Here comes the weekly news digest of Silverlight-Zone.com. During last week (i.e. from 21st August 2011 to 27th August 2011) we have submitted 78 new links in Silverlight-Zone on various topics like Silverlight, Windows Phone 7, LightSwitch, XAML, MVVM, XNA and more.

 

Most popular post was "Fundamental MVVM" from John Papa. In this post, I am going to share the top 5 visited posts @SilverlightZone during last week. Also, I am going to share the daily news digest links in case you missed to find some of them.

Few days ago, I published a XAML Tips "How to Convert a Rectangle to a Path Control using Expression Blend?". Today in this post, we will discuss on another tips similar to that post. In this post, we will discuss on the steps to crop an element to give a desired output.

 

This post will help a beginner who just started designing XAML using Expression Blend. Hope, this small tip will help you to understand it in better way. Read to know more on this topic.

Windows Phone 7.1 SDK Release Candidate (RC) is now available for download. Microsoft released this version with “Go Live” license, that means, you can now build production applications and submit them to the Marketplace. This build also empowers the developer to build applications and games both for WP7.0 and WP7.1 devices.

 

In this post, find the link to the web installer and standalone/offline installer. Download, install and start building your games or applications.

This will be a short tip of the day where I will show you the way to convert a Rectangle or a Ellipse control to a Path control. If you are not familiar with Expression Blend and currently working with it to design your UI, this tip will definitely help you in various scenarios.

 

Let’s start with a small demonstration using Rectangle control. You can do the same for Ellipse too. Read to know more.

Proud to announce that, I have been selected as the Winner of Article writing competition at "The Code Project" for the month of July 2011. This is the first competition that I have won from Code project.

 

Last month I wrote an article on Silverlight which demonstrated the steps require to do the communication between two local Silverlight applications. This article was well appreciated by the readers and my sincere thanks to all community fellows to support me by providing their vote and feedback. Read to find more about the article.

During last week (i.e. from 14th August 2011 to 20th August 2011) we submitted 85 posts at Silverlight-Zone.com. Topics were on Silverlight, Windows Phone 7, LightSwitch and Xbox. Some posts on WPF also showcased there.

 

In this post find the most visited 5 posts. As usual, I am sharing the "Daily News Digest" pages of last week too, in case you want to find out the posts submitted during the week.

Microsoft released the new stable version of "Silverlight for Windows Phone Toolkit (SDK 7.1)" at Codeplex. This is the first stable build after the February 2011 release. This release features several new controls and fixes to the existing controls.

 

In this post find the new controls that has been added to this release. Also find the setup link and urls to the release notes.

Hope you already read my article series "Collection of Windows Phone 7 (Mango) Tutorials". During the tutorial series, we used the common styles "PhoneTextNormalStyle" and "PhoneTextTitle1Style" in the TextBlocks added to the TitlePanel. So what are those? These are all common styles defined by the style library of WP7 SDK.

 

In this post, we will learn about various font sizes defined in the default style library of Windows Phone 7. So, you don't have to define them again and can reuse those styles which will be standard sizes all over any Phone 7 Applications. Let's discuss them here. Read to know more about it.

Sometime we need to bind the same data in different properties of the same control. For example, in some cases we need to show text in a TextBlock and also want to show the same text as a Tooltip to that TextBlock control.

 

How to do it? It's very easy to bind the same value twice in the control. But is there any other way to implement the same? Let us discuss this today in this blog post. If you are not aware of it till date, you will definitely like.

Today in this article we will discuss how to fetch feed from Picasa and display images from that RSS feed to your Windows Phone 7. This will not only clear the image feed mechanism in WP7, but will also help you to understand how to read RSS feed in Windows Phone 7 or in a Silverlight application.

 

After reading this article, you will be able to fetch any feed and display specific content in your application. Hope, this will help you. Don't forget to share it to your followers and if you have any query, drop a line below.

Here comes the weekly news digest of Silverlight-Zone.com. During last week (i.e. from 7th August 2011 to 13th August) we have submitted 83 news links in Silverlight-Zone on various topics like Silverlight, Windows Phone 7, LightSwitch, XAML, MVVM and more.

 

In this post, I am going to share the top 5 visited posts @SilverlightZone during last week. Also, I am going to share the daily news digest links in case you missed to find some of them.

