I sometimes get this question when I tell people about TechMasters, so I thought maybe it’s time for a blog post on the topic. What is TechMasters? It is Open Toastmasters club for Geeks, with the focus of helping our members become public speakers for community developer conferences and user groups. We are an open club in that it is open to anyone, ......

---

I like to think of myself as an early adopter, but I’m a month behind in getting the latest set of tools for Visual Studio 2015 and Azure. One of the great additions is the Cloud Explorer, a new utility for managing services provisioned in the cloud. These have been well documented by my friend Brady on the Azure Blog, but one of my favorite things ......

---

Have you ever tried to reuse code by adding existing files to a project? In Visual Studio this usually works, with the file getting put into the right location, associating the editor based on the file extension. I’ve been working on a Xamarin Forms project which allows me to use XAML to create the UI and C# for the code behind. This enables me to leverage ......

---

I’ve been working on a project using Xamarin.Forms and Azure Mobile Services for a while, and one issue I came across that wasn’t entirely clear is how do you work with an existing database, yet support updates to the tables and be able to deploy to different environments (like Test, QA and Prod)? Hopefully I can shed some light with this post. Azure ......

---

Xamarin.Forms is an attractive option when building cross platform apps, but for an old XAML developer like myself it can be a challenge to get the nuances of the grammar and syntax right. For Windows I’ve depended on tools like Blend and Visual Studio Intellisense to help me understand what’s possible. Moving to Xamarin XAML is sometimes tedious because ......

---

I'm creating a Xamarin.Forms project, using XAML for markup that includes an authentication page when the app starts. I am using a TabbedPage (also tried CarouselPage) as the container of my main UI and plan to have several pages displayed. The first page (myDashboard) checks to see if the user has authenticated and if not I want to display a modal ......

---

Short Answer – Don’t use special characters in a Mobile Service’s project name when you create it, the local SQL won’t be able to open the database and you may spend a lot of time figuring out why chasing down false leads… The Long Answer… In my last role at Microsoft as an Azure Evangelist I posted a series of cloud tips, which were intended to be ......

---

Xamarin + WAMS = Happiness (well, most of the time) First some background…I spent the last couple months trying to figure out the best approach for cross-platform development stuff. After some research and working thru some POC’s with Apache Cordova, Native and Xamarin we decided to go down the path of Xamarin as the tool of choice. We did this for ......

---

I want to help people be aware of some of the scams going on. Lately I’ve been getting a number of emails that are needing some attention.The latest phishing scam example is fairly clever, disguising itself as a voicemail received by outlook. It includes text with a bogus phone number and a link to a zip file they want you to open that includes the ......

---

This week we're doing a session called "Avoiding Hacker Trix" which goes thru some of the top web exploits that you should be aware of. In this webcast we will cover a variety of things including what we call the secure development process, cross site scripting attack, one click attack, SQL Injection and more. There are a bunch of links we cover, but ......

---