Chun Lin Goh

Few days ago, the Cloud & Enterprise team at Microsoft Singapore organized an event about developing modern applications on Microsoft Azure in their downtown office. As member from a young startup using Microsoft Azure services, I decided to join the event to find more about the tools that we have been using daily in our development journey. Hence, this article is to share what I had learnt in that 8-hour Azure event. [caption id=“attachment_media-36” align=“aligncenter” width=“1366”] Modern App Development with Azure event[/caption] ...

Azure Search is provided as a Search-as-a-Service solution that helps e-commerce developers to easily offer a robust search experience on the website without managing search infrastructure and understanding in depth about search. Working in the e-commerce team, we find search to be very important because as the number of products grows, search function becomes a top-priority task for us to implement. Azure Search is what we choose to use. Upload Data to Index For our e-commerce platform, we have data stored separately in different systems. With Azure Search, we can easily compile and push data to populate the Azure Search index. By doing this way, we don’t need to worry about what our data sources will be. To upload data to Azure Search in .NET, firstly, we need to get the Microsoft Azure Search .NET SDK NuGet Package. [caption id=“attachment_4759” align=“alignnone” width=“1392”] Installed Azure Search NuGet package in ASP .NET MVC project.[/caption] Secondly, we need to create an instance of the SearchServiceClient. ...

DTU: Database Transaction Unit DTU is an important keyword to understand, especially for those who have been thinking about migrating databases from on-premise MS SQL Server to Azure SQL. Before the migration, there is normally a question to ask, “which service tier and performance level should I use and how much do I need to pay?” Hence, if you read the Azure SQL pricing page, you will be presented with tables similar to what is shown below. [caption id=“attachment_21526” align=“aligncenter” width=“1058”] