Troubleshoot Intune app and profile installation issues, error “NOTNOW”

6th of May, 2019 / / No Comments

On Microsoft Intune Mobile Device Management (MDM) managed devices, sometimes app or profile installations can fail. When these app or profile installs fail, it can be challenging to understand the failure reason or troubleshoot the issue. Microsoft Intune provides app installation failure details that allow help desk operators and Intune administrators to view app information to address user help requests. The troubleshooting pane within Intune provides failure details, including details about managed apps on a user’s device.… [Keep reading] “Troubleshoot Intune app and profile installation issues, error “NOTNOW””

Inter-App Communications in Xamarin.iOS and Why OpenUrl Freezes for 10+ sec

9th of March, 2016 / / No Comments

Inter-App Communications

Mobile apps are meant to communicate using multiple channels, but the most popular, recommended, and widely used is using Scheme Uri. If you have not used Scheme URI then you should consider adding them to your app, it takes less than a minute to add support to your app, and it provides you a great way to get users to your app.

Setting the Stage

One scenario that I had was App A was launching App B and querying data, App B was in turn looking up the request, and returning data to App A.… [Keep reading] “Inter-App Communications in Xamarin.iOS and Why OpenUrl Freezes for 10+ sec”

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”

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”

Solving self signed certificate blocking by inspecting web requests using Xamarin iOS

21st of October, 2015 / / 2 Comments

In iOS 9 Apple have turned on App Transport Security (ATS) as default. So if your iOS application is connecting to an insecure url resource then you’re out of luck as it will be blocked, an example of the most likely culprit is viewing a webpage without SSL encryption.

With the current application I’m working on I ran into trouble whilst loading a dev resource only to find it was using a self signed certificate and being blocked by the OS. … [Keep reading] “Solving self signed certificate blocking by inspecting web requests using Xamarin iOS”

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”

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”