At the Brisbane Azure User Group's November meetup, I gave a quick introduction to the Azure Mobile Engagement offering that recently went into GA. It was one a of a number of lightning talks given at the meetup, each aimed at summarising one of the …
almost famous
So Valuable Right Now
Finally, a genuine use for my 'almost-famous' tag! I am honoured to be able to announce that I have been awarded MVP status for Xamarin. The award is for "outstanding independent community leaders who have demonstrated an exemplary commitment to hel…
code
A lazily-evaluated stream wrapper for IEnumerable
Recently I found myself working with a storage API in .NET that expected a Stream parameter for the content to be persisted. In contrast to other SDKs I've worked with, like the AWS and Azure blob SDKs, this one did not give you the ability to write …
almost famous
Starting out right with Xamarin
At the Queensland C# Mobile Developers meetup group's June event, I gave a presentation entitled 'Starting out right with Xamarin'. It's a light-hearted but informative overview of things to keep in mind when beginning to work with Xamarin, including…
code
A JSON Data Context Driver for LINQPad
I use LINQPad a lot. Whether as a scratchpad or for fast, capable and interactive exploration of data, it's hard to beat. A LINQPad query is executed within a single 'data context' - typically a connection to a database, but there are many other crea…
sockets-for-pcl
sockethelpers-for-pcl alpha on NuGet
The first version of the Socket Helpers library is now on NuGet. It is alpha code and there is always the possibility of drastic breaking changes in the future. Still, if you'd like to try it out, there are a few bits and pieces included so far: …
code
Service discovery for mobile apps
In a recent post I talked about sockethelpers and the kinds of problem it aims to help with. Service discovery is the first aspect of the library I've been working on, and that's the topic of this post. The code discussed here is still very alpha - b…
sockets-for-pcl
sockethelpers-for-pcl: Making socket tasks easy that should be
When I first started thinking about the API design for sockets-for-pcl, I made the decision build a minimally functional, unopinionated and lightweight wrapper over the existing platform implementations - no extra features. Part of the reason was to …
General
CocosSharp helper methods for the "Give us the Gist of it!" contest
Xamarin recently ran a "Give us the Gist of it!" contest, encouraging developers to share snippets of code they found useful in day to day Xamarin work. From the valid entries, five were randomly chosen as winners, and yours truly happened to be one …
sockets-for-pcl
Improvements to sockets-for-pcl
I've been making steady improvements to my sockets-for-pcl library over the last month. There are a number of bugfixes, as detailed in the full changelog. Most of those bugs I've found while building out the upcoming sockethelpers project. However, t…