Reachability.Net: A unified API for reachability (network connectivity) on Xamarin Android and iOS

4th of May, 2015 / / No Comments

Do you need to check for an active internet connection in your mobile app? Don’t we all do it often and on many platforms (and for almost all apps)? I found myself implementing it on iOS and Android and then pulling my implementation to almost all the mobile apps that I write. This is not efficient, and can be done better, right? 🙂

As a result I have created a library called Reachabiliy.Net which can be found as a nuget package for everything related to network connectivity.… [Keep reading] “Reachability.Net: A unified API for reachability (network connectivity) on Xamarin Android and iOS”

Sharing Azure SSO Access Tokens Across Multiple Native Mobile Apps

8th of January, 2015 / / 3 Comments

This blog post is the fourth and final in the series that cover Azure AD SSO in native mobile applications.

  1. Authenticating iOS app users with Azure Active Directory
  2. How to Best handle AAD access tokens in native mobile apps
  3. Using Azure SSO tokens for Multiple AAD Resources From Native Mobile Apps
  4. Sharing Azure SSO Access Tokens Across Multiple Native Mobile Apps (this post).

Introduction

Most enterprises have more than one mobile app and it’s not unusual for these mobile apps to interact with some back-end services or APIs to fetch and update data.… [Keep reading] “Sharing Azure SSO Access Tokens Across Multiple Native Mobile Apps”

Using Azure SSO Tokens for Multiple AAD Resources From Native Mobile Apps

9th of December, 2014 / / 3 Comments

This blog post is the third in a series that cover Azure Active Directory Single Sign-On (SSO) authentication in native mobile applications.

  1. Authenticating iOS app users with Azure Active Directory
  2. How to Best handle AAD access tokens in native mobile apps
  3. Using Azure SSO tokens for Multiple AAD Resources From Native Mobile Apps (this post)
  4. Sharing Azure SSO access tokens across multiple native mobile apps.

Introduction

In an enterprise context it is highly likely there are multiple web services that your native mobile app needs to consume.… [Keep reading] “Using Azure SSO Tokens for Multiple AAD Resources From Native Mobile Apps”

How to Best Handle Azure AD Access Tokens in Native Mobile Apps

2nd of December, 2014 / / 6 Comments

This blog post is the second in a series that cover Azure Active Directory Single Sign On (SSO) Authentication in native mobile applications.

  1. Authenticating iOS app users with Azure Active Directory
  2. How to Best handle AAD access tokens in native mobile apps (this post)
  3. Using Azure SSO access token for multiple AAD resources from native mobile apps
  4. Sharing Azure SSO access token across multiple native mobile apps.

In my previous post, I talked about authenticating mobile app users using Azure AD SSO.… [Keep reading] “How to Best Handle Azure AD Access Tokens in Native Mobile Apps”

Implementing Azure Active Directory SSO (Single Sign on) in Xamarin iOS apps

2nd of December, 2014 / / 2 Comments

This blog post is the first in a series that cover Azure Active Directory Single Sign On (SSO) Authentication in native mobile applications.

  1. Authenticating iOS app users with Azure Active Directory (this post)
  2. How to Best handle AAD access tokens in native mobile apps
  3. Using Azure SSO access token for multiple AAD resources from native mobile apps
  4. Sharing Azure SSO access token across multiple native mobile apps.

Brief Start

Two weeks ago the Azure AD (AAD) team released the Active Directory Authentication Library (ADAL) to enable developers to implement SSO functionality leveraging AAD.… [Keep reading] “Implementing Azure Active Directory SSO (Single Sign on) in Xamarin iOS apps”

Installing WordPress in a Sub-Folder on Azure Websites

27th of November, 2014 / / 7 Comments

This blog post shows you how to install a wordpress website in a sub-folder on your Azure website. Now somebody would ask why would I need to do that, and that is a good question, so let me start with the reasons:

Why do it this way?

Assume that you have a website and you want to create a blog section. This is a very common practice and most companies nowadays have a blog section of the website (which replaces the old “news” page).… [Keep reading] “Installing WordPress in a Sub-Folder on Azure Websites”

Addressing Cross-Site Request Forgery in public/hybrid APIs

6th of November, 2014 / / No Comments

Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF or Session Riding) is the invocation of unauthorised commands that are triggered by a trusted user. A malicious website could make use of the fact that a user is logged in to a vulnerable website to then ride that session and forge requests. CSRF is a very common type of attack and ASP.NET has had the AntiForgery library for a long time. What’s interesting is when you have a hybrid/public API that your website is using and it is also used by other clients like Powershell, Mobile, etc.… [Keep reading] “Addressing Cross-Site Request Forgery in public/hybrid APIs”

The Little Gotchas of managing certificates in Azure

5th of November, 2014 / / 2 Comments

Azure and I have been friends for quite some time now, and I love the power that Azure gives me. He enables me to spin up a whole enterprise-like infrastructure in seconds. However, when it comes to managing certificates, Azure disappoints me. In a recent project that I have worked on, I got frustrated with some of Azure gotchas when it comes to managing security keys. In this blog post, I will share my experience on these issues.… [Keep reading] “The Little Gotchas of managing certificates in Azure”

Forget about the Internet and Sync Locally

4th of September, 2014 / / 2 Comments

If you have missed our talk in Melbourne Mobile, now you have the chance to flip through the slides and have a look at the code/demo.

Talk Details

Cloud technologies have changed the way users interact with their devices and the way they keep their data. Users now expect their data to be synced always to all devices in real-time. This has been facilitated through many cloud providers such as iCloud, Google services, and Azure.… [Keep reading] “Forget about the Internet and Sync Locally”

Mobile Test-Driven Development Part (3) – Running your unit tests from your IDE

15th of August, 2014 / / 2 Comments

TDD in Mobile Development – Part 3
1. Unit Testing of Platform-Specific Code in Mobile Development.
2. Portable IoC (Portable.TinyIoC) for Mobile Development
3. Mobile Test-Driven Development – Running your unit tests from your IDE

This is the third post in my TDD for Mobile Development series. This post shows how we can have test driven development for mobile. We will look at options for running our tests from within our IDE and finding the right test runner for our development env without the need to launch an emulator or deploy to a device every time we want to run the tests.… [Keep reading] “Mobile Test-Driven Development Part (3) – Running your unit tests from your IDE”