Any developer can get into building Artificial Intelligence apps with Microsoft Cognitive Services.
Just as in the pioneering days of ecommerce, you could build an online retail store app by dropping in a shopping cart web service, Microsoft wants to empower you to create AI apps by adding pre-built cognitive services.
Suddenly your next app can include machine learning capabilities for speech recognition, text analysis, image recognition, and decision support. The best part is you don't have to be an AI guru or a data scientist to build that app. That is the democratizion of AI that Microsoft is hyping.
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Posted by Richard Seeley on 10/16/20190 comments
If you are developing business to consumer applications but you're not an expert in configuring secure identity management, Microsoft says it can provide everything you need with its Azure Active Directory (AD) Business to Consumer (B2C) identity offering.
AD B2C will do all the heavy lifting when it comes to things like third-party authentication, Single Sign On (SSO) and even protection against Denial of Service and brute force password attacks, the Redmond-based software company says.
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Posted by Richard Seeley on 09/19/20190 comments
Full stack web developers are in great demand with attractive salaries being dangled from job search sites.
Is this job for you?
If you've heard about this employment category and are intrigued by the possibilities, you still might want to look before you leap.
To start with: What exactly are we talking about when we talk about full stack web development?
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Posted by Richard Seeley on 08/27/20190 comments
If you are working with earlier versions of plain old ASP.NET, but need to upgrade your skills for Microsoft Azure DevOps, you may be looking to get up to speed on its smarter brother, ASP.NET Core, which is growing in popularity with the developer community.
While C# is the "most loved" programming language, according to a recent survey by developer tooling specialist JetBrains. There is growing regard for .NET Core, according to a recent Visual Studio Magazine article. "… the survey indicates Microsoft's new open source, cross-platform 'Core' direction is gaining traction but still has a long way to go as it usurps the ageing, Windows-only .NET Framework, with .NET Core and ASP.NET Core leading the migration," the article noted.
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Posted by Richard Seeley on 07/19/20190 comments
At one time data was mostly a topic for database administrators. Not anymore. With artificial intelligence exploding on the scene, Big Data is a hot topic in the developer world.
The meteoric rise of the Internet of Things (IoT) is creating huge datasets – think terabytes and petabytes – that go beyond what traditional relational database management systems (RDBMS) and legacy software analytics tools can handle, according to a Wikipedia article. Sensory data is pouring in from IoT devices in industries including medical, manufacturing and transportation. That data is useful and sometimes even crucial but those industries need a way to make sense out of it.
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Posted by Richard Seeley on 06/19/20190 comments
Everybody involved with any kind of software development has heard the DevOps mantra: "DevOps automates and speeds software delivery." Of course, not everyone practices DevOps because there’s a learning curve and a discipline to follow and that’s not always easy especially in organizations demanding instant application gratification. Despite the hype, getting started in DevOps can be a challenge.
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Posted by Richard Seeley on 05/15/20190 comments
DevOps can be a challenge especially for developers starting out with it. But a new Basic Process in Azure DevOps aims to pare down the more complicated methodologies.
On an April 2019 Microsoft video explaining how Basic Process works, Dan Hellem, program manager on the Azure DevOps team, told viewers that the goal is to not only attract engineers to the product but also keep them as loyal users: "We’ve been talking about putting out the Basic Process for several years. Looking at it from the perspective of a new person coming into Azure DevOps, we have three processes: Agile, Scrum and CMMI [Capability Maturity Model Integration]. The problem with those processes is they are very methodology heavy."
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Posted by Richard Seeley on 04/17/20190 comments
Service-oriented architecture (SOA) and web services were hot developer trends a decade ago but may only get a yawn today. Now, microservices take the concept into the cloud and container era.
If you missed the SOA and web services hoopla, and haven’t worked with microservices here’s a brief explanation from Wikipedia:
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Posted by Richard Seeley on 03/20/20190 comments
"I will talk about two sets of things. One is how productivity and collaboration are reinventing the nature of work, and how this will be very important for the global economy. And two, data. In other words, the profound impact of digital technology that stems from data and the data feedback loop." ~ Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella
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Posted by Richard Seeley on 02/20/20190 comments
Xamarin is one of the biggest tech success stories of the decade.
In 2011 few if any developers had even heard of Xamarin. That was the year its namesake San Francisco-based company was founded. Six years later, “1.4 million developers were using Xamarin's products in 120 countries around the world,” according to Wikipedia. Is it any wonder that Microsoft acquired it in 2016 and made it a free tool for Visual Studio developers?
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Posted by Richard Seeley on 01/17/20190 comments