Xamarin Development|Jul 3, 2015

From Zero to Hero in Xamarin Forms in 53 Minutes

Looking for a fast way to get up to speed on Xamarin Forms? There are tons of learning resources out there, including a series of articles I published this spring, the first of which can be found here. But while some developers prefer learning by reading, others find video training the best learning medium. Which…
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Blogs|Jun 30, 2015

Handling the Back Button in Windows 10 UWP Apps

The cool thing about Universal Windows Platform (UWP) apps is that they run on an assortment of devices, from PCs, tablets, and phones to (soon) Xboxes and HoloLens, among others. Personally, I can’t wait to see some of the apps I’ve written light up on my kids’ Xbox. They’ll think I’m a hero (“my dad…
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Blogs|Jun 25, 2015

Angular2 Databinding is Fast!

I’ve been working with the Angular2 alpha ever since ng-conf 2015, and it has been pretty awesome to see how the framework is shaping up. I’ll be the first to admit that the bleeding edge tax is high, but it has been worth it to see just how powerful the next version of Angular is…
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Blogs|Jun 16, 2015

Azure Bits #3 – Adding a Message to an Azure Queue

In Azure Bits #2 – Saving the Image to Azure Blob Storage, we were able to save our image to Azure Blob Storage and verify that this all went according to plan after re-publishing our site to Azure. In this Azure Bit, we will take a look at the Azure Queue service and we will…
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Blogs|Jun 9, 2015

Pooling Buffers for Better Memory Management

Occasionally, you need a more robust solution to solve a problem. In my last post, I wrote about the horrors of this small code snippet: One way to alleviate the memory pressure that can be caused by frequent creation and destruction of large objects is to tell the .Net garbage collector to compact the Large…
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Blogs|Jun 3, 2015

Deploying an ES6, JSPM, NodeJS Application to Azure

I have a simple NodeJS application that I want to deploy to Microsoft Azure. Fortunately, there already exists detailed instructions, on how to accomplish this. But I want to add a couple of extra things. The Node application will be written using ES6, the latest version of Javascript, and also use JSPM, a newer generation…
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Blogs|May 22, 2015

Azure Bits #2 – Saving the Image to Azure Blob Storage

Creating the Azure Storage Account In Azure Bits #1 – Up and Running, we got a skeleton in place for our web application that will allow the user to upload an image and we published our Azure Image Manipulator Web App to Azure.  Our next task is taking this uploaded image and saving it into…
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Blogs|May 20, 2015

Lighting up Native Platform Features in Xamarin Forms – Part 2

In the previous post I implemented a custom attached property to be used in Xamarin Forms XAML when a built-in accessory view is desired on a table cell. In this follow-up we will continue and build out the iOS renderer that is responsible for actually enabling the feature in our running application. What about Android…
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Blogs|May 19, 2015

Lighting up Native Platform Features in Xamarin Forms – Part 1

In my last few posts I introduced a simple app that lets you browse the various built-in font variations supported by Xamarin Forms. If you recall, the application adopted a “stack navigation” design, which is quite common in mobile applications. However, there is one small flaw with our implementation so far – on the iOS…
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Blogs|May 16, 2015

Hey, Who Stole All My Memory?

Sometimes a little piece of seemingly innocuous code can cause a significant amount of trouble: Doesn’t look like much, but I’m sure we have all written something like this and paid it no mind. In fact, most of the time, code like this isn’t a problem. This little method becomes a problem when that object…
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Azure and Cloud Computing|May 14, 2015

Combining F# and Xamarin Forms to Create Mobile Applications

While we certainly have been busy getting our hands dirty with Xamarin I’ve been doing some of my own. However, I’ve been messing around with using Xamarin with F#. I mentioned in a previous post that F# can be used very well for enterprise applications. Here’s an in depth look at F# with Xamarin for…
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How To|May 12, 2015

Azure Bits #1 – Up and Running

  As Steve Porter mentioned in his blog post, How Wintellect Uses Microsoft Azure, we are making pretty heavy use of many offerings in the Azure toolset for our internal and client-facing web properties here at Wintellect and have been doing so from the early days of Azure. As we continue to experiment with new…
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