AI

Download the Developer’s Guide to Building AI Applications

on June 11, 2018

O'Reilly E-book

Thinking about getting started with AI can be a daunting task. Thankfully there is a free e-book called A Developer’s Guide to Building AI Applications that is available to help get you started.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is accelerating the digital transformation for every industry, with examples spanning manufacturing, retail, finance, healthcare, and many others. At this rate, every industry will be able to use AI to amplify human ingenuity. In this e-book, Anand Raman and Wee Hyong Tok from Microsoft provide a comprehensive roadmap for developers to build their first AI-infused application.

This e-book provides an easy introduction to the tooling, infrastructure, and services provided by Microsoft AI Platform for creating powerful, intelligent applications. With this e-book you will learn the key ingredients needed to develop an intelligent chatbot. In addition you will also…

  • Understand how the intersection of cloud, data, and AI is enabling organizations to build intelligent systems.
  • Learn the tools, infrastructure, and services available as part of the Microsoft AI Platform for developing AI applications.
  • Teach the Conference Buddy application new AI skills, using pre-built AI capabilities such as vision, translation, and speech.
  • Learn about the Open Neural Network Exchange.

Download your copy now.

Enjoy!

    References

    https://info.microsoft.com/ww-landing-ai-developers-bot-ebook.html

    Uncategorized

    Azure Files shared by VMs in a Dev Team

    on June 11, 2018

    Roy Kim on Azure, Office 365 and SharePoint

    Azure File is a service in Azure Storage Accounts such that I look at it a managed network file share. For a further introduction read Introduction to Azure Files

    A practical use case for me in a development team scenario is where each team member has its own or shared Azure Virtual Machine and there is a need to share files. A traditional approach I have seen is using on-premises network file shares.

    The type of files one can store are software installation files, scripts, local Git repos, developer and system admin documentation, etc. But I wouldn’t suggest this to be a replacement for project and document management solutions such as SharePoint or TFS.

    Other alternative approaches may not feasible such as Dropbox or online cloud drives where they have network policies and security policies that discourage or limit use. Or on-premises network file shares may not be accessible or the…

    View original post 320 more words

    Uncategorized

    Azure Logic Apps for Document Content Approval

    on June 7, 2018

    Roy Kim on Azure, Office 365 and SharePoint

    Logic Apps is an Azure service for enterprise integration. It comes with many connectors including from outside of the Microsoft ecosystem. In this blog post, I will show an implementation and key implementation points that will facilitate an approval process for approving a document in SharePoint Online.

    Business Scenario

    1. User publishes a document for approval.
      LogicAppContentApproval3LogicAppContentApproval1
    2. Assigned approver gets an email to either approve or reject
      LogicAppContentApproval2
    3. Document is set as approved or rejected.
      LogicAppContentApproval3

    The business process will be integrating the following three Office 365 services.

    • SharePoint Online – Document Library
    • Office 365 User Profile with Email
    • Outlook

    The Logic App Design
    LogicAppContentApproval4

    Implementation Details

    1. To trigger this Logic App, it done through any modification of the document item properties such as the user action of publishing.
    2. We must get the file metadata of the document specifically the ETag which represents the file version. This is for future use. Note this is not…

    View original post 345 more words

    Database

    Installing Extensions in SQL Operations Studio

    on June 5, 2018

    Just like VS Code, extensions provide more functionality to SQL Operations Studio. These extensions can come from Microsoft or the community.

    Adding Extensions to SQL Operations Studio

    1. Open the Extensions manager by going to the View menu and selecting Extensions. After clicking on the Extensions menu item, the Extensions navigation icon shows up on the left side. I’m not sure why this isn’t always available like it is in VS Code.

    image

    2. Browse and select an available extension. At this time there are 9 extensions available to choose from. 

    image

    3. Click on the green button to install the desired extension. In my case I’m trying to install RedGate SQL Search which is a tool I use in SQL Server Management Studio. This will download the extension but if you try to double click and run it, the installation will fail. Instead you need to install it from SQL Operations Studio.

    4. From SQL Operations Studio, press Ctrl/Cmd+Shift+p, and type Extensions: Install from VSIX and then press enter.

    image

    5. You should then see a notification in the bottom right corner of SQL Operations Studio indicating the extension has successfully been installed.

    image

    Enjoy!

    References

    What is Microsoft SQL Operations Studio

    Installing SQL Operations Studio

    Extending the functionality of SQL Operations Studio

    DevelopmentEvents

    Insider Dev Tour coming to Toronto and a city near you

    on May 30, 2018

    Insider Dev Tour Banner

    The Insider Dev Tour is coming to Toronto on June 25, 2018 and will be held at the Microsoft Canada office in Mississauga, Ontario. This is a full day event where you can come and learn about Machine Learning (ML), Modern Desktop Apps, Fluent Design, Artificial Intelligence, Progressive Web Apps (PWA), Microsoft Graph, Teams, Mixed Reality, Extending Office 365, and so much more! For the Toronto event register for free at https://www.insiderdevtour.com/Toronto?ocid2=spark . For other locations see this link http://aka.ms/idevtour .

    The Insider Dev Tour is for developers interested in building Microsoft 365 experiences today, using the latest developer technologies, as well as for those who want a peek into the future. If you can read code, this is for you, regardless if you are a beginner, expert, student, or hobbyist developer.

    The tour is a great opportunity to connect directly with leads and engineers from Microsoft (Redmond), as well as regional industry leads and Microsoft Developer MVPs. If you missed out on attending the Microsoft Build 2018 conference then this is a great opportunity to follow up on some of that same content.

