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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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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…

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…

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…

Face identification with Azure Cognitive Services Face API

Featured Jim Bennett 02 Mar 2018 xamarin, AI, azure, cognitive services, xamarin.forms, nuget, technology, api, faceapi

Recently I've been playing with a lot AI and seeing how it can be used in mobile apps to enhance the experience offered to the user. Currently I am playing with facial recognition using the Azure Cognitive Services Face API. This is a stupidly powerful API that can do a LOT of different things: Detect faces in images Analyze those faces to detect c…

Identifying my daughters toys using AI - Part 5, Plugin for on-device models

Featured Jim Bennett 26 Feb 2018 xamarin, xamarin.ios, xamarin.android, xamarin.forms, Tensorflow, AI, CoreML, nuget, custom vision, cognitive services, azure, technology

In the first part of this series I used the Azure Custom Vision service to create an image classifier to allow me to easily identify my daughters cuddly toys. Once created I tested it by uploading an image and seeing what tags the classifier found for the image. In the second part I accessed this model from a Xamarin app, so that I could use the ca…

Identifying my daughters toys using AI - Part 4, using the models offline on Android

Featured Jim Bennett 24 Jan 2018 xamarin.android, Android, xamarin, Tensorflow, AI, custom vision, cognitive services, azure

Identifying my daughters toys using AI - Part 3, using the models offline in iOS

Featured Jim Bennett 17 Jan 2018 technology, xamarin, AI, CoreML, azure, cognitive services, custom vision, Porg, Image classifier, iOS

Identifying my daughters toys using AI - Part 2, using the model

Featured Jim Bennett 02 Jan 2018 azure, cognitive services, technology, xamarin, xamarin.forms, Porg, custom vision

In the first part of this post I used the Azure Custom Vision service to create an image classifier to allow me to easily identify my daughters cuddly toys. Once created I tested it by uploading an image and seeing what tags the classifier found for the image. Although this works, it's a long winded way of using the model. Ideally I'd want it in a…

Hiding API keys from Git

Featured Jim Bennett 28 Dec 2017 azure, technology, api, keys

I've been working on a Xamarin app using Azure Cognitive Services to do image recognition, and one of the stumbling blocks I've faced is what to do with my API keys. I want to make the app open source as an example of how to use these services, but don't want to check my API keys into Git to be available to all - after all, bad things can happen. I…

Identifying my daughters toys using AI - Part 1, creating the model

Featured Jim Bennett 27 Dec 2017 azure, Technology, AI, cognitive services, Image classifier, Porg

Prefer to watch instead of read? - https://youtu.be/3sjInlJcpBs It's currently just after Christmas, and my 4 year old daughter has received a fair few cuddly toys from Santa. These bring her total collection up to way too many, and like most parents I have a hard time remembering all their names, especially the least favorite ones that rarely come…

Getting a users Facebook profile after Authenticating your Xamarin app with Azure

Featured Jim Bennett 17 Nov 2017 xamarin, xamarin.forms, technology, azure, facebook, authentication, functions

I've recently been looking at the authentication offered by Azure for use in a mobile app, specifically using social auth providers like Facebook to allow a user to sign up for my app. The auth setup is incredibly easy, with Azure taking care of a lot of the hard stuff. There are also loads of great docs on how to get it set up - including the Micr…