Developer Advocate for all things Cloud
I recently published a blog post discussing the introduction of both authentication and data storage to App Center, which takes it from a DevOps focus to a fully-fledged Mobile Backend as a Service (MBaaS) solution. The first post was a little light on technical details as it was written on an iPad whilst on vacation,…
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In my first week working for Xamarin, I was flown to Austin Texas from London in order to help support Xamarin Evolve 2013. Like most conferences, we had sponsors, which included a little startup called Parse. Parse was a backend born in 2011 that allowed mobile developers to easily add cloud storage, push notifications and authentication…
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Earlier this week my girlfriend (who is a networking ninja) asked a great question, how do you secure traffic between pods in Azure Kubenetes Service (AKS). This simple sounding question started a two-day hack to allow us to experiment with deploying AKS and configuring network policies. As it turns out, this functionality is currently in…
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The title is click bait, but I can picture situations where we could replace lighting programmers with artificial intelligence using language understanding techniques that power Alexa, Google Assistance and Cortana. I’m going to discuss how I’m working on this using Microsoft language understanding and intelligence technology. Console Syntax Most DMX Lighting control systems have a…
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Recently Microsoft announced a rebranding of Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) to Azure DevOps and as a big fan of Azure, I wanted to check out if the changes were just a new name or if it’d progressed to be a little more welcoming. I say this because as someone with limited experience using VSTS,…
Read MoreI’ve been working on a problem for more than a decade on and off now, and last week I decided I was going to take it seriously. Seriously enough to set up an Office 365 subscription attached to the project’s domain along with an Azure DevOps subscription for keeping everything in one place. I’ll regularly be…
Read MoreAnyone familiar with my ramblings will be aware that I mostly develop in C# using a mixture of Xamarin and .NET Core depending on what I’m building. Earlier this year I took the decision that I’d be serious about learning Swift and got started with building a simple utility app for macOS to help me…
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It’s that time of year again where we all ask ourselves “should I install this beta software on my devices and risk my development setup?”. If you’ve only one iPhone and Mac then it can be difficult to decide when it’s the right time to install the latest and greatest offerings from Apple, for fear…
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This post is a direct result of a conversation with a colleague in a taxi in Madrid. We were driving to Santiago Bernabéu (the Real Madrid Stadium) to demonstrate to business leaders the power of artificial intelligence. The conversation was around the ease of use of Cognitive Services for what we call “native native” developers. We…
Read MoreRob Gibbons wrote a fantastic blog post back in 2015 on how best to write network requests layers for your Xamarin Apps. I’ve personally used this approach many times, but I felt that it needed updating for 2018, so here it is. A slightly updated approach to resilient networking services with Xamarin. And when I…
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