Unfortunately for the past couple of weeks the Alexa skill to synchronise Microsoft To Do with Alexa lists has been limping along due to a mix up with my Azure subscription taking the Azure Function which serves the skill offline. Of course these things always happen when you’re on vacation and don’t have the ability […]
Yesterday’s release of Home Assistant 2022.8 adds built-in Bluetooth support. This allows multiple integrations to share common functionality and (important for non-Linux platforms) share a single Bluetooth adapter. In the release are five integrations built on top of this support, along with Apple HomeKit support for Bluetooth devices (even if you don’t have an Apple […]
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Bluetooth for MAUI
Quick update today as I’ve just published new builds of InTheHand.BluetoothLE and InTheHand.Net.Bluetooth to NuGet which support the new .NET 6.0 MAUI target platforms. There were some small code changes to make in the iOS/macOS APIs and on Android I had to replace the Xamarin.Essentials reference with the new Microsoft.Maui.Essentials package. That change was very […]
A user of 32feet pointed out a change in behaviour between version 3.5 and 4.0. If you disabled the Bluetooth radio after initially getting a reference to the default radio it would still show the Mode as Connectable/Discoverable. I looked into the code and the 3.5 code was doing an additional check – calling BluetoothGetRadioInfo […]
Thy Phone uses the NavigationView control to provide a pop out navigation pane to provide a similar UI to Your Phone. I was contacted this week by a user indicating problems with the app for blind users – it doesn’t play well with screen readers and the keyboard navigation is not clear. My first investigation […]
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Ukraine
It’s difficult to come up with the right words to describe what we are seeing unfolding in Ukraine. It’s very easy to feel completely powerless. Our own government (United Kingdom) have been very weak with their response both in terms of sanctions and in supporting refugees, compared with many of our neighbours. The Disasters Emergency […]
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32feet for WinRT
Currently the 32feet Bluetooth Classic library for Windows is build around the Win32 API to ensure support for Windows 7 as well as theoretically supporting prior versions no longer officially supported. It has always been my aim to implement the library using the newer WinRT APIs in order to support consistent functionality for apps running […]
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Happy Birthday .NET
.NET is 20 years old this month. I can remember when I first encountered .NET and C# and found it a great step forward from Visual Basic and the C++ and Java I had learned at university. However, what really changed things for me was due to some very chance encounters I had ended up […]
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We Don’t Talk About IrDA
We take for granted that every mobile phone, tablet and laptop has Bluetooth built in, and probably use it all the time for headphones, mice etc without even thinking about developing software for it. There was a time long ago when phones and laptops had IrDA built in and it could be used for exchanging […]
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Back to the Future With C++/WinRT
Recently I was asked to investigate a scenario for a desktop C++ application. It was something I’d done before with C# and used a number of WinRT APIs. This meant I had to refresh myself in C++ which has changed again since the last time I used it! I started with the latest C++/WinRT template […]
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