Visualize Your Data With Microsoft’s New Free Power BI Service

Microsoft has announced a new Azure based service that provides data visualization and dashboards on multiple data sources. Microsoft touts their Power BI service as “a cloud-based business analytics service (software-as-a -service) for non-technical business users”.  The service allows users to drag and drop connections to multiple data sources both in the cloud and also…

Why You Should Be Writing ECMA Script 6 Now

If you are reading this article then you have probably at least heard of ECMA Script 6, the next version of JavaScript, and are curious about what it means for you or your organization. You might be wondering how ES6 is different, if it will affect your existing applications, or if it will affect your…

When Should You Make the Move to Entity Framework 7?

The next version of Entity Framework will be called “Version 7” and will be released as part of the next version of ASP.NET, called “ASP.NET 5.” If you’re currently on EF6, you might jump to the conclusion that you should upgrade to EF7 as soon as it hits the streets. But the EF team has…

Microsoft and GitHub Offer Students Free Development Tools and Resources

GitHub is now offering Visual Studio Community 2013 edition, Azure, Visual Studio Online, and Windows and SQL Developer accounts as part of its Developer Student Pack. GitHub’s Student Packs just got a new boost from the Visual Studio team with the inclusion of Visual Studio Community 2013, a full featured version of Visual Studio and…

Playing the Kevin Bacon Game with Cypher Queries in Neo4j

In this video excerpt from Brian C. Lanham’s new course “Getting Started with Graph Databases using Neo4J”, you’ll learn how to use the Cypher Query Language to find relationships between nodes by playing the Kevin Bacon game. Neo4j is an open-source graph database, implemented in Java that allows data to be stored in structured in graphs…

5 Questions with Kathleen Dollard

In this interview with Kathleen Dollard we dig into some of the new features of Visual Studio 2015, what’s coming up in the C# language, and the power of Roslyn and what it means for developers. Kathleen Dollard wants to teach you to code better. There’s more to learn about the tools you use every…

Less Defects with F# Units of Measure

One of the most powerful things that F# has is its ability to create custom units of measure. F# allows you to set an explicit type to a unit. That’s right…you will get compile time checking on any of the units that you use within your app...

5 Questions with N. Taylor Mullen

We sat down recently with N. Taylor Mullen, a winner of the Microsoft Imagine Cup for game development and current member of the ASP.NET team to talk about ASP.NET vNext. Shortly after placing 1st in Microsoft’s international Imagine Cup competition in 2012 (Game Design Phone) Taylor joined the ASP.NET team at Microsoft. On the ASP.NET…

The Doctor is Out: So Long Dr. Dobbs

After 38 years of publishing great content for software development, Dr. Dobb’s is turning its final page. For those of us who have been in the software industry long enough to remember a time before Google put code examples, good and terrible, at your fingertips, Dr. Dobb’s Journal was a source of knowledge like few others.  Started even…

Microsoft Acquires HockeyApp Mobile Platform

Microsoft has acquired HockyApp which provides  crash analytics and app distribution for developers building mobile apps on iOS, Android and Windows Phone.  The acquisition of Stuttgart Germany based HockyApp provides Microsoft with yet another developer tool for its ApplicationInsights service on Visual Studio Online.  HockyApp provides several key services for mobile developers building apps for Android, iOS,…