private ManualResetEvent _manualResetEvent = new ManualResetEvent(true);

var thread = new Thread(() =>
{
    while (true)
    {
        //Do the work here
        _manualResetEvent.WaitOne(Timeout.Infinite);
    }
});

And to pause the thread, you can use

_manualResetEvent.Reset();

And to resume you can use

_manualResetEvent.Set();

You can find more details about ManualResetEvent in MSDN

Happy Programming.

And then the Visual Studio project was not available in the solution. All the project said was “The project file cannot be loaded.”

This error is because the project was under Subversion version control, and I don’t have Subversion installed on my system. To resolve this error, open the project in notepad(if you have power tools installed, it will help to open project file as XML file).

And remove the xml tags which is pointing to the source control. Now save and close the project file, and re open with Visual Studio, it will load without any problem.

Happy Programming.

This will help you to create unit test project for Windows Phone 8 applications. Once you create the project, necessary references will be added to the project by Visual Studio.

If you are familiar with MS Test, you don’t need to learn any new framework for testing phone apps.
The Windows Phone test framework is designed as an adapter on top of the extensible Visual Studio 2012 unit testing platform. So you can run the tests from VS 2012 IDE itself.

You can run the tests from console also, using vstest.console.exe. You can also choose to export the results to Visual Studio Test Results File using /Logger:trx command line switch. This unit testing feature is supported in Express Edition also.

Happy Programming

if (!dataContext.DatabaseExists())
{
	dataContext.CreateDatabase();
}

And if there is any master tables you can write code to insert after database creation, like this.

if (!dataContext.DatabaseExists())
{
    dataContext.CreateDatabase();
    dataContext.Categories.InsertAllOnSubmit(
        new[] { DefaultCategory });
    dataContext.SubmitChanges();
}

This approach is not feasible if you have lot of data, for example a Dictionary database. In such scenarios you can add the existing database to the project, and setting the Build Action to Content.

This will deploy the database file with your application onto the phone, but it will be placed in the same folder as all other static content for your application. Your application can only read from this folder.

You can communicate to existing database using following connection string.

private const string ConnectionString = 
"Data Source ='appdata:/Database/Dictionary.sdf';File Mode=read only;";

If you want to modify the database, you need to copy (duplicate) the database to the application isolated storage. Here is the code snippet which will help you to copy your database file to isolated storage.

const string DatabasePath = "Database";
const string Filename = @"Database/Dictionary.sdf";
using (var isolatedStorageFile = 
    IsolatedStorageFile.GetUserStoreForApplication())
{
    if (!isolatedStorageFile.DirectoryExists(DatabasePath))
    {
        isolatedStorageFile.CreateDirectory(DatabasePath);
    }

    if (isolatedStorageFile.FileExists(Filename))
    {
        return;
    }

    var resource = 
        Application.GetResourceStream(new Uri(Filename, UriKind.Relative));
    using (var file = isolatedStorageFile.CreateFile(Filename))
    {
        var length = resource.Stream.Length;
        var buffer = new byte[1024];
        var readCount = 0;
        using (var binaryReader = new BinaryReader(resource.Stream))
        {
            while (readCount < length)
            {
                int actual = binaryReader.Read(buffer, 0, buffer.Length);
                readCount += actual;
                file.Write(buffer, 0, actual);
            }
        }
    }
}

Happy Programming.

Retrieving the COM class factory for component with CLSID {0006F03A-0000-0000-C000-000000000046} failed due to the following error: 80080005.

My code was simply straight forward, I was just creating the instance of the outlook application.

var oApp = new Outlook.Application();

And this code was used in a different application which works without any issue. Later I found the solution for the problem. The culprit was UAC. I was running the Visual Studio as Administrator. So the conclusion is, when automating an Office application from another application, both the application should be run in same privilege level. If you are running Visual Studio as Administrator, you should run the office application also in Administrator mode.

Happy Programming.

Unfortunately we don’t have the source code of this application with us. Later I got one solution using bindingRedirect. This configuration element will help you to redirect referenced assemblies from one version to another using the app.config file.

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<configuration>
	<runtime>
		<assemblyBinding xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v1">
			<dependentAssembly>
				<assemblyIdentity name="Microsoft.Ink" 
					publicKeyToken="31BF3856AD364E35" culture="neutral"/>
				<bindingRedirect oldVersion="0.0.0.0-6.1.0.0" 
					newVersion="6.1.0.0"/>
			</dependentAssembly>
		</assemblyBinding>
	</runtime>
</configuration>

We fixed the problem by creating an application.exe.config file with binding redirection inside it. By doing this you are instructing the application or DLL that during runtime, for a particular dependent assembly to use a particular version when an application and/or other assembly is looking for the older version.

You can find more details about binding redirection in MSDN.