Windows Phone 8.0 SDK

Visual Studio 2015 RC–Download

April 30, 2015 .NET, .NET Framework, .NET Framework 4.6, ASP.NET, ASP.NET 5.0, ASP.NET AJAX, ASP.NET MVC, BCL(Base Class Library), Microsoft, Microsoft SDKs, MSDN, Portable Class Library, SignalR, Trial Downloads, Updates, Visual Studio 2015, VisualStudio, VS2015, Web API, Web API v2.0, Windows, Windows 10, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1, Windows Phone 8.0 SDK, Windows Phone SDK 2 comments

During #Build2015 event Microsoft has unveiled Visual Studio 2015 RC (Release Candidate) with lots of improvements and fixes to CTP version of Visual Studio. RC would be a near release quality and your see it is stable than ever.

Release Date:	29/APR/2015
Release Notes:	View Release notes

Download

Visual Studio 2015 RC Community Edition – Web Install / Offline Install (iSO) (3.56GB)
Visual Studio 2015 RC Enterprise Edition – Web Install / Offline Install (iSO) (3.71GB)
Visual Studio 2015 RC Professional Edition – Web Install / Offline Install (iSO) (3.68GB)

Other Associated Products

Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2015 RC – Web Install / Offline Install (iSO) (396MB)
Release Manager Client for Visual Studio 2015 RC – – Web Install / Offline Install(iSO) (318MB)

Visual Studio 2015–Editions

April 30, 2015 .NET, .NET Framework 4.6, ASP.NET 5.0, Community, Editions, Microsoft, Microsoft SDKs, Mobile-Development, MSDN, MSDN, Visual Studio 2015, Visual Studio SDK, VisualStudio, VS2015, Web API, Web API v2.0, Windows 10, Windows Phone, Windows Phone 8.0 SDK, Windows Phone SDK No comments

With Visual Studio 2015 Microsoft has changed type of editions available as part the Visual Studio product line up, also made some changes to MSDN Subscription levels.

Changes in Visual Studio Editions

No more Premium and Ultimate edition of Visual Studio. There will only be 3 editions available:

Visual Studio 2015 Community Edition – Free, full-featured and extensible tool for developers building non-enterprise applications
Visual Studio 2015 Professional Edition – Professional developer tools and services for individual developers or small teams
Visual Studio 2015 Enterprise Edition – Enterprise grade solution with advanced capabilities for teams working on projects of any size or complexity, including advanced testing and DevOps

Changes in MSDN Subscription Levels

MSDN Subscription Levels also has changed: there will be only two subscription levels MSDN PRO and MSDN Enterprise. If you have a valid MSDN Premium subscription, it will be automatically upgraded to MSDN Enterprise, which is fully loaded as previous MSDN Ultimate.

Limited Period Upgrade Offer – 50% off on upgrade to Premium

Beginning May 2015 – Upgrade from : Visual Studio Professional with MSDN or Visual Studio Test Professional with MSDN to Visual Studio Premium with MSDN for 50% off the regular list price and get a free upgrade to Visual Studio Enterprise with MSDN automatically when Microsoft release Visual Studio 2015.

For more information follow: https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/products/vs-2015-product-editions.aspx

Windows Phone Screen Sharing/Mirroring to PC

July 4, 2014 KnowledgeBase, Mirror Casting, Visual Studio 2013, VisualStudio, VS2012, VS2013, Windows, Windows 8, Windows 8.1, Windows Phone, Windows Phone 8, Windows Phone 8.0 SDK, Windows Phone Development, Windows Phone SDK, Windows Store Development No comments

Being mobile developer and strong follower of Mobile related technologies, always admire to demonstrate my work to my friends and colleagues. All this time I was fancy about iOS Mirroring provided through apps Reflector and Air Server. With help of these tools we used to mirror our iPad/iPhone to be mirrored to a Windows/Mac and then project that to large screen using a Projector. These tools seamlessly mirror your activities on iPad/iPhone and audiences get a live view of the application running in a Live Phone. Advantage is you don’t have to rely on iOS Simulators coming with XCode and iOS SDK alone to demo your applications.

Coming to Windows Phone, we can have the same through a Wired Connection. Probably in recent Microsoft demos you might have fancied how the presenters used to share their Windows Phone activities and features from their live phones. You don’t have to envy them, it is available for our use now.

Microsoft has provided an application to be installed on Windows/Mac or Tablets and through a Wired or Wifi.

