Life Working from home A lot of us have been advised to work from home during the COVID-19 outbreak, especially here in the Seattle area. I've had to work from home quiet a bit
Life A Week in the Life of a Technical Evangelist The best way to start this blog post off would be to note that not every day is the same. In fact, it's the most varied, flexible job I've ever had. The second-best way would be to actually explain what a Technical Evangelist is
Bots Why Chat Bots are Relevant We keep hearing that bots are the new apps, but are they really? Why now? We’ve had bots around for years. The definition of a bot is an application
Bots Bot Framework: Getting a user's location in node.js You can get items that user’s send to you, such as attachments, photos, contacts or location, through the entities array in the message received. When you get a message
Bots Building My Own Personal Chat Bot “What Would Lilian Do?” The moment I found out about the new bot framework Microsoft was releasing, I knew I had to build a WWLD bot. Every time someone asks
Technology Visual Studio 2015 Shortcuts I’ve been using Visual Studio for the past 3 years and I still haven’t managed to remember, let alone use, all of the shortcuts and it’s starting to hit me how important they are. Shortcuts really do make you more productive,
Ink to Text Digital Ink Part 2: Writing to OneNote For anyone new, you can read part 1 here! In the first part of this tutorial, we created a note taking application using UWP (Universal Windows Platform). The application allowed
Ink to Text Digital Ink Part 1: What is it and how do I implement it? Using pen and paper is a natural activity. We’ve learnt how to use this form of input from the age of 3, granted at that age it was just
Cloud How to use Azure Blob Storage on Android I’ve been asked about this a few times so this is just a quick Azure Blob Storage tutorial using the Azure Android SDK. Download the Azure Storage SDK You
Machine Learning Project Oxford: Emotion Recognition on Android Machine Learning is awesome. Really, it is, especially today. Years ago it would have taken a lot of effort (and I mean A LOT of effort) to implement emotion recognition
Technology Siri vs Cortana vs Google Now - how easy are they to implement? As developers, we’re always looking to use the right tool for the job. Virtual Personal Assistance (VPA) is becoming a thing now, well, I say “now” but they have
IoT Sending SMS to the Raspberry Pi using Twilio, Azure & UWP Microsoft Edge Case Recently, I got involved with a really cool project based around the Microsoft Edge Case. You can check it out here #microsoftedgecase. Martin Beeby & Martin Kearn (a.k.a. M&M) built a machine to make checking if your
Technology Pi in OneNote I was writing a blog the other day in OneNote, as I do, and I noticed something weird. I was reading over what I wrote and saw this: 3.141592653589793
Ink to Text UWP Live Handwriting Recognition I’ve been working on an inking application that I want to use to possibly replace my notebook. One of the key concepts behind my app is to recognise the
Machine Learning Using Machine Learning APIs to get Average Twitter Sentiment in Java Some call it ‘The Orb of Destiny’, others ‘The Orb of Happiness’, or as I prefer to call it: ‘The Orb of Doom’. Martin Kearn, Amy Nicholson and Andrew Spooner
IoT Exception Handling and the Internet on the Raspberry Pi I recently started playing around with the Windows IoT core and deployed a Universal Windows Platform (UWP) app to my Raspberry Pi (RPi). My UWP app uses HttpClient to make
Technology API calls using HttpClient and deserializing JSON in C# I recently started learning how to develop Universal Windows Platform (UWP) applications and found a simple way of getting JSON formatted data from APIs into a UWP app using C#
