Categories
Windows

Keeping Focus

Windows 11 introduced the concept of Focus Sessions which allow you to specify a fixed time to work uninterrupted. While active, Windows will not flash taskbar icons and will turn on Do Not Disturb mode to suppress notifications (this particular feature was known as Focus Assist in Windows 10). From Windows 11 22H2 there is […]

Categories
Apps Windows

The Next Step for the Occupied App

Today the latest app update went live in the Microsoft Store. This update adds a quick manual override to your busy status which you can trigger from the tray icon. The app continues to evolve to help you manage your free/busy time and share your status with colleagues. Read more about it here.

Categories
Books

Book Review: .Net MAUI for C# Developers

Jesse Liberty and Rodrigo Juarez have created this book to guide the reader through all aspects of creating apps with .NET MAUI. It assumes a level of experience with C# and .NET but is not limited to previous Xamarin developers. In fact while Xamarin Forms is mentioned it does not get in the way of […]

Categories
Windows

Sense a presence in the workforce

Many organisations revolve around a communication tool like Microsoft Teams. Not only do they form the backbone of meetings in hybrid and remote working, but also one-to-one chats and calls. Microsoft Teams has a presence indicator for each user so that you can show your colleagues when you are available or do not wish to […]

Categories
Azure Mapping

A Journey Through Azure Maps

This article was originally written in 2018 and there have been a number of additions to the API since then. Azure Maps is a suite of services for working with constantly changing location-based information. These cover everything you’ll need whether managing systems with moving elements (Route, Traffic), finding contextual information (Search, Time Zone) or presenting […]

Categories
Uncategorized

This Year, Next Year, Sometime…?

One of the books I read when I first got interested in computers was from the Ladybird books How It Works series. The volume covering “The Computer” was published in 1979 and, as you can imagine, features plenty of suitably dated illustrations of computers of the time. It ends with a page speculating about the […]

Categories
.NET Bluetooth

Pi Day

I’d completely forgotten about Pi day until I saw someone post about it online and I thought I should write about the happy coincidence that I’ve been working with a Raspberry Pi today. Last week I took delivery of a new Raspberry Pi. I have an older Pi 2 but I wanted to have a […]

Categories
.NET Bluetooth

Bluetooth Support for Android on More Frameworks

There is a particular issue when writing any code which will run on Android which presents external UI through an Intent or uses broadcasts in that you need to have a reference to the current Activity. I covered this in my last post. Following on from that I moved the code to a new library […]

Categories
.NET

Dot Net DLLs, Droid, Dependencies

Natively, Android apps are built around activities. These are distinct parts of an application which include UI and are designed to perform a particular task. Android allows you to start activities and pass data between them. A number of system dialogs are just activities which run and return a result. Across Platforms When using a […]

Categories
IoT

Manage a Parking Lot with Azure Sphere

This article was originally written in 2018 and there have been many updates to Azure Sphere between then and now so some changes may be required. I thought it would be useful to share this as-is (and the code) in case it was of use to others who wanted to take advantage of an ultrasonic […]