Blogs

Xamarin Mobile Application Development By Dan Hermes (@ lexiconsystems) Recently I was lucky enough to get my hands on an early draft of Xamarin Mobile Application Development by Dan Hermes. This is a book aimed at the .Net developer who wants to get started with Xamarin, primarily with …

I had a great time hosting an iBeacon mini-hack with the Birmingham Xamarin Mobile Cross Platform User Group. A big thanks to Dave Evans for organising this. It was only a small group, which was great as I had enough Estimote iBeacons to give away to everyone. Due to hardware issues and phones not …

So in preparation for my upcoming iBeacon mini-hack I’ve been thinking about iBeacon security. For such a simple device, there is a lot of complex issues around their security to consider. iBeacons are defined by their UUID and version A simple statement but with large undertones. An iBeacon …

I’m doing some work for a client at the moment that involves storing files on disk and metadata about those files in a MongoDB instance. The service that manages all this needs to support replication between multiple so that as a file or metadata record gets added/deleted/updated etc., the …

iBeacons are a cool technology that allows you to add location awareness to you apps, not based on your location on a map, but based on your proximity to iBeacons, be they at a fixed or moving point. They allow your apps to have an accurate understanding of where you are both inside and out, from …

Just a quick post to share with the world the good news! After a lot of lectures and a lot of effort I’m now a Xamarin Certified Developer!

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 …

After my Blog post about binding the Estimote iOS SDK, James Montemagno (Developer evangelist at Xamarin) contacted me to say they were about to release an official Xamarin component for accessing Estimote iBeacons and nearables from iOS. This renders my binding library redundant - which is a good …

Update: Since writing this, James Montemagno from Xamarin contacted me to say they are working on an Estimote component. This is now available on the Xamarin component store. Check out his blog post here. I’ve been playing around with iBeacons a lot recently. They seem a really cool technology …

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 …

This time for an app, not for a podcast. One of my iTunes apps is finally complete and is now approved and up on iTunes: Second screen for Plex If you use Plex as your media server/player then you’ll love this app - it connects to your server and shows you what’s currently playing …

As mentioned before, I wrote a guest post for Core Java Interview Questions all about technical testing as part of the interview process. Sam, the sites editor, has been doing a podcast for the site and was kind enough to invite me along to discuss my blog post with him for an episode. What was …