Blogs

Binding the Cognitive Services Android Speech SDK - Part 3 - Java 8 fun
Binding the Cognitive Services Android Speech SDK - Part 3 - Java 8 fun

In the first part of this post, I showed how to get started binding the Microsoft Cognitive Services speech API. In the second part I showed how to make the code look more C#-like. In this part, I’ll show how to use it and fix up a nasty issue with the Android compiler and using jars created …

Binding the Cognitive Services Android Speech SDK - Part 2, making the code more C#-like
Binding the Cognitive Services Android Speech SDK - Part 2, making the code more C#-like

In the first part of this post, I showed how to get started binding the Microsoft Cognitive Services speech API. In this part I show how to make the code look more C#-like. In the third part I’ll show how to use it and fix up a nasty issue with the Android compiler and using jars created with …

Binding the Cognitive Services Android Speech SDK - Part 1, binding the library
Binding the Cognitive Services Android Speech SDK - Part 1, binding the library

As part of the Microsoft Cognitive Services speech API, there is a native Java Android SDK available as an .aar file. I wanted to use this in a Xamarin app, so I created a binding project for it. The code for this is available in my GitHub. Binding an SDK is a four step process: Create the binding …

Running AI models on iOS, Android and Windows using Xamarin
Running AI models on iOS, Android and Windows using Xamarin

I created a NuGet package a while ago to allow you to run models exported from the Azure Custom Vision service on iOS and Android in Xamarin apps from your cross-platform code. You can read about this here. Since then, the Custom Vision service has added ONNX export, meaning you can now run these …

Running custom vision models on a Windows device
Running custom vision models on a Windows device

Recently I wrote about creating AI models using the Azure Custom Vision Service. In these posts I looked at creating and training models, running them online, then finally exporting the models to run on iOS using CoreML and Android using TensorFlow. Recently Microsoft announced another way to export …

Setting iOS permission descriptions in Visual Studio 2017
Setting iOS permission descriptions in Visual Studio 2017

I spend most of my developer day using Visual Studio for Mac, but occasionally I flip back to Visual Studio 2017 on Windows. Last time I flipped back I tried to build an app that uses the camera and I got stuck on one simple thing - setting the camera usage description. If you double click on the …

What the @ - fixing weirdness in return JSON from Azure functions using F#
What the @ - fixing weirdness in return JSON from Azure functions using F#

I’ve been playing a lot with F# recently, both to build Xamarin apps using Elmish.XamarinForms and for some Azure Functions. Whilst building an HTTP trigger I came across some weirdness when serializing a record type to JSON. This is the relevant parts of my code: type Output = { TotalBalance …

Describing a photo in a mobile app using Azure Computer Vision
Describing a photo in a mobile app using Azure Computer Vision

I recently gave an introduction to Xamarin talk at Imperial College, London and wanted to build a cool app to show off what you can do on mobile using the awesome Cognitive Services available on Azure. I only had about 30-40 minutes to not only introduce Xamarin, but build an app so I decided to …

Xamarin in Action is now on the bookshelves!
Xamarin in Action is now on the bookshelves!

Finally, after 2 years since I first put pen to paper (well, put keystroke to Atom), Xamarin in Action is done and available from your favorite bookseller as a printed, paper book, with a forward from my good friend, the amazing James Montemagno! You can buy this book in one of two ways - an eBook …

Xamarin Essentials
Xamarin Essentials

TL;DR - check out Xamarin Essentials in the official documentation. Like a lot of developers, I love how Xamarin allows me to share business logic between iOS and Android apps, and share UI using Forms, but still have access to the native APIs. But one thing has been missing - a consistent, out of …

Building mobile apps in F# using Xamarin.Forms and Elmish
Building mobile apps in F# using Xamarin.Forms and Elmish

FSharp and Xamarin Xamarin is well known for allowing you to build mobile apps in C#, but you can use F# as well. F# is fully supported by the compiler and toolchains in both Visual Studio 2017 and Visual Studio for Mac. It’s also pretty much supported by all the Xamarin tools including …

The Jim and Tonic show
The Jim and Tonic show

Since starting at Microsoft as a Senior Cloud Developer Advocate I’ve been hugely privileged surrounded on a daily basis by some of the most awesome people across a wide range of developer communities - the rest of the Cloud Developer Advocacy team. These are engineers who constantly work to …