Yesterday I attended the “C# and Mvvm – Developing apps for all of Android, iPhone and Windows” event hosted by Stuart Lodge at Modern Jago. In preparation for the day I had the daunting task of setting up my Mac (OS X 10.8) for cross platform development with Xamarin. While most of it was fairly straight forward and well documented (see Installing Xamarin.iOS), I came across a few gotchas worth blogging about.

In the last post I introduced v2.0 of our open source, composition framework. In this post, I’m going to cover a quick example of how to get started with the basics of the endjin composition framework. Firstly, we define an interface for some type Then, we create a concrete type for our interface Now we can [...]

Introduction Programming, like most crafts, is the process of taking one thing and turning it into another thing. Turn a touch on a screen into a character in a message, or a tap on controller into the sideways shuffle of a character in a game. Simple to describe, they’re actually quite complicated to achieve, involving [...]

We’ve just pushed out version 2.0 of our open-source, component composition framework. This is the framework we use internally day-in, day-out for our dependency injection. The previous version had a dependency on Castle Windsor, but in this new version we have implemented our own container. There are a few reasons we decided to take this [...]

Collaboration is the ability to pull together expertise and ideas. In our office you’ll often hear the developers say ‘lets get it working, while the designers get on with the chrome.’ This isn’t a case of passing the buck it’s just enabling the developers to engage their expertise and deliver their part of the job [...]

I’d like to start the Campaign for Rational Business(1). CamRB(2). The aim of the campaign is pretty simple. Try to inject at least a little bit of rigour into your decision making. You’d be amazed how many businesses don’t. Articulate your idea in terms clear enough for people who work outside of your business to [...]

It’s been over a year since I wrote An Omega Geek’s Guide to Learning PowerShell, and I thought it was about time, with all the recent  noise about scriptcs, that PowerShell should get some more love as it’s a much overlooked and misunderstood gem of the .NET and Windows ecosystem. When I announced in the office that [...]

You take it for granted those you work with on a daily basis understand your sector terminology and language. You can’t just jump up and down and say ‘ well you know it’s creative, it’s the user experience, usability, information architecture…’because most people don’t have a clue about what you are talking about. Take a [...]

Today, we’ve set up what is the beginnings of a one-stop shop for information about Azure Cloud Migration projects. It consists of a bunch of curated links to case studies, whitepapers and developer tools, along with a feed of the latest Azure-related blogs and twitter feeds. If you’ve got an article, case study or tool [...]

In the past few months we’ve had several several requirements for charting and data visualizations across Windows 8 Modern Apps, Windows Phone 7 & 8 and desktop client applications. We’ve written up a client story that touches on this need. Here are some of the charts on the desktop: And on the phone: And here they [...]

Part 1 of the series talked about Different Branching Models. Part 2 covered GitFlow – a Branching Model for a Release Cycle and part 3 covered all the GitFlow Commands. In this final part of this series about adopting GitFlow, we’re going to cover how we can use the exciting new feature branching abilities of TeamCity 7.1 to allow [...]

Ever asked your friends the question, “Can you tell me what I do?” I can guarantee that you will get an array of answers – some close, some way off the mark, some even out of date. All of them a watered down variation on a theme of what you actually do. Over the years [...]

Templify is a simple tool that aims to solve one simple problem and solve it well: Every project starts the same way, You create a place to put Solution Artefacts On one file system On one computer Templify allows you to create a tokenised template of your entire solution. So if you’ve got a default [...]

In my previous post, we listed a few learnings from our experience of using Boostrap as a layout engine in an HTML5 website. In this post, I’ve put together a basic example that illustrates some of the techniques we talked about. I’ve structured a page with a header; left-hand sidebar; body content with a call-out [...]

We ran a retrospective of our first few Bootstrap-based HTML5/Javascript projects a few weeks back, and distilled some of the output into these top tips. 1) You don’t have to use a container-fluid to make the design responsive container-fluid is a full-width, smoothly resizing container (e.g. for apps). container is a pseudo-fixed-width, centred container that [...]

My post yesterday about programming language diversity and barriers to adoption prompted a fair bit of discussion, I’m pleased to say. Some of the most frequent comments were about languages I had erased from history. First, I forgot about the languages that are often overlooked unless you have a statistical or mathematical bent. MatLab and [...]

We were having a discussion about languages, prompted by a piece of technology strategy work we are doing around Node.js, and I came away with the impression that there is a general sense that we are moving from a period when the C-family of languages had a hegemony (from the mid-nineties onwards) into a period [...]

Since my last post we have been busy ‘snagging’ our site, building on our visual language, and pulling together potential merchandise. Like any brand we realise that it needs to continually evolve and be refined. So what is our next step? Now we have the foundations, we need to continue to develop our visual language and [...]

Previously, we’ve talked about the idea that Strategy is a kind of hypothesis about the future development of your business. What’s a hypothesis? The fount of all wisdom, Wikipedia, defines a (scientific) hypothesis as “a proposed explanation of a phenomenon which still has to be rigorously tested.” You can take any metaphor too far, though. [...]

In part 1 of the series I talked about the difference in branching models inherent with the different types of version control system. In part 2 I talked about the problems inherent in the software development, release and support cycle and how GitFlow was designed as a workflow to try and solve or at the [...]