2018 - March/April
Rick Strahl serves up our lead article this month with his in-depth and incredibly educational “Ready for Prime Time: .NET Core 2.0 and ASP.NET Core 2.0” article. See the About the Cover sidebar in Rod’s “Ending Malaise” editorial for more information about the cover. Rounding out the rest of the issue, Wei-Meng Lee continues to guide us down the machine learning path with this “Introduction to the R Programming Language” article, Sahil Malik gets you started creating your own bots and the remaining articles cover creating better mobile apps by eliminating HTML tables, Facebook reversing its course and ditching its ReactJS licensing scheme, getting started implementing Node streams in your applications and much more. Happy reading.
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Ending Malaise
Rod Paddock argues that developer malaise stems from stagnation rather than workload, and his breakthrough came only when he returned to what he loves: learning new things. By exploring how his API could be consumed from Swift and expanding into Python and other tools, he rekindled enthusiasm and overcome burnout. He advocates lifelong learning, refreshing the “battery” by adding new skills (and even arts) as a antidote to fatigue, noting that growing in diverse directions can prevent burnout and keep programming rewarding.
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Eliminate HTML Tables for Better Mobile Web Apps
At this point, you’re clear that your app has to work on all platforms, especially on smartphones. Paul gets tables to adjust their sizes based on which platform is being used to view it.
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Bots
Sahil Malik’s article demystifies the rise of bots as the next era of human–computer interaction, arguing that bots are simply conversational interfaces built with the Microsoft Bot Framework. He explains core concepts—dialogs, state, channels, and the waterfall pattern—while outlining pragmatic design guidelines (simplicity, usefulness, and non-annoyance), and shows how to develop, test, and deploy bots across platforms (including Microsoft Teams) with practical steps, tooling (Bot Framework Emulator, ngrok), and concrete code, culminating in a basic Hello World bot and a Teams-ready example.
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Better Extract/Transform/Load (ETL) Practices in Data Warehousing (Part 2 of 2)
Kevin shows us how to solve tangles in SQL Server, and in this article, he looks at some questions that have come up since his last article on ETL practices in Data Warehousing.
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Ready for Prime Time: .NET Core 2.0 and ASP.NET Core 2.0 Have Arrived
Rick explores the new features in .NET Core and ASP.NET Core and shows you that the wait was worth it.
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Getting Started with Node Streams
If your synchronous load drowns in a sea of code, a lifeboat can be found in NodeJS. Chris explains how to use node streams to organize the flow of data.
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Introduction to the R Programming Language
Learning R sets you up for creating machine learning projects. Wei-Meng takes a close look at the language, which can implement a wide variety of statistical techniques, tests, analysis, classification, clustering, and can help you produce publication-quality graphs.
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Azure Skyline: Terms (Resource Groups, App Service Plans and SQL Elastic Pools)
Azure has come out with some great new tools. Mike introduces some of them, including Resource Groups, App Service Plans, and SQL Elastic Pools.
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On Managers
Ted talks about being a manager, having a manager, and the difference between a good and a bad manager.
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What’s New in ASP.NET Core 2.1
Daniel takes you on a tour of the new features in the new release of ASP.NET. He thinks you’ll find it exciting, especially regarding its SignalR capabilities.