The Ups and Downs of being a Contractor

As with most careers being a contractor has it’s ups and downs and I have certainly had my share of both over the last couple of months.

When my last contract came to an end I entered the limbo land that is ‘between contracts’. Due to the nature of contracting many clients require someone who is immediately available, or at least within a week or so. Looking further than a couple of weeks ahead and you are probably going to be passed over for someone who can get their feet under the desk much quicker.

I had not been looking for a follow-on contract because I already had a holiday booked and, knowing that I would have minimal phone & email access for a couple of weeks, I had decided to leave that until I returned to the UK. I then gave myself a couple of weeks ‘off’ during which time I would continue work on the Xamarin implementation of my FillLPG for Android application and hit Pluralsight to keep my axe sharp and my stills current.

Fixing Xamarin COMPILETODALVIK build error in VS2013

After clearing the decks of some other freelancing projects I’ve had on the go recently I’ve been able to get back to looking at my FillLPG application that I’ve decided to rewrite from scratch using Xamarin.

It was time to start working on the UI and with the new Xamarin.Forms library promising cross platform UI development I thought I’d create a quick project to compare the old approach with the new (and maybe write blog post or two about it). However, I ran into problems very quickly and thought I’d pass on my experience.

iOS Limitations and Xamarin Mobile Certification

In my previous post I mentioned that I was looking at developing a cross platform, mobile application to schedule SMS messages.

Well I’m afraid that took a bit of a backseat for a couple of reasons.

Firstly I became aware that the action of sending a text message with no input from the user was not possible using iOS. While I have not investigated this fully it did make me pause for thought – what was the point of starting this cross-platform project if it was not going to work on the iPhone? Well, if the information I have is correct, there is no point …… unless I just demonstrate that writing apps for Android does not necessarily mean Java! So, this project is still on the cards – just not at the top of the deck.

Getting Started with Xamarin – a Pet Project

In previous posts I have mentioned that 2014 will be my ‘Year of the Mobile‘ and that Xamarin (which will allow me to develop for Android, iOS and Windows Phone using C#) will be my weapon of choice.

As with all undertakings such as this I needed a few pet projects to work on, something that more closely resembles a real world application than some contrived examples that you find in some books and web tutorials (that’s not to say that all book and web tutorials are created equally).

Website Outage

The website was offline for a few hours this morning due to a power outage at Fasthosts – who are the current registrars for the onthefencedevelopment domain. I say ‘current’ registrars because while the outage was due to circumstances beyond their control the fact that it took ALL of their systems offline is cause for concern.