Importance of using a RSS Reader

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) Feeds. I guarantee that you have heard of this technology. But I don't think many of you don't use it. But I'm telling you RSS Feeds is something that is very important for a daily internet user. 

From Wikipedia, RSS is a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works—such as blog entries, news headlines, audio, and video—in a standardized format. 

The main advantage of using a RSS Feed is that, if you add a web site to the RSS feed you don't have to revisit that website to see for new content. RSS Feed will update the RSS Reader with the new content. You can use a RSS Reader like Google Reader(my favorite), Sharp Reader, NewsGator etc. 

I'm great fan of RSS Feeds. But to understand it's importance you need to use the RSS Reader for sometime and see. The importance comes into notice when you're subscribed to a frequently updating website like Mashable, TechCrunch, Engadget. These sites are updated with fresh content in a rate where it's a tedious task to go to the website every few hours to see new content. This is where RSS Reader comes into play. 

By using a RSS Reader you can differentiate the articles you have read and the articles that you haven't read. 

As highlighted in red in below image, you can go through articles using previous and next buttons. Try today itself and see the difference. You will be amazed by the usefulness of this. 

Hello World in Windows Phone

In this tutorial we'll look at basics in Windows Phone Development and we will create a basic Hello World Application. 

1. After installing the Windows Phone Developer Tools, on the start menu open  Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone.

2. Go to file menu and select new project. 

Here there are variety of options to choose from. To understand the basics, we will just    create a simple 'Windows Phone Application'.

3. Select 'Windows Phone Application' and give the project name (WindowsPhoneApplication1). Then select the location where you want to save your project. Press Ok. Visual Studio will create the project.

4. By default Visual Studio is divided into 3 panes. On the left you have the design view, On the middle you have XAML code and in the right you have Solution Explorer and Properties. 

The design view displays how the application will be look on the phone. You can drag and drop elements from Toolbox on to this. 

The XAML(Extensible Application Markup Language) file will be auto-generated when you're adding elements from toolbox to the design view. XAML file is a XML File which is used by visual studio to create the layout and to generate elements. For more information look at this article at MSDN. 

5. Let's get back to the tutorial. Now we'll add a TextBlock to display text in our application. Go to the toolbox and drag and drop a TextBlock in to the design view. Notice in the XAML that TextBlock element was added inside Grid. 

You can change these properties from either properties window or by manually adding elements to the XAML code. We'll do from properties window. 

6. Select the TextBlock you added and Increase the font size, height and text from Properties Window. You can see that XAML code is changed and elements are added accordingly.

7. Ok. Now we'll run the application. For this we will use the Windows Phone Emulator. Press F5 or go to Debug -> Start Debugging. For the first launch the emulator might take some time to load. 

In the next tutorial we will dig into some user interaction.