Download Project My Screen App from Microsoft

It is pretty simple to use:

1. Just install the app on your Windows/Mac

2. Connect your Windows Phone to USB (wired)

3, Launch “Project My Screen App” from Start Menu. It will detect your phone and your will will be prompted to Accept the screen sharing. Click on ‘Yes’, and look how amazing it is to share your screen on PC.

PS: There is a caveat you all need to know, you cannot share DRM protected contents through this feature.

Enjoy your live demos…

Visual Studio 2013 – Update 2 is available

May 14, 2014 .NET, .NET Framework, .NET Framework 4.5.2, Azure SDK, Microsoft, SQL Server 2014, Trial Downloads, Updates, Visual Studio 2013, VisualStudio, VS2013, Windows, Windows 8, Windows 8 apps development, Windows 8.1, Windows Azure Development, Windows Phone, Windows Phone 8, Windows Phone 8.0 SDK, Windows Phone Development, Windows Phone Store, Windows Store, Windows Store Development, Windowz Azure, XBOX Development No comments

Microsoft has released the latest update for Visual Studio 2013 with major improvements including support for developing Universal apps for Windows 8.x, Win Phone, and XBOX.

Here are the list of improvements included as part of the release(lending from Visual Studio team blog):

Visual Studio 2013 Update 2 has many new capabilities as well as fixes that address bugs, customer feedback, performance, and reliability improvements. Here are some new capabilities that are part of this and related Updates and links to where you can find more info.

Universal Apps. With this release you can now build universal apps that can run on Windows 8.1 and Windows Phone 8.1 while sharing code and assets through shared projects.

TypeScript. The TypeScript language is a typed superset of JavaScript that compiles to plain JavaScript. As a typed language you can define classes, modules and interfaces that compiles to JavaScript and runs in any browser.

Web Tool. Our web development tools have many new features like SCSS support, a new JSON editor, updated ASP.NET templates, and an improved URL picker.

Azure tools. It’s easier to take advantage of Azure with options to create websites and SQL Azure databases directly on Azure for simpler deployment to a development / testing environment.

Diagnostics. Our diagnostics tools also got some enhancements. Performance events now let you navigate to user code for MVC Methods or jump to the SQL command for database queries. It is also possible to view the Windows Store diagnostics tools at the same time to see all your diagnostics information on a shared timeline.

Slipstream install. You can download Visual Studio with all its latest features from one install that includes Visual Studio 2013 RTM and Update 2 for Visual Studio.

There are a number of other important updates that are available today in addition to Update 2 for Visual Studio 2013:

Apache Cordova and Visual Studio. Cordova tools in Visual Studio let web developers build cross-platform mobile applications targeting Android, iOS, Windows and Windows Phone using use their existing skills in HTML and JavaScript. To learn more about Apache Cordova visit http://cordova.apache.org/

A cloud optimized .NET. The latest updates to the framework provide a cloud optimized mode that is smaller, lighter weight, and designed for cloud and server workloads.

.Net vNext. This update to the .Net framework is optimized for cloud-first and mobile-first development. It enables you to compile C# 6 and VB code with Roslyn compilers, speed up Windows Store apps with the .NET Native ahead of time compiler, and has a cloud optimized mode for ASP.NET apps.

TFS 2013 Update 2. It’s worth mentioning again the updates in TFS 2013 like improvements for tagging, charting, shared parameters, cloud load testing application analytics, and a lot more.

Check out Somasegar’s Blog and Brian Harry’s Blog to get more details on some of the highlights in this release. For a quick view at all the features and fixes included in this update go to the KB article.

DOWNLOAD:

Visual Studio 2013 – Update 2 (Web / ISO)

WP8Dev– How to identify the sensors supported on your Windows Phone

August 12, 2013 C#.NET, Codes, KnowledgeBase, Microsoft, Microsoft SDKs, Mobile-Development, VisualStudio, VS2012, Windows, Windows Phone, Windows Phone 8, Windows Phone 8.0 SDK, Windows Phone Development, Windows Phone SDK, Windows Phone Store, XAML No comments

This post will give you an overview on how to identify the sensors supported on your Windows Phone. As a developer when you are developing for Windows Phone – and your application would need to interact with certain sensors in windows phone to achieve a certain functionality, you would need to verify whether the sensors are supported in targeted devices.

