A couple years back I posted about an add-in we wrote to expose a command to use as part of our build process to grab a snapshot of the current versions of all the tools in the Xamarin Studio build chains. For us this is essential in being able to track how a specific app was built long after versions have been updated on the build server. With the release of Xamarin Studio 6 the add-in…

I recently broke down and purchased an Amazon Echo after hearing enough good things about it, and also seeing how straightforward it looked to develop for it. It's no secret that I'm a big fan of Datadog, so naturally I felt like I needed to mix the two. I've previously covered exposing Datadog metrics through Hubot, so I figured I'd try to do something similar for the Echo. I decided to create and host the skill…

In case you haven't noticed, I've been rambling a lot lately on the topic of app monitoring and instrumentation, including a visit to Jesse Liberty's podcast as well as my session at Xamarin Evolve. For whatever reason I've been allowed to keep rambling about it since then, so I have some more links to share! dotnetConf I was invited to speak at dotnetConf, which was an awesome virtual conference involving many great folks from Microsoft in…

I've given a lot of talks over the years, with varying amounts of live coding and moving parts. For many of them it wasn't uncommon for me to have some sort of notes jotted down as an emergency reminder if my memory fails in the moment, and I always have local fallbacks for any network-dependent demos to avoid being completely hindered by bad connections. When preparing for my talk at this year's Xamarin Evolve, I found…

Last week I had the pleasure of attending and speaking at my third Xamarin Evolve, and as always it was a great time. Video from my session is now available to watch: The slides are also available here, though you lose out on the critical animations: All of the code, including everything from the sample app to the Hubot instance, is available on GitHub.…