This is part six 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 After a much longer hiatus than I'd hoped to take from this project, I'm finally getting a chance to dive back in! One of the main things I've…

If you know me you know that if I can't monitor something in Datadog it may as well not exist, so as I'm starting to roll out some Akka.NET systems naturally I needed to get some observability in there. There is already some basic StatsD support that ships in the core Akka.Monitoring packages, but that fell a little short of what I wanted. Namely, if your actor system is named mysystem and your actor…

One of my favorite things about Mobile Center is that everything it can do is exposed via their REST API, meaning that if the default experience doesn't fit the workflow you're going for, you can compose things yourself in any way you see fit. They were also nice enough to expose a Swagger definition as well, making it easy to explore. The API is easy to use, but one of the other nice things about Swagger…

If you're building a mobile app, there's a lot of things you need to set up. How do you build and distribute your app? How do you authenticate your users? Do you have some sort of backend set up to store your data? How are you monitoring errors and usage? The list goes on and on. Microsoft has a lot of different offerings targeting these very needs. There's Xamarin Insights for crash reporting and monitoring, Test…

Last week I had the pleasure of chatting with Jesse Liberty on Yet Another Podcast about a variety of topics, ranging from Azure Functions, Alexa skills, Azure Mobile Center, F#, and more. Check it out here: Yet Another Podcast – #168: Greg Shackles Enjoy!…