Mike James

Native iOS Facebook Authentication with Azure App Service

January 24th, 2017

Authentication is a fundamental pillar to almost all modern mobile apps, but it's challenging to get right. In the past, I found myself in using methods that I knew were bad practice, but which allowed me to quickly ship apps to app stores. The most common approach I've seen when authenticating mobile apps with Azure is to use the magic l

Getting Started with the iOS 10 Notification Framework

November 9th, 2016

iOS 10 includes some significant changes to notifications for developers, with the addition of a brand new framework for dealing with notifications that supports the delivery and handling of both local and remote notifications. In this blog post, we'll look at the changes and cover how to ensure your app continues to work perfectly with

Say Hello to Siri with SiriKit

November 2nd, 2016

One of the most exciting new features of iOS 10 is that it opens Siri to app developers. In this blog post, we'll cover the basics of how to add Siri support to your existing apps. Siri was introduced in 2011 as part of iOS, after Apple acquired Siri's developers in 2010 and integrated it into the core of iOS as a digital personal assi

Start Building Azure-Connected Apps with the Xamarin Shopping Demo App

September 15th, 2016

Today I’m excited to announce that we’re making our latest sample app, the Shopping Demo App, available to download from GitHub. We worked closely with the Microsoft Azure team to create this great business-to-consumer sample app available for iOS, Android, and Windows 10. The Shopping Demo App is a classifieds marketplace that uses

Creating a Five-Star Search Experience with Azure Search

July 13th, 2016

Search is a feature that can make or break a mobile app, but it can be incredibly difficult to get right. Often, the likelihood that a user continues to use your app depends on the quality of the search experience; if Yelp didn't help me find restaurants or Amazon didn't display the products I was looking for, I'd likely abandon that ser

WWDC 2016 Recap for iOS Developers

June 14th, 2016

Yesterday, Apple announced several exciting innovations during the WWDC keynote presentation to kick off Apple's annual developer conference. No matter what Apple platform your building for today, there's an update that will provide you with brand new APIs and features to explore. iOS 10 Let's start off with Apple's most popular platfor

Building Smart Apps with Microsoft Cognitive Services

May 25th, 2016

Machine learning is a hot topic for developers these days. Many developers, though, have been deterred from integrating machine learning into their applications due to daunting requirements in advanced understanding of math and theory. Earlier this year, Microsoft announced the availability of a set of 21 new APIs called Microsoft Cognitive Se

Add Background Data Refresh to Your iOS Apps

March 1st, 2016

Users expect your apps to load quickly. A critical component of a user's perception of your app is how fast it loads data. There are many steps you can take to speed up network requests, including general networking techniques like request prioritization and speculative requests or taking advantage of the native networking stack on iOS

Building Dynamic Layouts for iOS with UIStackView

February 15th, 2016

Laying out views on iOS has traditionally been very difficult. Before the birth of the iPad and different iPhone form-factors, developers would often hardcode view positions, but this is no longer a viable approach as the device landscape has broadened. To solve this, Apple introduced AutoLayout, which can dynamically adjust your user int

Adding Suggestions to Mobile Search with Azure Search

January 7th, 2016

I’ve recently been developing an iOS app that leverages Microsoft’s Azure Search to provide search query suggestions to the user as they type. Implementing this feature will reduce the number of search queries that return zero results and help keep users engaged since users often misspell search terms (and thus a search returns no resu