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Advanced Live Tiles, Part 3: Lock Screens

How to use lock screen badge and tile notifications in your Windows 8 application.

A Live Tiles Tutorial

Live Tiles are images that update a pinned tile (icon) on the start screen of Windows Phone. They're used to offer updates to a user browsing the start screen, without having to open the application completely.

The Builder Pattern in .NET

How to separate complex object construction from its representation using the Builder design pattern in C#.

Big Data in the Cloud

Microsoft has cooked up a feast of value-added big data cloud apps featuring Apache Hadoop, MapReduce, Hive and Pig, as well as free apps and utilities for numerical analysis, publishing data sets, data encryption, uploading files to SQL Azure and blobs.

Build a More Powerful CRM System with Visual Basic .NET Extensions

Accessing a customer relationship management system with a custom .NET application can add important functionality.

Working with Advanced Live Tiles in Windows 8

In part 1 of his series on advanced live tiles, Eric Vogel shows you how to add secondary tiles to your Windows 8 Metro style applications.

Creating an HTTP Service with Web API

ASP.NET Web API allows you to write a service once and provide different output formats with little effort on the developer's side.

Enabling User-Updated Live Tiles in Windows 8

This tutorial demonstrates how to give users more power with the ability to customize live tiles in Metro style apps.

Database Synchronization with the Microsoft Sync Framework

Use the Microsoft Sync Framework to synchronize data changes between SQL Server 2008 Standard, SQL Server 2008 Express and SQL Server Compact Edition 3.5.

The .NET Framework 4.5 Gets ZIP

On VB columnist Joe Kunk shows you how to create and extract "almost" .ZIP files in .NET Framework 4 and standard .ZIP files in .NET Framework 4.5.

Fluent Interface Design in .NET

Eric Vogel shows you how to simplify the consumption of your API by adding a fluent interface design.

Plug in to Mono for Android for Lights, Camera and Video Apps

Multimedia is expected in today's mobile applications, and the fun isn't only for smartphone and tablet users. Mono for Android, based on the Mono project's open source implementation of the Microsoft .NET Framework, can help you take advantage of Android Camera APIs in Visual Studio.

The .NET Command Pattern, Part 2

How to implement an undo/redo system using the Command pattern in the .NET Framework.

Entity Framework Code-First Migrations

Code First Migrations allow for database changes to be implemented all through code. Through the use of Package Manager Console (PMC), commands can be used to scaffold database changes.

The Command Pattern in .NET

In Part 1 of this series, Eric Vogel walks you through a software design pattern that is commonly used to handle UI interactions.