Expecting someone geekier

Jim Bennett

Senior Cloud Developer Advocate at Microsoft, Xamarin Certified Developer, author of Xamarin In Action, blogger, speaker, father and lover of beer, whisky and Thai food. Opinions are my own.

Reading, UK
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Contact me:
Xamarin In Action
Twitter
The Jim And Tonic Show
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CV

Open anything in VS Code using a MacOS quick action

Featured Jim Bennett 13 Dec 2018 Technology, vscode, automator

I've been getting fed up with the long winded process to open things in VS Code - you know, typing in the terminal, opening VS Code and dragging folders in, that sort of long, manual process... #FirstWorldProblems 😜 I thought it would be fun to automate the whole thing, using Automator! If you haven't used Automator, it's a great little tool. You…

Controlling an IoT device from your phone

Featured Jim Bennett 19 Nov 2018 Technology, azure, azure free, functions, xamarin, xamarin.forms, IoT, GooGoo clusters

I've just finished watching the latest episode of Five Things, where Suz Hinton talks with Burke about Goo Goo Clusters and IoT devices. One of the devices Suz showed was the Azure IoT DevKit - an arduino compatible board made by MXChip that works beautifully with Azure, even down to having an Azure LED on board to show when it is connecte…

Azure makers series

Featured Jim Bennett 14 Nov 2018 Technology, xamarin, azure, AI, cognitive services, azure free

I recently recorded a quick video to talk about an app I was building using the Azure free account. You can check it out here: If you want to see the code, it's in my GitHub repo here - https://github.com/jimbobbennett/AzurePhotoSharer…

Trust

Featured Jim Bennett 13 Nov 2018 trust, Technology, soft skills

Thought I'd repost a blog post I wrote 4 1/2 years ago on Medium onto this blog - be interested in what readers think. Shouldn’t our default position be to trust first? I was having a conversation with a friend of mine recently about his current work situation. His team leader has a default state of not trusting in the knowledge and abilities of th…

Debugging multiple Azure Functions apps at the same time

Featured Jim Bennett 13 Nov 2018 Technology, azure, functions, Visual Studio, debugging

Dentists don't want you to know these 5 tips that show how easy it is to run multiple Azure Functions apps locally and debug them all at the same time! Number 3 will shock you! Enough ClickBait nonsense, on to the post. I recently built a demo app that has two Azure Functions projects in it - one using the new V2 Functions runtime and written i…

Updating your google-service.json from an AppCenter environment variable

Featured Jim Bennett 25 Sep 2018 Technology, xamarin, google play, appcenter, firebase

I've been working on an app that needs push notifications, but also needs to be open source. This led me to a problem - the google-services.json file. This file is needed to sign up for Firebase messaging to implement push on Android, but it also contains my API keys, values I do NOT want to be public. So - what to do? Well I'm building and distrib…

Binding the Cognitive Services Android Speech SDK - Part 3 - Java 8 fun

Featured Jim Bennett 10 Sep 2018 xamarin, Technology, xamarin.android, java, binding, aar, jar, COMPILETODALVIK, invalid opcode ba, invokedynamic

In the first part of this post, I showed how to get started binding the Microsoft Cognitive Services speech API. In the second part I showed how to make the code look more C#-like. In this part, I'll show how to use it and fix up a nasty issue with the Android compiler and using jars created with the latest versions of Java. Using the SDK To use th…

Binding the Cognitive Services Android Speech SDK - Part 2, making the code more C#-like

Featured Jim Bennett 10 Sep 2018 Technology, xamarin, xamarin.android, java, binding, aar, jar

In the first part of this post, I showed how to get started binding the Microsoft Cognitive Services speech API. In this part I show how to make the code look more C#-like. In the third part I'll show how to use it and fix up a nasty issue with the Android compiler and using jars created with the latest versions of Java. Making the namespaces more…

Binding the Cognitive Services Android Speech SDK - Part 1, binding the library

Featured Jim Bennett 09 Sep 2018 Technology, xamarin, xamarin.android, java, binding, aar, jar

As part of the Microsoft Cognitive Services speech API, there is a native Java Android SDK available as an .aar file. I wanted to use this in a Xamarin app, so I created a binding project for it. The code for this is available in my GitHub. Binding an SDK is a four step process: Create the binding project with the relevant jar or aar file Make any…

Running AI models on iOS, Android and Windows using Xamarin

Featured Jim Bennett 20 Jul 2018 xamarin.forms, AI, windows, iOS, Android, onnx, nuget, technology, xamarin

I created a NuGet package a while ago to allow you to run models exported from the Azure Custom Vision service on iOS and Android in Xamarin apps from your cross-platform code. You can read about this here. Since then, the Custom Vision service has added ONNX export, meaning you can now run these models on-device on Windows as well. This meant it…

Running custom vision models on a Windows device

Featured Jim Bennett 20 Jul 2018 xamarin, technology, windows, custom vision, AI, onnx

Recently I wrote about creating AI models using the Azure Custom Vision Service. In these posts I looked at creating and training models, running them online, then finally exporting the models to run on iOS using CoreML and Android using TensorFlow. Recently Microsoft announced another way to export models - as ONNX models that can be run using Win…

Setting iOS permission descriptions in Visual Studio 2017

Featured Jim Bennett 05 Jul 2018 xamarin, xamarin.ios, technology, docs

I spend most of my developer day using Visual Studio for Mac, but occasionally I flip back to Visual Studio 2017 on Windows. Last time I flipped back I tried to build an app that uses the camera and I got stuck on one simple thing - setting the camera usage description. If you double click on the info.plist file in an iOS app project, it will open…

What the @ - fixing weirdness in return JSON from Azure functions using F#

Featured Jim Bennett 19 Jun 2018 fsharp, f#, azure, functions, technology

I've been playing a lot with F# recently, both to build Xamarin apps using Elmish.XamarinForms and for some Azure Functions. Whilst building an HTTP trigger I came across some weirdness when serializing a record type to JSON. This is the relevant parts of my code: type Output = { TotalBalance : float } let Run(req: HttpRequestMessage, boundTable: I…

Describing a photo in a mobile app using Azure Computer Vision

Featured Jim Bennett 30 May 2018 xamarin, xamarin.forms, AI, computer vision

I recently gave an introduction to Xamarin talk at Imperial College, London and wanted to build a cool app to show off what you can do on mobile using the awesome Cognitive Services available on Azure. I only had about 30-40 minutes to not only introduce Xamarin, but build an app so I decided to throw together a simple app to take a photo and descr…

Xamarin in Action is now on the bookshelves!

Featured Jim Bennett 21 May 2018 xamarin, book, xamarin in action, technology

Finally, after 2 years since I first put pen to paper (well, put keystroke to Atom), Xamarin in Action is done and available from your favorite bookseller as a printed, paper book, with a forward from my good friend, the amazing James Montemagno! You can buy this book in one of two ways - an eBook in PDF, kindle, iBook format, or a prin…