and pushing the changes to the remote repository.

In this part of the tutorial series, we will learn how to stash the changes of a working directory and pop it where/when require. Lets start discussing about “git stash” command and it’s parameters.

As of now, as part of the Git Tutorial Series we learned about the changes, the commit to the staging area and viewing the working tree status. Once we are fine with the local branch changes, we need to push it to remote repository.

In this part of the tutorial, we will learn how to push these commits/changes to remote. Lets start discussing about the “git push” command and it’s various parameters.

The Visual Studio LightSwitch team, in a blog post, announced an important update about the LightSwitch tool that was used to accelerate the development of line-of-business apps. They are going to draw a line to end this tool from the future versions of Visual Studio.

If you are developing apps using LightSwitch, it’s time for you to think and start planning for a smooth migration. Continue to read more about it.

In the last two posts of the "Git Basics" series, we learned how to stage changes and save/commit to Git remote repository. I hope, that was clear and easy to understand. Today we are going to see how to show the working tree status.

Let's continue learning the "git status" command today with the parameters that you need to know. Stay tuned to read more posts on Git Basics.