Xamarin Essentials is a great recent initiative from the Xamarin team to provide an endorsed, comprehensive cross-platform set of APIs in a single package (read more about it on the docs page). One interesting aspect of the library is the lack of int…

There's a lot of exciting stuff going on lately when it comes to C# and the web, mostly thanks to the great work of the Mono team in bringing mono to WebAssembly and a few pioneers in the space, like Frank Krueger my secret idol and Steve Sanderson, …

While preparing for my recent talk on Visual Studio App Center, I realised that there were a couple of limitations in the current offering that would make it difficult to implement an upcoming requirement in one of my projects. Knowing that VSTS rece…

A tool that's probably already made it into your debugging flow when using Xamarin Studio is the 'Exception Catchpoint' feature. It functions in a manner roughly equivalent to the 'Exceptions' debug window in Visual Studio. An exception catchpoint is…

During the course of building an iOS app, at some point you're likely to need to hook into the NSNotificationCenter functionality. Not to be confused with the consumer-side Notification Center in iOS, it provides a pub/sub-like mechanism that you can…

As a Xamarin developer, after hearing today that Microsoft is going to acquire Xamarin, you might be wondering what you can do to prepare yourself for the incoming assimilation*. Speculation abounds as to what will come out of all this, but it seems …

Transport-level security requirements for iOS have undergone significant changes recently. Indeed, unconfirmed statistics suggest that the introduction of App Transport Security in iOS 9 was responsible for doubling the size of the StackOverflow data…

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 …

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…

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…