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 MoreLearn how to build an internet connected fan using the MXChip Azure IoT dev kit and Azure IoT Hub…
Read MoreA 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'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 MoreI'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 MoreI'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 MoreI 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…
Read MoreThought 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…
Read MoreDentists 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 in C#…
Read MoreI'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…
Read MoreIn 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…
Read MoreIn 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…
Read MoreAs 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…
Read MoreI 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…
Read MoreRecently 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…
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