PIN Number Password Fields for Windows XAML

22nd of October, 2015 / / No Comments

In Windows XAML world, a bad design decision was made to have PasswordBox and TextBox as different objects, meaning that the PasswordBox does not inherit common properties from the TextBox. As a consequence, you cannot do many of the things that you normally do with a textbox such as customising the appearance of the password textbox (say you want to make the text centre-aligned, or you want to bind the number keypad instead of the alpha keyboard).… [Keep reading] “PIN Number Password Fields for Windows XAML”

Handling Complex Object Persistence and Messaging on Mobile

21st of October, 2015 / / 1 Comment

Data persistence and messaging is a very common task that you almost certainly need in your apps. Mobile platforms have come a long way in supporting data persistence mostly through the SQLite engine which has become the standard on all mobile platforms. However, SQLite is (as it’s name suggests) a lightweight engine and does not offer as many features as a full RDBMS.

This should not be a problem on a mobile device where persisting data is intended mostly for caching until the data reaches its ultimate destination on a backend server.… [Keep reading] “Handling Complex Object Persistence and Messaging on Mobile”

Azure Applications Insights for Xamarin iOS

7th of August, 2015 / / 4 Comments

Azure Application Insights (AI) is a great instrumentation tool that can help you learn about how your application is doing during run-time. It is currently in Preview mode, so bear that in mind when developing production ready apps. It gives you the ability to log lots of different kinds of information like tracing, page views, custom events, metrics and more.

Azure AI supports multiple platforms, but unfortunately they have not released a Xamarin package yet. There is one library which is for Xamarin.Forms… [Keep reading] “Azure Applications Insights for Xamarin iOS”

Sharing HTTP sessions between WebView requests and HttpClient on Windows Phone

15th of July, 2015 / / 1 Comment

Introduction

I have been working on a hybrid mobile application that requires displaying/containing a few mobile apps in a WebView control. In the background, some HTTP requests need to go through to collect data and do further processing. We need to maintain the same session in all of the web requests going through the mobile app. This means all web (HTTP) requests originated by the Webview as well as our background (HttpClient) requests need to share cookies, cache, etc.… [Keep reading] “Sharing HTTP sessions between WebView requests and HttpClient on Windows Phone”

Azure MFA Server – International Deployment

1st of July, 2015 / / 2 Comments

Hi all – this blog will cover off some information to assist with multilingual/international deployment of Azure MFA server. There are some nuances of the product that make ongoing management of language preferences a little challenging. Also some MFA Methods are preferable to others in international scenarios due to carrier variances.

Language Preferences

Ideally when a user is on-boarded, their language preferences for the various MFA Methods should be configured to their native language. This can easily be achieved using MFA Server, however there are some things to know:

  1. Language settings are defined in in Synchronisation Items.
… [Keep reading] “Azure MFA Server – International Deployment”

Xamarin Plugins

12th of May, 2015 / / No Comments

Cross-platform NuGet Packages

Xamarin Plugins are a special kind of NuGet package that let you easily add cross-platform functionality to your apps. Using NuGet to distribute Plugins means that anyone can create them, and of course consume them. The platforms supported by Plugins include Android, iOS, iOS Unified (64bit), Windows Phone 8, Windows Phone 8.1 RT and Windows Store.

Plugins abstract common device functionality or expose cross-platform APIs via a single interface

Plugins are small, have few or no dependencies, and provide a simple mechanism for accessing a single device function or feature.… [Keep reading] “Xamarin Plugins”

Let’s Hack It: Securing data on the mobile, the what, why, and how

6th of May, 2015 / / No Comments

Here is the presentation of tonight’s talk. It was great to see so many passionate developers and business people at Melbourne Mobile. I have embedded the slides below and I hope you find it useful.

Talk Summary

This presentation is basically a summary of what I have learned and the experience I have had going through my recent project. In trying to secure the users data on the mobile device, I have come to learn quite few common flaws in the security implementation, I have learned more reasons why you need to protect the data on your mobile app, and have come to know and use few useful open source projects.… [Keep reading] “Let’s Hack It: Securing data on the mobile, the what, why, and how”

Announcing KeyChain.NET: a unified API for using KeyChain on many platforms

6th of May, 2015 / / No Comments

Storing and accessing private keys and passwords can be a tricky task. How far do you need to go to protect your (and the user’s) data? This is where KeyChain on iOS comes in handy. It allows you to store keys in a (arguably) secure database. This has seen great improvements since iOS 8 and iOS devices (since iPhone 5S) equipped with a special A7 chip designed particularly for holding your keys. More on iOS KeyChain can be found on Apple’s website here.… [Keep reading] “Announcing KeyChain.NET: a unified API for using KeyChain on many platforms”

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”

Command and control with Arduino, Windows Phone and Azure Mobile Services

24th of January, 2015 / / 1 Comment

In most of our posts on the topic of IoT to date we’ve focussed on how to send data emitted from sensors and devices to centralised platforms where we can further process and analyse this data. In this post we’re going to have a look at how we can reverse this model and control our ‘things’ remotely by utilising cloud services. I’m going to demonstrate how to remotely control a light emitting diode (LED) strip with a Windows Phone using Microsoft Azure Mobile Services.… [Keep reading] “Command and control with Arduino, Windows Phone and Azure Mobile Services”