Technology - Expecting someone geekier

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.

Reading, UK
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Save your users from typing with AI 🤖

Featured Jim Bennett 21 Jul 2019 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.…

Adding Try .NET to VSCode launch.json

Featured Jim Bennett 11 Jun 2019 Technology, try .net, dotnet new, vscode

Learn how to launch Try .NET from VS Code using the debug menu instead of the terminal.…

Fabulous Santa Tracker

Featured Jim Bennett 24 Dec 2018 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…

Open anything in VS Code using a MacOS quick action

Featured Jim Bennett 13 Dec 2018 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…

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 connected. This i…

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…

Trust

Featured Jim Bennett 13 Nov 2018 trust, Technology, soft skills

Thought 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…

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 in C#…

Updating your google-service.json from an AppCenter environment variable

Featured Jim Bennett 25 Sep 2018 Technology, xamarin, google play, appcenter, firebase

I'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…

Binding the Cognitive Services Android Speech SDK - Part 3 - Java 8 fun

Featured Jim Bennett 10 Sep 2018 xamarin, Technology, xamarin.android, java, binding, aar, jar, COMPILETODALVIK, invalid opcode ba, invokedynamic

In 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…

Binding the Cognitive Services Android Speech SDK - Part 2, making the code more C#-like

Featured Jim Bennett 10 Sep 2018 Technology, xamarin, xamarin.android, java, binding, aar, jar

In 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…

Binding the Cognitive Services Android Speech SDK - Part 1, binding the library

Featured Jim Bennett 09 Sep 2018 Technology, xamarin, xamarin.android, java, binding, aar, jar

As 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…

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…

Creating Visual Studio project and solution templates - Part 1, dotnet new

Featured Jim Bennett 25 Oct 2017 xamarin, Technology, .NET Core, dotnet new, templates

I've recently updated my MvvmCross templates to support .NET Standard to be ready for the awesome future. Unfortunately this meant a complete rewrite of my templates as the out of the box Visual Studio project template extensions on both Windows and Mac don't support .NET Standard. As it turned out though, this rewrite was a blessing in disguise as…

Introduction to UI Testing with Xamarin

Featured Jim Bennett 20 Aug 2017 xamarin, xamarin.android, uitest, test, Technology, xamarin.ios, book, xamarin in action

This article is an excerpt from Xamarin in Action. Save 37% off the cover price using code fccbennett at http://xam.jbb.io. One of the great things about the MVVM design pattern is that it allows us to maximize the code in our cross-platform model and view-model layers. This means we’ve written the bulk of our code and we’ve also written unit te…