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…

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…

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!…

A couple years back I wrote an article covering how you could leverage many different languages in your Xamarin apps. In it, I included an F# portable class library that was referenced by the main application written in C#. That's still a completely valid approach, but I thought it was a good time to follow that up with a look at how, these days, you can use F# to build the entire app, and why it's…

This is part five 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 previous post I added some basic remote control command functionality, allowing for being able to do things like mute, pause and resume playback, and change the…