Sometime we need to detect the browser information of the user's computer where our Silverlight application is running. We can do this using the JavaScript but sometime it is useful to detect it from our Silverlight application. So, how to do it? Let us discuss this with a small simple example.

 

Read this post to know how to detect the browser information using the HtmlPage.BrowserInformation property.

"Why my Visual Studio debugger is not working for my Silverlight application?" - it's not a new question. People ask this several time in different forums. If you search on net, you may probably find the solution. But, in this post I am just sharing the solution once again for my blog readers and anyone on the net who may face similar issue in future.

 

In this post, I will share you 4 small tips. Just follow the steps from top to bottom and let me know which one resolved your problem. This tip might not be a new thing for you but don't forget to share to others. This could be useful for them.

All most all secured sites like bank websites asks you to close your browser window after you signed out from the web application. This is due to high security which actually removes all session details from the browser cache.

 

If you want to develop the same behavior in your Silverlight application, how will you do this? This post covers the code to implement the functionality of the same. Read to know more.

Few weeks ago Mr. Jim Moscater, Community Leader of DZone, contacted me saying that he really liked my WP7 & Silverlight related blog contents and wanted to invite me to join DZone's MVB (Most Valuable Blogger) program.

 

I am very proud to say that, I am now a MVB of DZone. So, what is this MVB Program? Read to know more about this.

During last week (from 31st July 2011 to 6th August 2011) around 89 article links on Silverlight, Windows Phone 7, LightSwitch and XNA submitted in Silverlight-Zone.com.

 

In this digest post, top 5 popular links are on "Windows 8 and the Future of Silverlight", "7 reasons to be a WP7 developer", "What's new in Silverlight 5", "Smooth Streaming on WP7" and "Windows Phone SDK 7.1 - A Developer review". If you are worried about the future of Silverlight, never miss to read out the post by Identity Mine.

 

Read to know more about the popular posts and find out the daily news digest links. Follow us on Twitter and become a fan of our Facebook page to be updated on latest article links.

If you work in XAML pages, sometime you might noticed that the XAML page freezes for sometime while opening the page in design view. This is very annoying and many time it is responsible to crash the Visual Studio IDE. So what to do?

 

If you use Expression Blend to design the XAML page or don't want to open the XAML in design view, this small tip will help you to improve the performance of the IDE. Read more to know.

Few days ago, I published one article on "Application Library Caching in Silverlight 4". In that article, we discussed about Library Caching concept in detail with a small demo. We discussed various parts of the AppManifest to support this feature for 3rd party libraries. But sometime you may need this feature for your own custom libraries too to reduce the XAP file size by separating the external assemblies in their own ZIP file, which will download by the app when it is require.

 

Let us discuss on this topic today by a small example which will help you to understand how to prepare your dll library to support Library Caching by your application. Read more to learn about it.

Last week was a busy week in Microsoft Technology. We noticed lots of releases during the whole week and hence increased the no. of posts in Silverlight-Zone.com too. During the week, 24th July 2011 to 30th July 2011, we have total 87 new article and news links posted here on Silverlight, Windows Phone 7 and LightSwitch.

 

In this weekly news digest, I am going to share the popular 5 posts of the week and links to all the daily digest pages. Most popular posts are on News of "WP7 Mango build 7712 release", News of "Microsoft gives WP7 developers a refreshed Mango build", News on "Windows Phone MVC release", "Collection of WP7 (Mango) Tutorials" and "A Story on LightSwitch in the not so distant future". Read out more to find out those links.

Few weeks ago, I published a post in my blog on "Default Browser Switcher Extension for Visual Studio 2010" and today that has been selected as "Articles of the Day" in Microsoft official site ASP.Net and showcased.

 

In that article, I described about a cool extension that you can download freely from the Microsoft Gallery. This extension will help you to improve the productivity if you are working as a web developer. That article demonstrates installation and uses steps-by-step. Read more to read about it.

Microsoft released Visual Studio LightSwitch 2011 on 26th July 2011. This is the first version of the product. You already known about this but those who are new to this product, let me tell about it first. This is a new tool for building data-driven Silverlight Application using Visual Studio IDE. It automatically generates the User Interface for a Data Source targeted for the desktop and cloud by writing a minimal code.

