Visual Studio 2015 – Package Installation Error [Failed to initialize the PowerShell host]

Well today I decided to start a new Xamarin.Forms project in Visual Studio 2015 but fell at the first hurdle – you would have thought File > New Project would be simpler than this really.

Aggregator Sites – What’s the Point??

I recently experienced and issue with one of my Xamarin apps and decided to post the problem on the Xamarin Forums. It’s a little obscure but I’m hoping that someone, somewhere has experienced the same thing and can point me in the right direction.

Well, in my lunch-break today I decided to take another look and entered the most concise search term I could think of – and received only 6 results, sometimes a good sign, sometimes not.

In this case it was the latter, mainly because there was only, actually one result – a link to my post on the Xamarin Forum. So what were these other results?

Insights is dead, long live Insights

In my previous post I sang the praises of Xamarin Insights and explained how it enabled me to locate a bug with the FillLPG for Android application.

At that time Insights as in Preview Release and all Xamarin subscribers has free access to the service, many like myself building it into production applications. We all knew that the time would come when Xamarin would decide that the product was mature enough and take it out of preview and start charging for it. At the recent Evolve conference (which I was not fortunate enough to attend) it was confirmed that existing users would still have access to the service but that plans were still being worked out.

Xamarin Insights to the Rescue

So, calling webservices from mobile applications is a solved problem yes? Well, not quite. I’ve been developing desktop and web-based applications for many years now and when it comes to accessing the Internet there are normally only a couple of scenarios to consider, you either have access or you don’t – simple.

However, in the world of mobile it’s not that simple. Mobile devices are just that, mobile, and can move in and out of coverage and between data connections numerous times during an application lifecycle. As mobile developers we know that this happens and we guard against it but checking that we have a valid connection and maybe even that we can ‘ping’ the target resource somewhere out there in the cloud.

Moving to new Virtual (really) Private Server provider

With all the post-Snowden privacy concerns I recently started to consider how much of my data was being stored on US servers, and hence fell under US legislation. It didn’t really surprise me that the answer was ‘quite a lot’, when you consider GMail, Drive, Dropbox, GitHub, Squarespace etc, but what was the alternative?