News

Top 5 SilverlightCream news for March 19-25, 2012:

• Windows 8 Metro Application AppBar trick
• Windows Phone - Theme colored tile and icon
• An Accurate Windows 8 Platform Architecture Diagram?
• What’s new in Expression Blend for visual studio?
• WinJS – how to cancel the navigation from a page ?

Dave also has another news site that worths taking a look at: WindowsDevNews.com. Check it out and make sure to bookmark it!

Read original post at Bill Reiss' Development Blog

I’ve been running the Windows 8 Consumer Preview on my personal laptop as my primary (and only) OS since it was released at the end of February, and for the most part it’s been a good experience. There hasn’t been much that I miss since almost everything works. The one major exception to this was that the Windows Phone emulator wouldn’t run. 

Read original post by Patrick Kalkman at The Code Project

This article describes the implementation and process of developing Blue Hour. Blue Hour is a Window Phone application for calculation the time the sun rises and sets for the next 30 days.

I love to take pictures using a digital camera. As most photographers know, light is the most important ingredient of a photo. The light during sunrise or sunrise is especially beautiful, making these periods ideal moments to take pictures.

Blue hour refers to the period of twilight each morning and evening where there is neither full daylight nor complete darkness. The time is considered special because of the quality of the light at this time of day, hence the name of the application Blue Hour.

Read original post by Chris Ziegler at The Verge

The Verge has learned that Microsoft went into its "Smoked by Windows Phone" campaign with a relatively thorough understanding of the risks involved, specifically telling employees of its retail stores to "select a challenge appropriate to your customer" with hints for which devices might be able to outgun Windows Phone in certain circumstances.

Read original post by Cliff Simpkins at The Windows Phone Developer Blog

I’m pleased to announce that the Windows Phone SDK 7.1.1 Update is now available for your download; it’s the final version of the CTP we released last month, and enables Windows Phone developers to do two things:

• Develop apps that work well on the new 256 MB devices
• Use the WPSDK 7.1 to develop on machines running Windows 8

While I’ll circle back to these two points in a moment, I’d like to take a moment and highlight what’s actually in this update.

Read original post at Nick's .NET Travels

Given how long TripleDes has been around you would have thought that it would be just part of any decent platform. Not so! Unfortunately Windows Phone support for cryptography in the core apis seems to be quite lacking (although it does now have DPAPI support for protecting local data). There also seems to be a lack of good documentation/examples on how to get existing code bases to work. It turns out that it’s not that hard if you reuse the massive Bouncy Castle cryptography library (http://www.bouncycastle.org/csharp/). Here are the steps to encrypt and decrypt with TripleDes using the Bouncy Castle library for Windows Phone.

Read original post at Pieter De Rycke's Blog

For a very long time I have avoided learning HTML and ASP.Net and stayed away of applications using it. I didn’t wanted to end up with messy code and hacks to support multiple browsers (read: Internet Explorer 6.0). But as HTML5 and CSS3 are gaining more momentum, I have changed my mind and I have started learning HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Even if these technologies have their annoyances, they are THE way to develop cross platform software applications.

Read original post by Toni Petrina at Toni codes .NET

In the earlier post we saw how to consume the OData service from console application. The same code applies for any desktop application, whether it is Windows Forms or WPF application. Since there is no support for developing WP7 applications in the Visual Studio 11 Beta, the code is written in the Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone.

Add the reference to the OData service using the instructions from the last post.

Read original post by Greg Jacobs at Binary Wasteland

In this windows phone 7 development 201 article we are going to cover live tiles. Live tiles have become a staple mark in the Windows Phone 7 OS arsenal as it distinguishes itself from the rest of the competition. In addition, it also gives developers a little more real-estate when it comes to getting pertinent information to the end user. This information could be anything from a notification that a new item is available and can be denoted by a number encased in a black circle to a title and text under it.