 

In this post, I am going to share the download links (both Web and Offline installer), as well as some good resources to jump start with this tool.

Sometime it is require to communicate between two local Silverlight applications. Though this situation is very limited but it may require as per your business deal. In such case, the local messaging mechanism comes into the place.

 

In this post, we will learn about this local messaging system using a small Silverlight application where we will have a sender project and a receiver project. At the end of the article, I embedded the demo which will give you more visibility on what we are going to do in the demo. Let's discuss more on this topic.

During the week 17th July to 23rd July, we have 68 new article links at Silverlight-Zone.com which consists of various topics like Silverlight, Windows Phone 7, LightSwitch, XAML and Blend.

 

In this weekly news digest, I am going to share the popular 5 posts of the week and links to all the daily digest pages. Most popular posts are on "A Collection of WP7 (Mango) Tutorials", "3rd Part of Data Driven Application with MVVM", "Metro Theme Customization7", "Microsoft has 3 months to make or break Windows Phone" and "Excel like Filtering in Silverlight DataGrid".

 

Read more to find those interesting posts of this week and the digest links in case you missed them.

It's definitely a great start of the day when you notice that one of your article has been selected as "Articles of the Day" in Microsoft's official site WindowsClient.net. This happened with me once again.

 

Few months ago I published one blog post describing a tip that helps to quickly close the open Visual Studio documents. There I also described how to customize the keyboard to assign shortcut for any Visual Studio commands. Read to know more.

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.

 

This eBook collects all 5 Chapters of Silverlight Show article series 'Beginners Guide to Visual Studio LightSwitch (Beta 1)' for your offline reference. In this post, I am going to share the Contents of this eBook. Also, there is a link to purchase the book. Read to know more about this.

Recently I had started exploring Windows Phone 7 with first Mango update and accumulated a no. of beginners tutorial in my blog. In this post, I am going to share all the chapters of the series as "31 days with WP7" - a must needed guide for a beginner who wants to learn about Windows Phone 7 programming.

 

Hope, this will be helpful to you to understand the basics before jump start to the application development. This post is on popular demand and I am dedicating this to all my blog readers. Thank you everyone for your support.

The weekly news digest of Silverlight-Zone.com released. We have 63 new article links posted in Silverlight-Zone on different topics like Silverlight, Windows Phone 7 and LightSwitch. In this post, I am going to share the top most 5 links as well as the daily digest links for your reference.

 

This week (10th July 2011 to 16th July 2011) top post was on the future of Silverlight and whether Silverlight is really dead. This post was made by Stephan Forte. A good discussion on Silverlight and XAML. If you are still in doubt, read this post. There are also other topics from James R. Borck, J. Prosise, Owen Williams and Suprotim Agarwal on Silverlight and WP7. Read more to find the links.

Many time we need to change the layout type of any panel present inside the page. This is mainly a designers job but sometime developers need to change them on their requirement. In that case, people need to find out the start and end tag of the panel and change them accordingly. This is little bit a tricky process.

 

In this post, I am going to share you the easy process to switch between different layout types. If you are a designer or using Expression Blend, you are already familiar with it. But for a newbie, I think it will be a great help.

Last Wednesday (July 6th 2011) we explored a way to create a Circular loader using XAML without writing any line in the code behind file. Lot of you gave a good feedback and discussed various findings on the same.

 

I did some more investigation to create a different type of circular loader which you can include in your Silverlight, WPF and Windows Phone 7 applications where you are using XAML code. In this article, I will be guiding to create similar kind of Circular loader as shown above. This will be more simple than the previous one. Let's start our discussion and create one loader like this.

Many time we need to find out which Theme we are using in Windows Phone 7. Based upon the chosen theme we may want to set our own Theme for the application. So, how to find out that?

 

In this post, I am going to share you the Tip. Using it you will be able to identify the current theme of your Windows Phone 7 device. Read to know more.

On last Saturday (i.e. 9th July 2011) I delivered one hour session on "MVVM from Scratch using Silverlight" in Pune User Group's (PUG) Monthly meet. The session was full of demo and very little with slides.

 

In this post I will just recap the session for you to know what are the things I discussed there. I will also share the slides here, if you want to go through it offline.

