Author Archives: torbenp

About torbenp

Torben is a Dane lost and Texas with a passion for technology.

Librarians and Bots

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It’s been a while and time to get going again! Been looking into Bots which has recently been a conversation topic of Facebook and Microsoft.
LibrarianBot
The underlying idea is that a Bot could be used as an assistant to help answer or do different tasks on your behalf. Looking at the history of Bookqueue it made me consider what is one of the primary capabilities of the application, searching for books. Before we had Personal PC’s, I would go the Library for a similar capability and ask my local librarian if she could find a book for me. Hence, the birth of the LibrarianBot.

Take it for trial run and ask it some questions you would have asked your librarian before the Personal PC:

'Find books by George R. Martin'
'Lookup ISBN 1439501661'


Should you get stuck, try entering ‘help’ to get instructions of phrases the bot can understand. Give it a try and please leave your feedback.

LiveSDK.Android – a Xamarin library for accessing SkyDrive

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skydrive logoI have recently been looking closer into  cross-platform development and found myself rooted in Xamarin.  The first adventure is Xamarin.Android and porting Bookqueue to the Android environment.  Microsoft has made accessing SkyDrive simple with its LiveSDK for Android.  To help make the native java libraries available to .NET, Xamarin has provided a nice Android Java Binding library that allows creation of runtime callable wrappers.

My first dive into this adventure went pretty smooth and is available at GitHub – LiveSDK.Android