Jim Bennett

Senior Cloud 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.
Cloud Developer Advocate

  Redmond, WA, USA

My book:
Xamarin In Action

Contact me:
  Xamarin In Action
  Twitter
  GitHub
  LinkedIn
  YouTube
  Email
  CV

Getting an internship at Microsoft

Featured Jim Bennett microsoft, internship

Come as you are, do what you loveI've been asked a few times for thoughts and tips around getting an internship at Microsoft. So in the spirit of "I didn't have time to reply to you so I wrote this blog post", I thought I'd provide a stack of resources useful to folks wanting to know more about the process. ApplicationInterested in an internship he…

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Streaming Serial data using an MXChip

Featured Jim Bennett technology, IoT, mxchip, azure, gps, serial

The MXChip board has 2 serial ports - one using the USB which is great for debugging, and one you can use to stream data from third party modules. This article shows you how! TL;DR - connect the TXD on the module to 1 on the MXChip, RXD to 2, then create a new Serial using UARTClass Serial1(UART_1); You can then call this in the same way as the Ard…

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Save your users from typing with AI 🤖

Featured Jim Bennett Technology, xamarin, xamarin.forms, AI, cognitive services, OCR, Text recognition

I've been playing a lot with the Azure Custom Vision Service - a great service to build image classification and object detection models with just a few images. To make it easier to test my models, I wanted to build a mobile app that connects to a custom vision project and uses that to classify or detect objects in images captured using the camera.…

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Trying out Try .NET

Featured Jim Bennett technology, .net, docs, c#

Try .NET is a new thing to come from the .NET teams that allows you to, well, try .NET. In a browser. You can think of it as a way to create interactive .NET documentation using .NET Core. What is Try .NETThe experience or writing code in a browser itself isn't new, developers have been able to try out C# coding snippets in the browser for a while…

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Screen sharing a Raspberry Pi from a Mac

Featured Jim Bennett technology, raspberry Pi, VNC, mac

I've been playing with a Raspberry Pi for a while, and I'm getting fed up with changing the input to my monitor and using a second keyboard/mouse (yeah, yeah, 1st World Problem I know). I decided to set up a remote screen share so I can share the screen. This means I can use the same monitor/keyboard/mouse that I use for my Mac, but it also means I…

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Xamarin ❤ F#

Featured Jim Bennett technology, xamarin, fabulous, f#, xamarin.forms

Xamarin and Xamarin.Forms need no introduction. I'm sure by now you are well aware of these technologies and have seen many examples of building cross-platform mobile apps using C#. If not, I can highly recommend my book Xamarin in Action which if you follow this link and use code 'xamarininaction' you can get 40% off the cover price. What you many…

Read More

Flying long haul with young children

Featured Jim Bennett flying, children, tips, travel

A discussion came up at work the other day on flying long-haul with very young children (toddler age), so I though it would be good to share the tips that I shared with the discussion. My daughter is 6 and has been on over 40 flights, including a lot of long haul as a toddler so I've managed to build up a selection of tips that have worked well for…

Read More
 

Getting an internship at Microsoft

Featured Jim Bennett microsoft, internship

Come as you are, do what you loveI've been asked a few times for thoughts and tips around getting an internship at Microsoft. So in the spirit of "I didn't have time to reply to you so I wrote this blog post", I thought I'd provide a stack of resources useful to folks wanting to know more about the process. ApplicationInterested in an internship he…

Read More

Streaming Serial data using an MXChip

Featured Jim Bennett technology, IoT, mxchip, azure, gps, serial

The MXChip board has 2 serial ports - one using the USB which is great for debugging, and one you can use to stream data from third party modules. This article shows you how! TL;DR - connect the TXD on the module to 1 on the MXChip, RXD to 2, then create a new Serial using UARTClass Serial1(UART_1); You can then call this in the same way as the Ard…

Read More

Save your users from typing with AI 🤖

Featured Jim Bennett Technology, xamarin, xamarin.forms, AI, cognitive services, OCR, Text recognition

I've been playing a lot with the Azure Custom Vision Service - a great service to build image classification and object detection models with just a few images. To make it easier to test my models, I wanted to build a mobile app that connects to a custom vision project and uses that to classify or detect objects in images captured using the camera.…

Read More

Trying out Try .NET

Featured Jim Bennett technology, .net, docs, c#

Try .NET is a new thing to come from the .NET teams that allows you to, well, try .NET. In a browser. You can think of it as a way to create interactive .NET documentation using .NET Core. What is Try .NETThe experience or writing code in a browser itself isn't new, developers have been able to try out C# coding snippets in the browser for a while…

Read More

Screen sharing a Raspberry Pi from a Mac

Featured Jim Bennett technology, raspberry Pi, VNC, mac

I've been playing with a Raspberry Pi for a while, and I'm getting fed up with changing the input to my monitor and using a second keyboard/mouse (yeah, yeah, 1st World Problem I know). I decided to set up a remote screen share so I can share the screen. This means I can use the same monitor/keyboard/mouse that I use for my Mac, but it also means I…

Read More

Xamarin ❤ F#

Featured Jim Bennett technology, xamarin, fabulous, f#, xamarin.forms

Xamarin and Xamarin.Forms need no introduction. I'm sure by now you are well aware of these technologies and have seen many examples of building cross-platform mobile apps using C#. If not, I can highly recommend my book Xamarin in Action which if you follow this link and use code 'xamarininaction' you can get 40% off the cover price. What you many…

Read More

Flying long haul with young children

Featured Jim Bennett flying, children, tips, travel

A discussion came up at work the other day on flying long-haul with very young children (toddler age), so I though it would be good to share the tips that I shared with the discussion. My daughter is 6 and has been on over 40 flights, including a lot of long haul as a toddler so I've managed to build up a selection of tips that have worked well for…

Read More