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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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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…

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…

Xamarin Essentials

Featured Jim Bennett 08 May 2018 xamarin, technology, iOS, Android, nuget, Xamarin.Essentials

TL;DR - check out Xamarin Essentials in the official documentation. Like a lot of developers, I love how Xamarin allows me to share business logic between iOS and Android apps, and share UI using Forms, but still have access to the native APIs. But one thing has been missing - a consistent, out of the box way of accessing native APIs from cross-pla…

Building mobile apps in F# using Xamarin.Forms and Elmish

Featured Jim Bennett 06 May 2018 xamarin, xamarin.forms, technology, f#, fsharp, elmish

FSharp and Xamarin Xamarin is well known for allowing you to build mobile apps in C#, but you can use F# as well. F# is fully supported by the compiler and toolchains in both Visual Studio 2017 and Visual Studio for Mac. It's also pretty much supported by all the Xamarin tools including Xamarin.Forms (except for one bug that should be fixed soon).…

The Jim and Tonic show

Featured Jim Bennett 02 May 2018 technology, microsoft, jim and tonic, podcast, cda

Since starting at Microsoft as a Senior Cloud Developer Advocate I've been hugely privileged surrounded on a daily basis by some of the most awesome people across a wide range of developer communities - the rest of the Cloud Developer Advocacy team. These are engineers who constantly work to make the world amazing for developers across a wide range…

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 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…

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…

Creating Visual Studio project and solution templates - Part 3, VS for Mac extension

Featured Jim Bennett 08 Nov 2017 technology, xamarin, Visual Studio, Mac, extension, dotnet new

In the first part of this set of posts I looked at creating a dotnet new project template, and in the second part I showed how you could easily add this to a Visual Studio for Windows extension. Lets now look at adding it to a Visual Studio for Mac extension, so that our template is available everywhere. It's really easy to create extensions for VS…