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”

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”

Xamarin Test Cloud – the new kid on the block?

9th of January, 2015 / / No Comments

Early last year I was working for one of our customers to find out an optimum test solution for their upcoming mobile application. The idea was that it should be heavily automated, efficient and cost-effective. The first observations (and the feeling) that I had was that we have very little choice in the way of tool choices. That was unfortunate, but the reality.

Almost a year later, when looking back and reflecting on some of those findings, I can see things have changed immensely.… [Keep reading] “Xamarin Test Cloud – the new kid on the block?”

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”