Blogs

Jim made some dumb mistakes when recording a video. You won't believe how he fixed it with Azure Media Services!
Jim made some dumb mistakes when recording a video. You won't believe how he fixed it with Azure Media Services!

Learn how Jim used Azure Media Services to fix his dumb mistakes when recording video!

Screen sharing a Raspberry Pi from a Mac
Screen sharing a Raspberry Pi from a Mac

I’ve been playing with a Raspberry Pi for a while, and I’m getting fed up with changing the input to my monitor and using a second keyboard/mouse (yeah, yeah, 1st World Problem I know). I decided to set up a remote screen share so I can share the screen. This means I can use the same …

Xamarin ❤ F#
Xamarin ❤ F#

Xamarin and Xamarin.Forms need no introduction. I’m sure by now you are well aware of these technologies and have seen many examples of building cross-platform mobile apps using C#. If not, I can highly recommend my book Xamarin in Action which if you follow this link and use code …

Prototyping your first cloud-connected IoT project using an MXChip board and Azure IoT hub.
Prototyping your first cloud-connected IoT project using an MXChip board and Azure IoT hub.

Learn how to build an internet connected fan using the MXChip Azure IoT dev kit and Azure IoT Hub

Flying long haul with young children
Flying long haul with young children

A discussion came up at work the other day on flying long-haul with very young children (toddler age), so I though it would be good to share the tips that I shared with the discussion. My daughter is 6 and has been on over 40 flights, including a lot of long haul as a toddler so I’ve managed …

Fabulous Santa Tracker
Fabulous Santa Tracker

‘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 …

Open anything in VS Code using a MacOS quick action
Open anything in VS Code using a MacOS quick action

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! …

Controlling an IoT device from your phone
Controlling an IoT device from your phone

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 makers series
Azure makers series

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
Trust

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 …

Debugging multiple Azure Functions apps at the same time
Debugging multiple Azure Functions apps at the same time

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 - …

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

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 …