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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 partitioning da

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 to provide seamless UX from dedicated devi

Images play a very significant role in any Windows Phone application. So, one should be very careful while dealing with images. As of now, Windows Phone supports only two image formats named JPG/JPEG and PNG. Now before concluding on which image format to choose, let's get into bit more depth of it. PNG format images are non-lossy and need very little CPU effort to display because those are pixel perfect. But at the same time, huge PNG images take too much longer to read from storage and ultimately lead to slower display. On the other hand, JPEG format images are lossy, smaller to store  and based on the compression level much more complicated decoding algorithm is required to display them. Another point regarding image is about opacity and transparency -  All the images that use transparency should be stored as PNG format because JPEG doesn’t support transparency and JPEG format should be used for all the images that are fully opaque. Now when coming to Windows Ph

Importance of UI in performance Simple UI tricks, such as progress bars, redirecting user's attention using animation, or placing slower loading sections at the bottom of a page or off-screen, can often ‘fix’ a performance problem without the need to tune the underlying code. These UI tricks are an important tool to have in your performance tuning toolbox and can be much quicker and easier than addressing the underlying issue. They can act as a holdover until you have the time to devote to the core problem. So, one should never underestimate the UI while tackling performance issues. Isn't it interesting :)

Yes, if you are in a loop and adding to a string, then a StringBuilder *could* be most appropriate. However, the overhead of spinning up a StringBuilder instance makes the following pretty dumb:      var sb = new StringBuilder();  sb.Append("This is "); sb.Append("not more efficient"); sb.Append(" solution."); var str= sb.ToString();   Instead, use String.Join , which is typically more performant than spinning up a StringBuilder instance for a limited number of strings. It’s my go-to concat option:             string myString = String.Join(" ", new String[] { "This", "is", "a", "much", "better", solution, "."});   The first variable of " " can just be set to "" when you don’t want a delimiter. For loops that do a lot of looping, sure, use a StringBuilder. But just don’t assume it’s the de facto solution in all, or even the majority of cases. My rule of thumb

Introduction  Continuing to my   Prism 2 of n series , in this article I am going to talk about how a communication happens between various application components, following Prism framework. Background  In earlier articles of this series, I already mentioned that Prism is all about loose coupling and modularity. So, in order to achieve both these aspects we divide our application into multiple modules. Now, when we are talking about modularity, first thing which strikes to our mind is communication. How will these module going to talk with each other, how they are going to communicate with each other, etc, etc. So, when we have a need of communication between modules, there are couple of approaches which we can take like Commanding, Event Aggregation, Shared Services, Region Context and probably there are many more. In this article, mainly I'll be taking these four concepts:    Commanding   Event Aggregation   Region Context  Shared Services      Now let's take

Both these words play a very important role in defining constants in an application (C#). At one sight, it seems like, both are same but exactly it is not he case. Let's understand one by one to get the clear picture. The word const itself means, it will never change. If you are specifying any variable as a  const t hat means the value of the variable is never going to change inside the application. How we declare a constant is, by using a  const  keyword. Basically, one can define  const  only on the primitive types, like int, double, etc. One should make sure that the value should be assigned at the time of declaration itself and another important thing is whatever value is set for  const  variable, that value will be set at the compile time itself and this value will get stored inside a .dll or an .exe. In later part, I'll show u on how we can see this value inside a dll or an exe using an Ildasm. Sample code to define  const   variable is as: Another key