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5 Top, No-Cost .NET Core Extensions for Visual Studio 2019

Here are some of the top, free .NET Core-related extensions that target Visual Studio 2019.

Weighted k-NN Classification Using Python

Need to predict the political party affiliation (democrat, republican, independent) of a person based on their age, annual income, gender, years of education and so on? Our resident data scientist Dr. James McCaffrey shows a technique that can help with that and much more -- with code!

Making It Up as You Go Along with ExpandoObjects

You can give your users the ability to store any data they want, including stuff they make up at run time, by using an ExpandoObject. In fact, when you don't know what your data is until run time (and you can live without IntelliSense), an ExpandoObject is your best solution.

Managing Page Layouts in Blazor

Blazor, like most systems for generating Web pages, supports using layout pages for repeated content. Here's what works, what doesn't (yet) work and work-arounds I've discovered for what doesn't work.

Managing Production and Development Settings in ASP.NET Core

The reality is that you will need to have, at least, two different configurations: one for production and one for development. Here's how to automate those conversions.

Extending Razor Pages

If you move beyond the basics of working with Razor Pages, there are at least two things you should know to support creating Pages that do more than one thing and integrate with existing code.

Navigating in Blazor

If you're moving your application's client-side code to Blazor, then you'll want Blazor to manage navigating between pages, too.

Dealing with Databases (and Data) in Docker

There are lots of ways to handle databases in a containerized environment like Docker. Here's how to create SQL Server in a container, how to load it with the data you want and how to integrate that container into whatever project needs it. Be warned: Some PowerShell is used.

Docker with Real Applications

Here's how to run a "real-world" application (consisting of an MVC application and a Web Service) in a networked set of Docker containers. And it's just a couple of mouse clicks in Visual Studio to implement it.

Neural Anomaly Detection Using Keras

Our resident doctor of data science this month tackles anomaly detection, using code samples and screenshots to explain the process of finding rare items in a dataset, such as discovering fraudulent login events or fake news items.

Support Vector Machines Using Accord.NET

The Data Science doctor delves into supporting vector machines, software systems that can perform binary classification such as creating a model to predict the gender of a person based on their age, annual income, height and weight.

Building Razor Pages

If you want to handle the most common pattern in ASP.NET Controllers (displaying a page and then accepting data entered into it), you can do it with Razor Pages. You'll just need less code than if you used a Controller, a View and a model object.

Getting Started with Razor Pages: A Better Model for Web Development?

As fond as he is of using Controllers and Views, Peter isn't sure that Razor Pages aren't a better model for Web development. But the first step, adding Razor Pages to your project, isn't as easy as it should be. And, after that, you'll want to integrate them with your existing MVC application.

Accessing Configuration Settings in ASP.NET Core

In ASP.NET Core, your web.config file with its <appsettings> section is gone. The replacement is a more extensive and configurable system that you can leverage to simplify configuring your objects.

What's New in and Getting Started with Blazor 0.8.0.0

There are good reasons to keep working with Blazor 0.8.0.0 ... but you're going to need to make some changes.

Configuring Your Application-Wide Objects in ASP.NET Core

ASP.NET Core's support for sharing objects defined at startup is great ... but what if you need to set options on those objects? Here's a case study that starts off great and then descends into over-engineered madness (but only if you want to go that far).

Creating the Right Database Initializer for Entity Framework

If you want to treat your database design as an "implementation detail" that just falls out of getting your object model right, then Entity Framework gives you four choices. Picking the right one, however, may mean creating your own.

ASP.NET Core: Learning the Ropes, Part 3

Eric Vogel uses code samples and screenshots to demonstrate how to create and use the views and controller for an ASP.NET MVC Core CRUD application.

21 New Tools and Extensions for Visual Studio 2017

From legacy xBase code to cutting-edge Quantum computing, these Visual Studio extensions will make you more productive.

Self-Organizing Maps Using Python

Dr. James McCaffrey of Microsoft Research uses a full project code sample and screenshots to detail how to use Python to work with self-organizing maps (SOM), which let you investigate the structure of a set of data.

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