Blogs
Identifying my daughters toys using AI - Part 4, using the models offline on Android
In the first part of this series I used the Azure Custom Vision service to create an image classifier to allow me to easily identify my daughters cuddly toys. Once created I tested it by uploading an image and seeing what tags the classifier found for the image. In the second part I accessed this …
Identifying my daughters toys using AI - Part 3, using the models offline in iOS
In the first part of this series I used the Azure Custom Vision service to create an image classifier to allow me to easily identify my daughters cuddly toys. Once created I tested it by uploading an image and seeing what tags the classifier found for the image. In the second part I accessed this …
Identifying my daughters toys using AI - Part 2, using the model
In the first part of this post I used the Azure Custom Vision service to create an image classifier to allow me to easily identify my daughters cuddly toys. Once created I tested it by uploading an image and seeing what tags the classifier found for the image. Although this works, it’s a long …
Hiding API keys from Git
I’ve been working on a Xamarin app using Azure Cognitive Services to do image recognition, and one of the stumbling blocks I’ve faced is what to do with my API keys. I want to make the app open source as an example of how to use these services, but don’t want to check my API keys …
Identifying my daughters toys using AI - Part 1, creating the model
Prefer to watch instead of read? - https://youtu.be/3sjInlJcpBs It’s currently just after Christmas, and my 4 year old daughter has received a fair few cuddly toys from Santa. These bring her total collection up to way too many, and like most parents I have a hard time remembering all their …
Getting a users Facebook profile after Authenticating your Xamarin app with Azure
I’ve recently been looking at the authentication offered by Azure for use in a mobile app, specifically using social auth providers like Facebook to allow a user to sign up for my app. The auth setup is incredibly easy, with Azure taking care of a lot of the hard stuff. There are also loads of …
Creating Visual Studio project and solution templates - Part 3, VS for Mac extension
In the first part of this set of posts I looked at creating a dotnet new project template, and in the second part I showed how you could easily add this to a Visual Studio for Windows extension. Lets now look at adding it to a Visual Studio for Mac extension, so that our template is available …
Creating Visual Studio project and solution templates - Part 2, VS for Windows extension
In the first part of this set of posts I looked at creating a dotnet new project template. These are great if you like the cli, but if, like me, you’d rather be able to do File->New then dotnet new is not much use. Instead you need a Visual Studio extension that provides a new project or …
Introducing Visual Studio Mobile Center
In this article, excerpted from chapter 15 of Xamarin in Action, we’ll be looking at using Visual Studio Mobile Center’ mobile-optimized lifecycle to build, test, deploy, and monitor applications. Save 37% off Xamarin in Action with code fccbennett at manning.com. Introducing Visual Studio Mobile …
Creating Visual Studio project and solution templates - Part 1, dotnet new
I’ve recently updated my MvvmCross templates to support .NET Standard to be ready for the awesome future. Unfortunately this meant a complete rewrite of my templates as the out of the box Visual Studio project template extensions on both Windows and Mac don’t support .NET Standard. As it …
Hitting refresh on my career
Inspired by Satya Nadella’s Hit Refresh, a book well worth reading, I thought I’d write about my Hit Refresh moment. Hit Refresh is inspired by refreshing your browser - it doesn’t reload everything, instead it just reloads part of the page. This is reflected in how we can change …
Using LiveXAML to improve your Xamarin Forms UIs
One of the downsides to UI development is how long it takes to get a good looking UI. You spend an inordinate amount of time setting up the UI, running your app to see how it looks, tweaking the UI, running again, tweaking again, running again. Then of course you have to repeat on multiple devices …