Two things that have been on my to do list for a while were learning a bit more Android and Xamarin, so I decided to do both at the same time. The plan was refresh my knowledge of Android and build something with it, and then reproduce it in Xamarin, and use it as an exercise to compare them.

With a new year starting I tasked myself to get a bit more active with my current and upcoming projects, as well as this website, so I’ve been setting up my dev environment from scratch to start the year with a clean slate.

A while back, I decided to move this site from a relatively cumbersome Wordpress to a rather nimble Jekyll instance.

I finally published my Goodreads client: myShelf. It has actually been on the store for a while, but I just haven’t had time to do a quick write down on it.

There were a few reasons behind building this app: the main website looked a bit dull (it has since been updated to look more modern), and not that good on mobile, but offered a lot of great features for people who loved to read.

Very quick post here.

So I recently retargeted a WP8 app to WP8.1 (Silverlight) and tried adding a background task, but kept getting an UnauthorizedAccessException when attempting to register the task.

Recently I’ve had to do some audio recording within a WinRT app, which is usually a fairly simple task as is demonstrated right here.

My problem with it was with encoding. When you set off to record something you can set up your own MediaEncodingProfile, or use one of the presets by calling, for example, MediaEncodingProfile.CreateM4a(...)