The Weekly News Digest of Silverlight-Zone.com is out. This week we have total 71 article news posted in Silverlight-Zone on various topics like Silverlight, Windows Phone 7, LightSwitch and XNA. Like always, Windows Phone 7 articles are trending much than Core Silverlight articles. I think, to start viewing some new links on Silverlight, we have to wait more time for the next build of Silverlight 5.

 

In this post, I am going to share all the daily news digest so that, you can find the all the links posted there daily. Also, I am going to share the top 5 posts of this week (3rd July 2011 to 9th July 2011). Read to know more.

Sometime we need to know whether Network connectivity is available or not from our application. In Windows Phone 7, we have the required API exposed for the developers to detect the status of the network connection and take respective step based on that.

 

So how to detect it? In this small tip of the tutorial series, we will learn about the API and we will also see how this can be done using a small demo which includes code too. Read to know more about it.

If you are a XAML designer and creating controls for Silverlight, Windows Phone 7 or WPF, you may come in some situation that the custom properties for the controls are not properly organized by the developers. If you come into such situation forward this link to the developers and they may find it useful.

 

In this article, we will learn how to well organize the custom properties of your control so that, designers can easily search in appropriate location. Read to know more about it.

There are many instance when we have "Browser1" as the default browser in the system and we want our web application to be run inside a different browser (say "Browser2") from the Visual Studio IDE. To do this, we need to open the "Browser2" application and set it as default one, so that, the "Browser2" will start as the application handle from the IDE. After that, you have to revert back the default browser to "Browser1" by doing the same step.

 

This is really very difficult job. To simplify this thing, there is an Extension for the Visual Studio 2010 IDE. If you download and install that free extension, you will be able to do this very easily. In this post I will share the step and show you how this will improve your productivity.

Sometime we need to show a circular loader in WPF and/or Silverlight. We may need it in Windows Phone 7 too. In simple statement, we need to show a circular loader in various XAML applications like Silverlight, WP7 and WPF.

 

In this article, we will learn how to create a Circular Loader as shown in the screenshot. I will not use a single line of C# code to create this loader. Everything will be in the XAML file itself to keep the code behind file clean. Read to know more about it step-by-step and after reading this article, you will be able to create and use a circular loader like this. Source code is also available for download at the end of the page. Feel free to use it.

Input Scope of a TextBox defines the information related to the scope of the data provided by the input method and use to define the layout of the onscreen keyboard of the device. It is present in the "System.Windows.Input" namespace and exposed in TextBox as a property called "InputScope".

 

You might be wondering what is this property and why should one use it. Ok, let us discuss this in depth with a small sample. After reading this chapter, you will be able to understand it more and use it on your business requirement. Don't forget to share this tutorial links to others as this will help them to learn more.

 

On coming Saturday, 9th July 2011, I am going to take an hour session on "MVVM from Scratch using Silverlight" in the Pune User Group's (PUG) monthly meeting. The session will start from 10 AM and will continue for one hour. Also there are two more sessions on Windows Phone 7 and Parallel Programming.

 

In this one hour session, I will demonstrate what is MVVM pattern, how a designer/developer will get the benefit of using it. I will also demonstrate how this will help you to clear up the code behind file and make a fully loosely coupled & maintainable code. Read more to find the Agenda and Venue of the event. Entry is FREE, hence you can join it directly at the venue. Will meet you there.

Here comes the weekly digest of Silverlight-Zone.com from 26th June 2011 to 2nd July 2011. We have completed 6 months of this site with more than 2000 news items. We received some good feedback too including a huge hit to the site. This motivates us to serve you better in future.

 

In this post, I am going to share the top 5 posts of this week. Windows Phone 7 is trending in this site. Top 5 posts are "The news of distribution of WP7 Mango to developers by Microsoft", "Windows 8 Rumour to Future for WP7", "A Screen Recorder application in WP7", "Hosting HTML App in WP7 Mango" and "Betting the House on LightSwitch". Read to find out these links as well as the link to daily news digest of the week in case you missed to read them.

Microsoft released Windows Phone SDK 7.1 Beta 2 on 29th June 2011. Earlier it was named as Windows Phone Developer Tools. While releasing the beta 2 version of the Software, they renamed it to Windows Phone SDK 7.1.