Windows Phone 8 platform has support for the following sensors

Motion sensor
Accelerometer
Compass
Gyroscope

You can access these API’s through the below namespace:

Microsoft.Devices.Sensors

You can check for any of the sensor support through “IsSupported” boolean property of the class

Motion sensor [ Microsoft.Devices.Sensors.Motion ]
Accelerometer [ Microsoft.Devices.Sensors.Accelerometer ]
Compass [ Microsoft.Devices.Sensors.Compass ]
Gyroscope [ Microsoft.Devices.Sensors.Gyroscope ]

Here is the sample code block:

  public static string GetSensors()
        {
               StringBuilder sensorsList = new StringBuilder();

                if (Microsoft.Devices.Sensors.Gyroscope.IsSupported)
                {
                    sensorsList.Append("Gyroscope, ");
                }

                if (Microsoft.Devices.Sensors.Compass.IsSupported)
                {
                    sensorsList.Append("Compass, ");
                }

                if (Microsoft.Devices.Sensors.Accelerometer.IsSupported)
                {
                    sensorsList.Append("Accelerometer, ");
                }

                if (Microsoft.Devices.Sensors.Motion.IsSupported)
                {
                    sensorsList.Append("Motion,");
                }

            return sensorsList.ToString();
        }

Note: Only Accelerometer is supported in Windows Phone 8 emulator. To test remaining capabilities, you would need to deploy the application on a real Windows Phone device.

Sending Mobile Push notification using C#/.NET (iOS, Android, Windows Phone 8, Windows 8 and Blackberry)

August 9, 2013 .NET, ANDROID, Blackberry, Extensions, iOS, iPhone, KnowledgeBase, Microsoft, Microsoft SDKs, Mobile, Mobile Services, Mobile-Development, Nokia, Third-Party-Libraries and Frameworks, VisualStudio, VS2010, VS2012, Windows, Windows 8 apps development, Windows Phone, Windows Phone 8, Windows Phone 8.0 SDK, Windows Phone Development, Windows Phone SDK, Windows Phone Store, Windows SDK, Windows Store, Windows Store Development 2 comments

This is an update blog to my earlier blog about Sending Apple iOS Push notifications using C#.

With that blog – I introduced you to how to send push notification using Open Source library APNSharp, by the developer John Redth. Redth announced that library is already deprecated.

Redth came up with with another open source project called as PushSharp:,published under apache software foundation license.

PushSharp is a server-side library for sending Push Notifications to iOS (iPhone/iPad APNS), Android (C2DM and GCM – Google Cloud Message), Windows Phone, Windows 8, Amazon, Blackberry, and (soon) FirefoxOS devices!. Single library serves the purpose of sending push notifications to multiple platforms. Pretty decent isn’t it?

Here is the basic architecture:

Features of PUsHSHARP

Supports sending push notifications for many platforms:

Apple (APNS – iPhone, iPad, Mountain Lion)

Android (GCM/C2DM – Phones/Tablets)

Chrome (GCM)

Amazon (ADM – Amazon Device Messaging)

Windows Phone 7 / 7.5 / 8 (including FlipTile, CycleTile, and IconicTile Templates!)

Windows 8

Blackberry (BIS and BES via PAP)

Firefox OS (Coming soon)

Fluent API for constructing Notifications for each platform

Auto Scaling of notification channels (more workers/connections are added as demand increases, and scaled down as it decreases)

Implementation using PushSharp is straight forward

Here’s some sample code: shared by Redth

//Create our push services broker
var push = new PushBroker();

//Registering the Apple Service and sending an iOS Notification
var appleCert = File.ReadAllBytes("ApnsSandboxCert.p12"));
push.RegisterAppleService(new ApplePushChannelSettings(appleCert, "pwd"));
push.QueueNotification(new AppleNotification()
                           .ForDeviceToken("DEVICE TOKEN HERE")
                           .WithAlert("Hello World!")
                           .WithBadge(7)
                           .WithSound("sound.caf"));


//Registering the GCM Service and sending an Android Notification
push.RegisterGcmService(new GcmPushChannelSettings("theauthorizationtokenhere"));
//Fluent construction of an Android GCM Notification
//IMPORTANT: For Android you MUST use your own RegistrationId here that gets generated within your Android app itself!
push.QueueNotification(new GcmNotification().ForDeviceRegistrationId("DEVICE REGISTRATION ID HERE")
                      .WithJson("{"alert":"Hello World!","badge":7,"sound":"sound.caf"}"));

You can get the Push Sharp for your .NET projects from below mentioned links:

Binaries from NuGet: https://www.nuget.org/packages/PushSharp