Akka.NET is a great toolkit for building concurrent and fault-tolerant systems by way of the actor model. Most think of actor systems as something you would just do on the server side of things, as part of building large distributed systems, but the approach works great for all sorts of applications. The recent release of Akka.NET 1.3 brought with it support for .NET Standard 1.6, so naturally I needed to try using…
A Mobile DevOps Retrospective Part I: 150+ Apps Later
I recently had the pleasure to write a series of guest posts for the Microsoft's Mobile Center blog about mobile DevOps, and our experiences over the years at Olo. I'm happy to say that part one of the series is now out, with parts two and three coming soon. Enjoy! A Mobile DevOps Retrospective Part I: 150+ Apps Later…
Building a Voice-Driven TV Remote - Part 8: Tracking Performance with Application Insights
This is part eight of the Building a Voice-Driven TV Remote series: Getting The Data Adding Search The Device API Some Basic Alexa Commands Adding a Listings Search Command Starting to Migrate from HTTP to MQTT Finishing the Migration from HTTP to MQTT Tracking Performance with Application Insights In the last part I vastly improved the performance of the app by switching from HTTP to MQTT. With that in place, the next step I wanted to…
Looking Ahead to Xamarin.Forms 3.0
It's been a few years now since Xamarin.Forms was released into the world, and it continues to be a popular and evolving framework choice for Xamarin developers. Later this year Microsoft is planning to release Xamarin.Forms 3.0, its third major release of the framework, which is slated to ship with a lot of exciting features and improvements. While it certainly won't be comprehensive, as the feature set is large and still in motion,…
Building a Voice-Driven TV Remote - Part 7: Finishing the Migration from HTTP to MQTT
This is part seven of the Building a Voice-Driven TV Remote series: Getting The Data Adding Search The Device API Some Basic Alexa Commands Adding a Listings Search Command Starting to Migrate from HTTP to MQTT Finishing the Migration from HTTP to MQTT Tracking Performance with Application Insights In the last post of the series I introduced a MQTT bridge to connect my Harmony system with Azure IoT, so now it's time to switch things over…