Zdravko Danev's dev blog

It’s been a productive month…

Another year, another Orlando Code Camp… This time I decided to change things a bit and talk about creating Alexa skills using c#. And since Amazon just released dot net core support for the AWS Lambda functions I just had to use AWS instead of Azure… and I liked it.

Code and slides: http://github.com/zdanev/occ2018

Thanks to everybody who attended my talk, and to all the organizers and sponsors!

How did I not know about it? Incredibly useful online JSON parser…

http://json.parser.online.fr/

I had a blast speaking at the Orlando Code Camp this weekend. Thanks to all that attended my sessions and special thanks to those that participated. Slides and notes available on http://github.com/zdanev/occ2017. See you again next year!

When Microsoft released R Services for SQL Server 2016 I felt a bit betrayed by Microsoft taking the other side in the data science language wars. To my good surprise they are making good with the Python community adding Python services to SQL Server 2017 (currently in preview).

In the traditional machine learning scenario we use historic data to create a model and then we use that model to predict some outcome. This presents several chalenges around the logistics of moving large chunks of data in a fast and secure way. What if we could build our models and use them to evaluate new data right where our data lives – in the SQL Server itself. And this is why Microsoft introduced the Python and R services for SQL Server.

I just completed the final requirements for the Microsoft Professional Degree in Data Science. I’ve been working my way thru the courses since August. Learned a lot, a lot more left to learn…

Big success: I created a (mostly empty) angular2/asp.net core project. But victory did not come easy…

On my mac I updated VS Code to the current version, then installed asp.net core following the instructions. Installed typescript. Installed yeoman. Installed the asp.net core generator. Created an empty project and it run. Just like that. Even debugging worked. VS Code had to install few extensions but it knew what it needed. Pretty cool.

Looked at the project structure… it’s all different… but manageable.

Next step – angular2. Looked at the quick start guide, looked at couple of blog posts. Everybody suggests something different. Then I found a yeoman generator for asp.core and angular2 RC4 (current is RC5) and decided to give it a try. Worked fine.

Then decided to make some changes. Added a Speaker model, Speakers controller and a GetSpeakers api call. Then on the client side added a component, a controller, a service, a route, an entry in the navigation, maybe a hundred other small things… it took a while but it all worked at the end.

Biggest issue for me was that nothing is where you expect it to be on the mac. At the end I ended up downloading a norton commander style file manager from the app store just to be able to view/compare two folders.

Finally – create a repo and push it to GitHub. This always gets me. They could have done a bit better job in VS Code/GitHub integration. There should be a button Create a repo and push it to GitHub. Something that should be a minute took me half an hour googling error messages and typing scary things in the command prompt.

Web development changes faster than ever so in order to stay current I’m starting a new learning projects. I’ll create an app using Angular 2 and ASP.NET Core. Angular 2 is now in RC5 which should be pretty close to final, ASP.NET Core was just released. I’m planning to do the whole thing on a Mac using Visual Studio Code.

For the project itself, unless I come up with a better idea really soon, I’ll do the old conference/codecamp app that I’ve done at least 3 times already (Silverlight, ASP.NET MVC 3(?) and Windows Phone).

Wish me luck…