Vipul Patel

Introduction We all have ideas and think we can quickly build applications. However, when rubber meets the road, we realize that building an application is not as simple as we think. Sometimes, we are trying to just check out an idea, but as any application developer can tell you, it takes a lot of time […]

Introduction With the popularity of Facebook at its utmost, it makes sense for application developers to leverage this and provide a way to enable Facebook login in their Windows Phone application. With Facebook login enabled in a Windows Phone application, users are prompted with the familiar Facebook login button. Enabling Facebook login in a Windows […]

Introduction With the emergence of better cameras in mobile phones, users are taking photos of increasingly higher resolutions. Image quality is getting better, and the image sizes are correspondingly increasing. High image quality shots take a lot of disk space, so it is important to be judicious when it comes to determining what resolution you […]

Introduction One little known fact is that Nokia is the largest manufacturer of cameras (by virtue of being the largest manufacturers of mobile phones). The camera specifications of their latest phones would shame the best of camera manufacturers because of the high bar Nokia has set. Since camera is considered one of the top most […]

Introduction Certain type of operations in mobile applications take time. For good customer experience, it is suggested that the user be informed that the activity is in progress. Providing such an indication helps prevents users from guessing whether their action was registered with the application or not. Displaying activity progress also allows a user to […]

Introduction To build applications that work with voice and audio inputs, Microsoft has provided programmatic APIs as part of the XNA framework, which is part of Windows Phone platform. This allows developers to build sound recording applications by using the Microphone class. Microphone Basics The Microphone class resides in the Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Audio namespace as part of […]

Introduction ListBox is dead!!! Long live ListBox. While not completely true, that was the intention of the Windows Phone architects when they introduced LongListSelector control as part of Windows Phone 8.0 operating system. In fact, with the platform tools like Visual Studio 2013, ListBox is not even offered as a control that can be dragged […]

Introduction With Windows Phone 8, Microsoft introduced the programmatic ability to access contacts, calendar and appointments. In an earlier article Building a Windows Phone Application that Accesses Contacts, we learned how to build a simple Windows Phone application that can access contacts on a device. In this article, we will learn about support to access […]

Introduction Windows Phone provides developers the programmatic ability to access contacts that enables them to build experiences that integrate tightly with the native contacts experience. The Windows Phone platform supports integration with contacts in two ways: 1. It supports read-only access to the phone’s contacts store. This support is available in all versions of Windows […]

Introduction To get the best possible performance out of Windows Phone applications, it is important that the applications do not become a resource hog. In this article, we will look at working with memory limits for Windows Phone applications. Application developers should note that all Windows Phone devices are high memory devices. In fact, the […]

Introduction As part of Windows 8.1, Microsoft is planning to release a ton of new APIs and controls to make it easy for application developers to build applications targeting the platform. Most of the applications have a need to expose application settings to the users. To ensure that applications offer a consistent experience to users, […]

Introduction Windows 8.1 introduces a bunch of new APIs to support common use cases.  To customize user interaction with the application, Windows 8.1 provides the MenuFlyout control, which allows application developers to build applications that can show contextual menus for the user to choose from. Basics The MenuFlyout control is used to show options that […]