Microsoft, in their Skype FAQ page updated that, the Skype app will continue to work on Windows Phone 8.x and Windows RT devices until early 2017. This also includes some Android, Mac and iOS devices running older version of the OS.
It’s because of their move towards transitioning Skype experience on cloud. Skype for other systems will not have any impact.
Microsoft released Windows 8.1 RTM and Windows RT 8.1 RTM on 17th October for general public to update their Windows 8 system. Many people already updated their Surface RT devices but as an exception, few people reported on Twitter and Forums that they are not able to update their RT devices.
If you are unable to update your Surface RT or unable to find the update in Windows Store, you are one of them who are victim of a small issue reported by Microsoft.
It does not sound good but this is the real fact. If you have a Microsoft Surface RT device with Windows 8.1 Preview installed and facing issue with battery consumption while in standby mode, it’s time for you to turn ON the Bluetooth of your device.
Microsoft support team answered in a forum thread that it is a bug and the current solution to resolve the quick draining of battery is to turn on the Bluetooth.
During the BUILD developer conference on 26th June 2013, Steve Ballmer announced the availability of Microsoft Windows 8.1 Preview and Windows 8.1 RT Preview. If you have Windows 8 PC, you can download an ISO image and install it from there. But if you have a Surface tablet, the process is different.
If you are using Surface RT and want to install Windows 8.1 RT Preview, this post will help you getting started. Make sure that you don’t have any language pack installed.
Yesterday in BUILD 2013 conference, Microsoft announced the availability of Windows 8.1 Preview which is now available for download as ISO image as well as an update from Windows Store. Windows RT devices have to update it from Windows Store only.
But before downloading and installing the latest preview build, you must know the pitfalls about it. In this post I am going to share some points for you. So, think before installing it now.
On 26th June 2013, during the BUILD Conference in San Francisco, Steve Ballmer announced the availability of the first official release of Windows 8.1 Preview. Windows 8.1 Preview and Windows RT 8.1 Preview are pre-release versions of Windows 8.1.
As it is a preview release and if you want to try the preview version, please make sure to read the post before starting the installation. Download links are available in this post for your reference.
Numeric control is not new and all of us already experienced it in various applications and websites. Telerik also has this control in all of their control libraries but was missing in Windows 8 for XAML library. Recently they announced the beta release of 2013.Q2 for Windows 8.
In this post, we will start with this new control that’s first introduced with Q2 2013 release of Telerik’s RadControls for Windows 8 XAML and find out the common properties a developer needs.
I just faced an issue with my Surface RT device. I was unable to turn on the device though it was completely charged. Though I had no idea about the issue but I was guessing about the Power Switch issue. Did a lot of stuffs, searching online etc. but nothing help.
Finally I tweeted about the issue and got a reply which helped me to turn on the device. If you came to this page just because your Surface is not turning on, this post will help you.
Today Tami Reller, Chief Marketing Officer for the Microsoft Windows business confirms the general availability and pricing of Windows 8.1 (Blue) at the JP Morgan Technology, Media & Telecom Conference in Boston.
The first public preview of next version of Windows 8 will be available during BUILD Conference going to happen at the end of June 2013.
Last year we discussed “How to Capture a Screenshot as File in Windows 8?” which you will find useful in your desktop PC or laptop. You will also find that post useful in a Surface if you have a keyboard attached to it, because “Win + Print Screen” key combination is needed to capture the screen.
What about Microsoft Surface which does not have a keyboard attach to it? In that case, a touch keyboard will be require to press the keys but that will fill half of the screen.
If you are a Win8Dev and building a Windows 8/WinRT application, you might want to download a file asynchronously from a web location. The job is very easy in Silverlight and in this case too but you just need to know the way, the APIs and the configuration settings.
Many developers already faced the difficulty to download a file in their WinRT apps and hence I thought to share the code with the API details in this post.
Are you a Windows 8 Application Developer? Are you building an app like audio/video player or game which needs to keep the display active when user is inactive in the system? Then you came to a right place where we will discuss how to keep the display on while idle.
This post details about the Windows 8/Windows RT API usage and code snippet to request the system to keep the display on. Continue reading to know more about it.
Are you a Windows 8 or Windows RT user? Are you looking for a code to change your Windows 8 lock screen programmatically? Then this post will be definitely helpful for you. Just follow the simple steps to write an application by which you can change it easily.
Windows 8 already exposes settings panel to change the lock screen of the Windows, but this post will help you to programmatically access that using the exposed APIs.
Microsoft is again back with their webcast series and this time they planned for both Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 sessions on the same day but in a different time slot. The webcast series will happen for five continuous days, 1.5hrs daily for each technology.
In this post, find the session details, time table and the link to register for the free webcast event. Take part of it and enhance your Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 skills.
As a Silverlight, WPF or WPDev you might be aware of the MessageBox class present in the SDK to show a message to the user and ask the user to interact with the application on some special cases. As a Win8Dev, you will find it missing in WinRT.
What to do? There is a class named MessageDialog which does the same thing but asynchronously in Windows 8 applications. If you are new to Win8Dev, you will find it useful.
As a Windows 8 Store application developer, we need to store and retrieve data to and from XML file stored in the application directory. There are various ways to store data in XML but this post will cover a simplest way to do that.
Here we will use a 3rd party extension in our application as assembly reference and use their XmlDeSerializer class to handle it easily. Keep reading to know more about it.
The Windows 8 Software Development Kit (SDK) contains header libraries and a set of tools which you can use to develop Windows Store apps using technologies like Visual C#, Visual Basic, Visual C++ and/or JavaScript.
Recently a new version of the SDK has been published which you can grab from here. Also it has a new version of the WACK to validate your Windows 8 Store application branding.
The “Clipboard” is a user driven set of functions that enables an application to transfer data between applications or within an application. Windows 8 Store SDK defines a set of APIs to handle the OS clipboard in your application.
In this continued series of Windows 8 Store application development tutorial, we will learn more about the API and the way to integrate the Clipboard in your WinRT application.
This is the continuing series of the Windows 8 Store application development tutorial and in this chapter, we will learn about creating and updating the live tiles of your WinRT application. There are 46 different types of tile templates available which we will go to learn today.
A live tile is one of the best way to provide a good experience to your application which you will find in your Windows 8 Start screen. Continue for further reading.
If you are a Windows 8 Store application and/or game developer, you may want to provide feature to share text, graphics, links or game score cards to Facebook, Twitter or Email. Windows 8 SDK provides those APIs to implement the feature in your application.
Today in this chapter of the Windows Store Tutorial series, we will discuss more about the API methods and how to integrate it in your application. Continue reading.