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Jim Bennett


Mobile developer at EROAD, Xamarin MVP and Certified Developer, Microsoft MVP, author of Xamarin In Action, blogger, speaker, father and lover of beer, whisky and Thai food. Opinions are my own. Auckland, New Zealand
Xamarin in Action from Manning Publications

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Using LiveXAML to improve your Xamarin Forms UIs

Featured Jim Bennett 17 Oct 2017 xamarin, xamarin.forms, technology, UI, xaml

One of the downsides to UI development is how long it takes to get a good looking UI. You spend an inordinate amount of time setting up the UI, running your app to see how it looks, tweaking the UI, running again, tweaking again, running again. Then of course you have to repeat on multiple devices with different OSes or screen sizes. For Xamarin Fo…

Device.StartTimer and iOS backgrounding

Featured Jim Bennett 08 Mar 2015 Technology, xamarin, xamarin.ios, technology, xamarin.forms, timers

I recently completed a lecture on backgrounding in iOS and Android as part of the Xamarin University. During this lecture, one topic of discussion came up with no real answer - how Device.StartTimer() in Xamarin.Forms affects backgrounding. With iOS, if you enable backgrounding using BeginBackgroundTask(), you have 3 minutes to stop all backgroun…

JimLib.Xamarin is now updated to the Unified API

Featured Jim Bennett 06 Feb 2015 Technology, xamarin, technology, xamarin.forms, jimlib.xamarin, unified API

Finally, after fighting with Xamarin and having my Surface die and need to be reinstalled twice, I've managed to get JimLib.Xamarin updated to use the new Xamarin Unified API so it should be suitable for submitting new apps to the iPhone app store. I'll be updating my first app Second Screen for Plex soon and sending it to the app store for approv…

Xamarin Unified API

Featured Jim Bennett 14 Jan 2015 Technology, xamarin, xamarin.ios, technology, xamarin.forms, build error, bug, unified API, 64-bit

Recently Apple announced some changes to their requirements for apps submitted to the iOS app store. From the 1st February all new apps must support 64-bit (for updates to existing apps, it's 1st June). Xamarin, not wanting to do anything the easy way have decided that as well as supporting this, they will overhaul their API and unify their Mac an…

Blind technology

Featured Jim Bennett 19 Nov 2014 Technology, technology, binaural, microsoft, blind, navigation

Busy, busy, busy. In the last month I've relocated form Thailand to the UK with my family, got my UK company up and running (more coming on this in a later post), lined up one client, fought with the Apple app store to get my developer account set up right so I can sell apps (still not done), found a new place to live and been fighting with overbe…

Useful links

Featured Jim Bennett 15 Oct 2014 Technology, xamarin, xamarin.ios, technology, crash, useful, links

I thought it would be good to create a page full of usefull links - things that have helped me solve some problems and are complete so there's no real need for me to blog their content. Adding symbols to Xamarin crash reports for iOS - this article shows how to add symbol information to a crash report retrieved from your device via XCode for a Xama…

Orientation with Xamarin.Forms

Featured Jim Bennett 10 Oct 2014 Technology, xamarin, xamarin.ios, technology, xamarin.forms, jimlib.xamarin, orientation, portrait, landscape

Xamarin.Forms is a great cross platform development tool when it works, but being cross platform it suffers from a sever lack of features. Some of these are understandable as they are different on each platform so it's hard to provide a consistent experience for the developer. Some are bad ommisions as they are vital to all platforms. The current…

Xamarin Insights

Featured Jim Bennett 10 Oct 2014 Technology, xamarin, technology, beta test, xamarin insights, tracking

At the moment Xamarin are holding their annual Evolve conference in Atlanta. Unfortunately I'm not there, but I've been keeping up to date with their announcements and one caught my eye - Xamarin Insights. I've been looking for a Xamarin compatible analytics and crash reporter for a while and it looke like this does the job. So far I've loked at:…

iOS pull to refresh without using a UITableView

Featured Jim Bennett 28 Sep 2014 Technology, xamarin, xamarin.ios, technology, xamarin.forms, jimlib.xamarin, pull to refresh, scrollview

I've been working on the UI for my current app, trying to make some usability improvements. The main screen is a list of data containing an image and some text. Although this is a standard UI pattern, the problem I'm having with it is one of size. List rows are usually short and full width. For text this is fine, but not so good for images, the…

ComPlexion and legal issues

Featured Jim Bennett 26 Sep 2014 Technology, plex, REST, technology, legal, beta test, restandrelaxforplex

I've been working on an open source Plex REST library. The idea behind it is to provide a simple way to connect to a Plex media server and get info on the currently playing movie or TV show. The most important info being a link to IMDB - pretty much every time my wife and I watch something we dig out of phones to look up an actors name or what el…

Performance tuning a website

Featured Jim Bennett 13 Sep 2014 Technology, javascript, moomoo.io, technology, node, css, minify, performance

Despite the rise in fast home broadband, tuning your website for performance is still just as important as it was in the days of dial up. Although home connections can be fast in most first world countries (I used to have a 1Gb connection in Hong Kong), there are stil a lot of people in developing countries who only have slower speeds, as well as…

FauxGhost - a clean, responsive Ghost theme

Featured Jim Bennett 13 Sep 2014 Technology, blog, ghost, ghostion, theme, technology, FauxGhost

This blog, like many others coming out recently, uses the Ghost blogging platform. This is a really nice, simple blogging platform with cheap hosting, built by some super smart people. The theme support for Ghost is excellent with loads of good themes available (some for money, some open source), and really great documentation on how to create you…

Weird goings on with Xamarin

Featured Jim Bennett 06 Sep 2014 Technology, xamarin, xamarin.ios, technology, crash, mono, sigsegv, storekit, skproductsrequest, json, newtonsoft, build error

Yesterday and today I had some weird things happening with Xamarin, so I thought it was work documenting them in case anyone else has the same issue. First - Build errors. I upgraded to the latest Xamarin and suddenly building for an iPhone using Visual Studio was failing with an odd error: Failed to resolve "System.Reflection.Emit.ModuleBuilder" r…

NDepend - Part 1

Featured Jim Bennett 29 Aug 2014 Technology, node, ndepend, review, good support, Exception on addin.connect.querystatus(), technology

Patrick from NDepend reached out to me today to ask me to review NDepend. Having dabbled with it a while ago, I was more than happy to say yes and try out the latest version. If you've never heard of NDepend before, it's a code quality tool. It analyses your code and provides a number of quality metrics such coupling and cyclomatic complexity - c…

Setting the font for an Entry control using Xamarin.Forms

Featured Jim Bennett 27 Aug 2014 Technology, jimlib.xamarin, xamarin, xamarin.ios, technology, xamarin.forms, extendedentry, renderer, control, xamarin.forms.labs

Xamarin.Forms depsite being very cool is stil a bit lacking when it comes to not only a good range of controls, but also to the abilities of those controls. One example of this is the Entry control - a simple text box. One thing you can't do with the out of the box implementation is to set the Font. Such a normal thing to do, but not supported. L…

Expecting someone geekier

Auckland, New Zealand