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Visual Studio 2013 Release Candidate is available for download now. This release includes new tools for line of business applications, Web applications, games, mobile devices, services and of course applications targeting our latest platform Windows 8.1.   With the Visual Studio 2013 Release Candidate (RC) and Windows 8.1 RTM for MSDN and TechNet subscribers, developers now have everything they need to start building and testing  the next generation applications for the Windows Platform. More.. .

Recently I worked on a WPF application which supports localization using LocBAML tool. I created a sample application, having a very simple UI, consist of a button inside a window. Here I am assuming that most of you are aware on how to generate satellite assemblies. So, quickly coming to the point, when I build my application, build was successful. But when I launched, my application crashed with reason stated as IOException :( After spending almost an hour, I came to know that it was due to Culture settings. Let's have a look at my code first: Apart from this above code, I also updated my project file (.csproj) for development language so that my satellite assembly contains the neutral language resources. Following line was added in the project file: <UICulture>en-US</UICulture> Apart from this, I did nothing special in my app. After hitting my head on msdn, I got an idea on why culture changes was causing an exception. Well, n...

Reduce the data sent across the network  Reducing the amount of data sent across the network can improve application performance significantly. Compressing CSS and JavaScript is possible using bundling and minification. This will reduce the number of server requests and the amount of code sent across the wire.

As a developer you may or may not need to go into the database and write queries or design tables and indexes, or help determine configuration of your SQL Server systems. But if you do, these tips should help to make that a more pain free process.  a) Since the code generated from the ORM can frequently be ad hoc, ensure that the SQL Server instance has ‘Optimize for Ad Hoc’ enabled. This will store a plan stub in memory the first time a query is passed, rather than storing a full plan. This can help with memory management. b) Ensure your variables and parameters are the same data types as the columns. An implicit or explicit conversion can lead to table scans and slow performance. c) You get exactly one clustered index on a table. Ensure you have it in the right place. First choice is the most frequently accessed column, which may or may not be the primary key. Second choice is a column that structures the storage in a way that helps performance. This is a must for partitionin...

Today I'll try to write bit on TemplateBinding and how to use it inside a ControlTemplate . TemplateBinding is a type of binding used mainly for template scenarios. Here I am not going to write more on it's theoretical aspect as what is TemplateBinding, when to use, blah blah blah, as lot of content is readily available on net.  So, let's start quickly onto coding part: First of all, let's create a new project using WPF template and place a button in it as below: Now, what I am going to do is, I am going to replace this content template for this button. So, in order to do this, open up the Button tag and add Button.Template  markup tag with a new ControlTemplate as: Now as soon as you will add ControlTemplate tag, you will notice that the content of the button is gone and button is shown as a transparent rectangle. This is happened because here I told WPF to replace the default ControlTemplate with the one, which I defined. But at this point, our Co...

This weekend, I got a chance to attend an event 'ReLive TechEd' organised by very talented folks of B.Net and Microsoft community. This event goes for close to 5 hours and gives us the glance of latest Microsoft technologies. The most effective thing was that all the sessions were given by the professionals who actually presented in Microsoft TechEd 2013. This year I missed the TechEd, but I am very happy and thankful to B.Net team, who organized it back and that is also totally free of cost :) 

Hope most of you might have heard DOUGLAS MARTIN's quote:           "Questions about whether design is  necessary or affordable are quite beside the point: Design is inevitable. The alternative to good design is bad design, not no design at all." And    VICTOR PAPANEK says:          "Design is the conscious effort to impose meaningful order" So, if designing is that much important then one has to be very much stern about it. Going forward, today I am pointing out some design principles for  Windows Phone App. So, let's gear up. Clutter free UI - Information should be well organized and user should not get congestion like feel. Make best use of typography Focus should be on content and it should be in a way that it attracts the user's attention from the beginning itself Try to keep only the most pertinent content on the screen because when it comes to WP design, content matters more than a chrome Try ...