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

  Reading, UK

See me soon at:
NDC London
FSharp Exchange
Techorama BE

My book:
Xamarin In Action

My podcast:
The Jim And Tonic Show
The Jim And Tonic Show on iTunes

Contact me:
  Xamarin In Action
  Twitter
  The Jim And Tonic Show
  GitHub
  LinkedIn
  YouTube
  Email
  CV

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 b…

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

Fabulous Santa Tracker

Featured Jim Bennett Technology, xamarin, xamarin.forms, f#, fabulous, santa

'Twas the night before Christmas, and all through the house... For millions of people worldwide, Christmas eve is a time of magic. Children are excited and unable to sleep because... Santa is coming tonight!!!! This is the one night of the year you want a stranger to come into your house whilst you sleep. He'll magic his way in (cos who has a chim…

Read More

Open anything in VS Code using a MacOS quick action

Featured Jim Bennett 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…

Read More

Controlling an IoT device from your phone

Featured Jim Bennett 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 connected. This i…

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 b…

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

Fabulous Santa Tracker

Featured Jim Bennett Technology, xamarin, xamarin.forms, f#, fabulous, santa

'Twas the night before Christmas, and all through the house... For millions of people worldwide, Christmas eve is a time of magic. Children are excited and unable to sleep because... Santa is coming tonight!!!! This is the one night of the year you want a stranger to come into your house whilst you sleep. He'll magic his way in (cos who has a chim…

Read More

Open anything in VS Code using a MacOS quick action

Featured Jim Bennett 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…

Read More

Controlling an IoT device from your phone

Featured Jim Bennett 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 connected. This i…

Read More