Blockchain
Blockchain|May 2, 2018

Chip Off The Ol’ Blockchain – Chip 2: Deploy a Smart Contract

Most people have probably heard about blockchains and even fewer people probably understand how they actually work. But even so, what makes blockchain technology itself so appealing is not about what you can do with the blockchain itself, rather what you can do with Smart Contracts. Smart Contracts, or “distributed apps” or “DApps” as they…
Read More→
Blogs|Apr 24, 2018

An Overview of Azure Databricks

With the announcement of the general availability of Azure Databricks, in this post we’ll take this opportunity to get a brief feel to what Azure Databricks is and what it can do. What is Databricks? Databricks is a data solution that sits on top of Apache Spark to help accelerate a business’ data analytics side…
Read More→
Blogs|Apr 20, 2018

Integrating Microsoft LUIS into the Bot Framework

In our previous post, we went over what Microsoft’s LUIS, or Language Understanding, is and showed how to create a new LUIS app as well as calling it using the APIs. In this post we will use the same LUIS app that we built but integrate it into a bot we will create from Microsoft’s…
Read More→
JavaScript
Tutorials|Apr 12, 2018

How To Do Data Binding in Pure JavaScript

Data binding for modern applications is about as fundamental as addition is to mathematics. To write any major application without it would seem absurd. An related to data binding is one of the most fundamental architectural patterns that has birth dozens of progeny, the Model-View-Controller pattern. I wanted to write this post not as an…
Read More→
Blogs|Apr 9, 2018

Using the Cognitive Services Text Analytics API: Sentiment Analysis

In our previous post, we feed Twitter data to the Text Analytics API which was able to detect the language of each tweet. We will expand upon our previous work and continue to use the API and our Twitter data to determine the sentiment of each tweet. By analyzing the sentiment of each tweet, we’re…
Read More→
Blogs|Apr 5, 2018

Building Language Intelligent Apps with Microsoft’s LUIS

To aid in building applications that have better natural language understanding, Microsoft came out with LUIS or Language Understanding Intelligent Services. LUIS can be used for understanding speech for the Bot Framework, Bing Speech, or even with Cortana. In this post, we’ll learn how to create a LUIS app, apply basic LUIS concepts, and how…
Read More→
Blockchain
Blogs|Apr 4, 2018

Chip Off The Ol’ Blockchain: What is a Blockchain? Part 1

Blockchain – just the word seems to stir up confusion.  Because there is so much confusion surrounding blockchain, it’s often hard to get clarity about what it really is and how it works. Blockchain is not that complicated, rather it’s remarkably simple. And moreover it has the potential to fundamentally change the way that businesses…
Read More→
Blogs|Apr 2, 2018

Pre-processing Text Data with NLTK and Azure Machine Learning

Data comes in all forms. Lately, we’ve been going over mostly numerical and categorical data. Even though the categorical data contains words, we transform it into numerical data for our algorithms. However, what if your data is only words? That’s where natural language processing comes in, and in this post, we’ll go over the basics…
Read More→
Blogs|Mar 29, 2018

Using the Cognitive Services Text Analytics API: Detecting Languages

Microsoft has a lot of fascinating APIs available to build intelligent applications with using their Cognitive Services. Among those services is the Text Analytics API. This API offers a wide range of valuable text-based functionality such as sentiment analysis and key phrase extraction. With these useful APIs available, what could be a better means of…
Read More→
Blogs|Mar 22, 2018

Using FontAwesome 5 in Xamarin Forms

There are several examples of using custom fonts in your Xamarin floating around the internet.  But like time, technology marches on and some recent changes have made it a bit more difficult so I thought I’d take a few minutes to show you how to integrate the latest FontAwesome fonts into Xamarin Forms 2.5. FontAwesome…
Read More→