Dapper I just recently discovered the Dapper [https://github.com/StackExchange/dapper-dot-net] micro-ORM for doing data access in applications. I had been using Entity Framework [https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/data/ef.aspx] (EF) 6 in the APIs of most of my apps. And don't get me wrong,

Summary The development of mobile apps presents many challenges, the primary being: > How does one ensure that the deliverable of the development process is an app that experiences pervasive and positive engagement with the target users? In other words, how do I make sure that I create an app

Weather conditions sound like they'll be perfect across MN this afternoon for viewing the partial solar eclipse. The event will begin at about 4:30pm and will peak right before the sun slips below the horizon around 5:30 - 6pm. Maximum eclipse will occur at 5:30pm.

One of the most exciting bits of news at Xamarin Evolve [https://evolve.xamarin.com/] 2014 last week in Atalanta was the announcement of Xamarin Insights [http://xamarin.com/insights], a new platform/service/libraries for gathering data from mobile apps on sessions, crashes, and events. And while there'

A rapidly developing industry yields a cacophony of terms The field of mobile app development (or simply "app development", as its known in the future) is one that's changing so fast, it can be difficult to keep up with all of the terms or be able

  NOTE: This post is now over 3 years old. I strongly suggest you use something else, like Auth0 or some other

I'm working on a Xamarin iOS/Android mobile project in which the core view of the app displays some images and data from some web calls. The app designer didn't like the way that images loaded AFTER they scrolled onto the screen (think Facebook). So, I

When I first started doing MonoTouch development (later to become Xamarin.iOS), the ability to use XCode's Interface Builder (IB) was at the time a broken feature with MonoDevelop. Further, the framework that I was using at work for writing apps had it's own UI abstraction

If you've ever usedReSharper [http://www.jetbrains.com/resharper/] (or even CodeRush from DevExpress [http://www.devexpress.com/products/coderush/]) for Visual Studio, you know just how useful these development productivity tools are, and how you often wonder how you ever got along without them. Now, if you&

So, I finally have my own licenses (subscriptions) for Xamarin.iOS and Xamarin.Android! This lets me feel good about the prospect of working on personal app projects, and not needing to use the employer's laptop and subscriptions to do it. The fresh subscriptions go quite nicely with

I installed the new iOS 7 SDK and the corresponding Xamarin.IOS SDK. It was cool to have the iOS 7 simulator running on my laptop and be able to play with iOS 7 a little bit. However, hell ensued when I ran the app that I've been

The iOS app I've been working recently is heavy on displaying lists of stuff, particularly lists of stuff with tap actions in the cells/views. I chose to use UICollectionViews instead of UITableViews. Similar to a UITableViewController, UICollectionViewController has a method that you need to override in order

So, this Cisco VPN error blighted my productivity for a few days: "Reason 442: Failed to enable Virtual Adapter" Apparently, this is caused by the Cisco VPN installer placing the wrong adapter name in the registry during installation. Seriously??? A registry hack is what it takes to fix

Just received a nice fat box of assorted Xamarin T-shirts for the crew at the office! Thanks to Erik Polzin at Xamarin for hookin' us up!!!

I recently setup GitTfs at work because, while working on a cross-platform mobile project, my co-workers and I were beginning to have severe code conflicts using TFS (imagine that). One of the stumpers I ran into while setting it up was just the simple act of cloning the TFS repo

[http://joesauve.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/monkey_big.png] When evaluating a new mobile project, the technical stakeholders will more than likely be asking the question, "How much of our existing code can be leveraged?" And rightly so; code re-use is one of the fundamental tenets of

Understanding the nuances between the different types of iOS provisioning profiles (and how they relate to the different types of iOS Developer programs) can be a real pain. I never found a nice visual aid in Apple's documentation, so I decided to make my own: [https://docs.google.

So, you have your fancy dancy .NET WCF service all completed and working nicely. But...it has that ugly ".svc" in the URL: http://YourSite.com/YourFancyWebService.svc/GetStuff Yeah...that looks gross. Let's make it prettier: http://YourSite.com/YourFancyWebService/GetStuff If you've

[http://joesauve.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/26923230.jpg] Xamarin [http://xamarin.com/] announced Test Cloud [http://xamarin.com/test-cloud] last week. It's a cloud-based testing tool that allows you to run your app on a plethora of actual devices. Apparently, all of these devices are physically wired

I just discovered Orchard CMS [http://orchardproject.net/], and I must say that based solely on the open source projects upon which it relies [http://docs.orchardproject.net/Documentation/Orchard-dependencies-and-libraries] , it looks like a GREAT platform. Namely, AutoFac [http://autofac.org/], Log4Net [http://logging.apache.org/log4net/], NHibernate [http://nhforge.