    Register today for free at https://www.insiderdevtour.com/Toronto?ocid2=spark .

    Enjoy and I hope to see you there.

    References

    https://insiderdevtour.com/

    AIAzureDevelopmentEventsProductivity

    Microsoft Build 2018–Day 2 Highlights

    on May 8, 2018

    Today’s keynote by Joe Belfiore was focused on Multi-sense + Multi-device for Microsoft 365, which is Windows, Office and EMS

    Image showing how Microsoft 365 brings together Office 365, Windows 10, and Enterprise Mobility + Security (EMS), a complete, intelligent, and secure solution to empower employees.

    Announcements

    • Fluent Design System updates.
    • UWP XAML Islands, which lets you incorporate UWP into WinForms, WPF and Win32 applications. This also means you can start to bring in the Fluent Design System into these UI frameworks.
    • Windows UI Library, which brings native platform controls as NuGet packages instead of being tied to the OS version. This will work from the Windows Anniversary Update and newer.
    • .NET Core 3.0, which will support side-by-side runtimes, along with support for WinForms, WPF and UWP.
    • MSIX, which is dubbed the best technology for installing applications on Windows. This inherits the Universal Windows Platform (UWP) features, works across Enterprise or Store distributions, and supports all Windows applications.
    • Windows SDK Insider Preview – https://aka.ms/winsdk
    • New developer revenue sharing model. Developers will get 85% when their app is found in the Microsoft store, and 95% when you provide your customers to your app in the Microsoft store.
    • Microsoft Launcher on Android will support Timeline for cross-device application launching. On iOS this will be supported through Microsoft Edge.
    • A new “Your Phone” experience coming soon to Windows 10 that enables you to see your connected phone text messages, photos and notifications and then interact with them without having to use your phone. Really neat experience – now if only they support Windows Mobile 10 Smile
    • Microsoft Sets was officially shown and demonstrated how it can be used for an easier way to organize your work and allow you to get back to work where you left off when ready. This means not having to have 25+ tabs open in Chrome or Edge. Nice!
    • Adaptive Cards is being added to Microsoft 365, which will enable developers to create rich interactive content within conversations. They demonstrated a GitHub Adaptive Card for Outlook (365) where you could comment and close an issue. Another example shown was paying for your invoice from an email.
    • There was a lot of buzz for Microsoft Graph, which is core to the Microsoft 365 platform. Microsoft Graph helps developers connect the dots between people, schedules, conversations, and content within the Microsoft cloud.
    • Cortana and Alexa start speaking to one another. Sometime in the future you will be able to access your Alexa device through Windows 10 and likewise on an Amazon Echo you will ne able to speak to Cortana.

    Enjoy!

    References

    https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/events/build

    Modernizing applications for our multi-sense, multi-device world

    Microsoft 365 empowers developers to build intelligent apps for where and how the world works

    AIAzureDevelopmentEventsProductivity

    Microsoft Build 2018 – Day 1 Highlights

    on May 8, 2018

    This is my first attendance at the annual Microsoft Build conference taking place in Seattle, WA. I have to tell you that so far I’m not disappointed. Here are some of the highlights from today’s events:

    • Azure is becoming the world’s computer: Azure | Azure Stack | Azure IoT Edge | Azure Sphere.
    • Azure IoT Edge runtime which runs on Windows or Linux is now being open sourced.
    • Microsoft showed off Cortana and Alexa integration which was pretty cool.
    • New Azure AI infrastructure announced: Project Brainwave which is a real-time AI on cloud and edge devices.
    • Announced Project Kinect for Azure, an Azure AI-enabled edge device.
    • Visual Studio Live Share is now generally available. This provides real-time collaborative development, shared debugging, independent views and works across Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code (Windows, Mac and Linux).
    • Azure Event Grid is getting new improvements like dead lettering (DLQ) and custom retry policies. Event Grid is also adding new event publishers for Azure Media Services and Azure Container Registry, and new event handlers for Storage Queue and Relay Hybrid Connections. Finally Azure Event Grid is providing an alternative form of endpoint validation. Event Grid provides reliable event delivery at massive scale (millions of events per second), and it eliminates long polling and hammer polling, and the associated costs of latency.
    • Azure Cosmos had some interesting updates like the new multi-master write support. It also provides API support for MongoDB, SQL, Table Storage, Gremlin Graph, Spark, and Casandra.
    • Azure Search now integrates Azure Cognitive Services to provide built-in enrichment of content using AI models, and it enables immersive search experiences over any data.
    • The Fluent Design System which Microsoft first debuted at Build 2017, is expanding beyond Universal Windows Platform (UWP) apps and will be available for Windows Forms, WPF and native Win32 applications.
    • Windows Timeline is coming to iOS and Android.
    • Azure Functions updates: Durable Functions reaches general availability, and Azure Functions now leverages the App Service Diagnostics.
    • .NET Core 3.0 and .NET Framework 4.8 announced were announced, and .NET Core 3.0 is coming to desktop development (awesome!)
    • Visual Studio 2017 version 15.7 and the next update version 15.8 preview 1 were released.
    • Visual Studio App Center integration with GitHub.
      • Visual Studio IntelliCode announced, which brings you the next generation of developer productivity by providing AI-assisted development.

      This already feels like a lot but really it’s just scratching the surface. I’m looking forward to what is announced today in the keynote followed by more technical workshops and sessions.

      Enjoy!

      References

      https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/events/build

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