 

Today I downloaded the SDK and installed it in my laptop. Sharing the same experience here just in case you want to read it. This will also help a beginner to kick start on the same.

Last three days we learnt about the new feature of Windows Phone 7 (Mango) called "Local Database Support". Yesterday we discussed it in depth by building a small demo application. While working with the demo you might noticed that, we used a connection string to connect with the local database present in the Windows Phone storage.

 

In this post, we will discuss more on the connection string. After reading this post, you will be able to know what are the various types and parameters available for connection string.

In the last two chapters of the tutorial series, we discussed about the local database support in Windows Phone 7 (Mango). We learnt how to create a DataContext class from existing SQL CE database and also we learnt about the issues that arises once we add the class file in the project to build. We learnt the steps to resolve those issues too.

 

In this article, we are going to discuss about the CRUD operations that we can do using the DataContext class with a small application. We will learn how to create and delete a database, we will also learn how to insert or fetch records. After reading this tutorial you will also be able to do other operations like edit, search etc.

Microsoft released Windows Phone 7.1 SDK Beta 2 today, 29th June 2011. It has a no. of new features as well as some breaking changes respect to previous Beta 1 release.

 

In this post, find the link to download the Beta 2 SDK of Windows Phone 7.1 (Mango) which includes both the web and standalone offline installer. Also find the links towards new and breaking changes.

Hope you read my previous post on Windows Phone 7.1 (Mango) local database support. If you didn't read the earlier post, you need to read it before reading this one. You can find it here: "Create DataContext". That will give you the basic context about the same.

 

In this post (I will rather calling it as a Tip), we will configure the project by adding the generated DataContext class and in the next post, we will learn what are the various CRUD operations we can do with a sample application. That will give you complete visibility to this new feature implementation.

Do you know that, Windows Phone 7.1 (Mango) now supports local database? Yes, you can now use local database inside your Phone 7 device and use it to CRUD operations. You can now create a DataContext class from an existing database and use it as the entry point class to do DB operation.

 

In this chapter we will learn how to create a DataContext class for local SQL CE database. At the end of this tutorial our data context class will be ready for further DB operations.

Last two days we learned about Accelerometer class, it's base class and the accelerometer tool that comes with the Phone emulator. Hope those posts gave you some basic idea about it.

 

Here in this post, we will learn the use of this feature with a small demo application. We will also learn how to use the phone to write application that depends on the gravitational force applied to the sensors. This will give you better idea to create game application that will work when the user moves his phone device.

Here comes the weekly news digest of Silverlight-Zone.com from 19th June 2011 to 25th June 2011. We have submitted 72 article links during the week on various topics like Silverlight, Windows Phone 7, LightSwitch, Expression Blend and even Windows 8.

 

During this week, top news was on Windows 8 Rumour to Windows Phone 7 future followed by several Windows Phone 7 related articles. In this post, I am going to share the top 5 posts as well as the links to daily news digest at Silverlight-Zone.com. Read to know more.

Yesterday, we came to know about Accelerometer of Windows Phone 7. We also learnt about the structure of the Accelerometer class and it's base class. Now, it's the time to see how to run the same inside the Phone emulator. In this post we are going to see the accelerometer tool that comes with the Phone 7 emulator.

 

Read more to know how to run the accelerometer tool and what customization we can do with this tool. This will be beneficial for you when we discuss more about the topic with a sample application.

Accelerometer defines the force applied to the Windows Phone 7 device which can be used to determine the measure of direction that has been applied by the user by moving the device. This values are represented as a 3D vector coordinates in X, Y and Z axis. Using the Accelerometer class present in the library, we can programmatically control the device's 3D acceleration.

 

In this article we will learn about the class that we will use to demonstrate the same feature. Read to learn more about it.

Last two days, we learnt about Alarm and Reminder class present for Windows Phone 7 application development. We came to know about the class structure and demoed the implementation with small application created in step-by-step process. We also learnt about the use of Task while discussing the same.

 

In this tutorial chapter we will learn more about the tasks present for Mango devices. After reading this part you will be able to understand the different tasks and their uses. Read more to learn about them with visual code snippet and huge screenshots.