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Building and Running an Auditing Solution on Blockchain
If you are in the NYC area on Feb 21, Premier Developer consultant Razi Rais will be hosting an event to demonstrate how to build and run a fully functional blockchain based audit trail application. The first half is a good fit for both business and technical audiences, as it covers auditing scenarios using blockchain. The latter half will showcase an open source project that provides tracking of Wikipedia change logs using blockchain. I will do a deep dive into the running solution that leverages the Ethereum Rinkeby Network. I will showcasing open source project “Wikipedia logs change tracking” that I am curren...
PolyBase – How SQL Server does Big data!
In this post, Senior App Dev Manager Nayan Patel introduces SQL Server PolyBase and shares some insights from a recent engagement using the technology.I was recently involved in helping my customer complete a successful PoC around SQL Server 2016’s PolyBase feature. They have invested a signification amount of budget and resources standing up their Hadoop environment to house massive amounts of unstructured/semi-structured data. However, they have been unable to retrieve meaningful insights and value from it, especially due to the required ETL processes and complex MapReduce actions. As part of ...
Microsoft Professional Program for Data Science – Sharpen Your Data Science Skills
In this post, Senior App Dev Manager Pete Fuenfhausen breaks down the concept of Data Sciences and provides a walk through of free training track to get oriented with the technologies Microsoft offers in this space. These days it’s pretty hard to be an application developer without running into concepts like big data, data science, artificial intelligence and machine learning. We’re seeing more and more requirements for our applications to include “smart”, “intelligent”, and “predictive” features. And we are seeing a lot more people with titles like “data scientist” appearing on our project teams or in the...
Partner Center API’s
In this post, Senior App Dev Manager Deepak Malik, explains how Partner Center API’s provide extensive management functionalities and enable partner to extend their existing systems.The Partner Center REST API helps Cloud Solution Provider partners (CSP's) integrate their existing CRM or billing systems with the Microsoft systems to manage multiple entities. This might include managing customer accounts, subscriptions, placing orders, and handling support requests to enable partners to sell Microsoft Commercial Cloud software. The Partner Center SDK provides a superset of the earlier CREST API functionality...
Designing a Cosmos DB database
Premier Developer consultant Julien Oudot brings us this blog with some considerations when designing a Cosmos DB database. The intent of this article is to summarize some of the key aspects to keep in mind while designing a database using Cosmos DB. Azure Cosmos DB is Microsoft's globally distributed, multi-model database. Sometimes referred to as a server-less database, the promise is the ability to transparently and indefinitely scale your data with high throughput, low latency and high reliability. To achieve this goal, a few best practices need to be applied. There is no need to have advanced DBA skills...
Microsoft’s Geospatial Capabilities
In a recent article published on LinkedIn, Premier Developer consultant Ron Vincent highlights some of Microsoft’s geospatial capabilities, both past and present.Microsoft has for some time now had some level of geospatial capabilities but since Azure has come along there has been many developments on this front. In this article, I think it’s time that we take a brief look across Microsoft’s services and offerings to see where we are at the end of 2017. This article will highlight the past and present capabilities that are available now and some new capabilities coming that were recently released.Continue reading...
Integrate Power BI Dashboards, Reports and Tiles into a WPF Application
In this post, Senior ADM Rob Reilly shows us how to integrate Power BI dashboards, reports, and tiles into a WPF application. Use the Power BI Embedded WPF Sample to learn how to integrate Power BI Dashboards, Reports and Tiles into a Windows Presentation Foundation application. The sample covers the "User Owns the Data" scenario. "App Owns the Data" scenarios can be accomplished but there are serious security considerations with native applications and the risk of the secret\password for the application credential being compromised. Therefore the "App Owns the Data" scenario will be out of scope. Also cov...
Amazon Alexa Skills authenticated by Azure Active Directory and backed by an Azure Function
This post is provided by Premier Field Engineer, Nathan Vanderby, who walks us through how to write an Alexa skill using Azure Functions. Last updated June 2018. Most people have heard of the Amazon Echo and the skills that provide it functions. Amazon makes it really easy to create these skills using an AWS Lambda function. These can also be backed using a REST API app or even an Azure Function. Below we will give some instructions for how to leverage Azure Functions. The steps below are almost identical to how you would configure a generic backend API with authentication except that the Azure Function n...
The performance characteristics of async methods in C#
The async series In the last two blog posts we've covered the internals of async methods in C# and then we looked at the extensibility points the C# compiler provides to adjust the behavior of async methods. Today we're going to explore the performance characteristics of async methods. As you should already know from the first post of the series, the compiler does a lot of transformations to make asynchronous programming experience very similar to a synchronous one. But to do that the compiler creates a state machine instance, pass it around to an async method builder, that calls task awai...