Any device, any platform, one Microsoft

29th of February, 2016 / / 1 Comment

Only a few years ago you’d have been hard pressed to have mentioned the following four words in a single blog post where you weren’t arguing for / against a way of doing things: Microsoft, iOS, Android and development.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock you will no doubt have seen Microsoft’s announcement on their intent to acquire Xamarin, a business very much about cross-platform application development.

For those of us working in this space this has really been a case of
“what took you so long?”… [Keep reading] “Any device, any platform, one Microsoft”

Google Cloud Messaging using Azure Notification Hub

8th of November, 2015 / / 3 Comments

The Xamarin team have provided a very helpful tutorial to get started with setting up Android notifications – I suggest using this to get the basic implementation working, and ensure you’re using the GcmRegistrationIntentService version, and avoid using the depreciated GCM Client.

To get a complete end to end solution up and running there is a fair bit of additional information required.  Here’s a guide for using Microsoft Azure Notification Hub.

Set up Google Cloud Messaging service

Log into the Google Developer Console (https://console.developers.google.com/… [Keep reading] “Google Cloud Messaging using Azure Notification Hub”

Taking Advantage of The (iOS 9) Universal Links on Xamarin iOS apps

3rd of November, 2015 / / 3 Comments

What is Scheme URI?

In the context of mobile apps, Scheme URIs are used for communicating between mobile apps. Mobile developers can register a unique URI for each app in the application manifest (info.plist). The operating system would then use that to launch your application once the user clicks on a link that matches your uri. For instance, I could have my-cool-app:// as my scheme uri. I could then generate links (should start with my-cool-app://) to send in my email to my app’s users and once clicked, my app will be launched.… [Keep reading] “Taking Advantage of The (iOS 9) Universal Links on Xamarin iOS apps”

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”

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”

TDD for Mobile Development – Part 1

29th of June, 2014 / / 5 Comments

TDD for Mobile Development – Part 1
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

jenkins-tests

This post aims at exploring the best practices in terms of code quality and testability for mobile development.
It is part of a series that talks about Unit and Integration Testing in the Mobile space. In particular, I focus on Android and iOS.… [Keep reading] “TDD for Mobile Development – Part 1”

Windows Intune Features and Policies for Samsung KNOX

25th of May, 2014 / / No Comments

Microsoft and Samsung have announced a partnership whereby Samsung KNOX devices can be managed by Windows Intune using both Direct Management and Exchange ActiveSync.  ​Windows Intune now supports direct configuration of Samsung KNOX devices.  This feature allows IT administrators to manage Samsung KNOX mobile devices via the Windows Intune administration console.  Samsung KNOX devices are designed to be used in high security environments.

 

Here are the list of Windows Intune policies which are available today for managing Samsung KNOX devices:

Group
 Policy
Security / Password Require a password to unlock mobile devices
Security / Password Password quality
Security / Password Minimum password length
Security / Password Number of repeated sign-in failures to allow before the device is wiped
Security / Password Minutes of inactivity before screen turns off
Security / Password Password expiration (days)
Security / Password Remember password history –> Prevent reuse of previous passwords
Security / Encryption Require encryption on mobile device
Device Capabilities / Hardware Allow camera

 

If you are looking for assistance managing your corporate owned or personally owned mobile devices, please contact Kloud Solutions using the following URL:

http://www.kloud.com.au/contact-us/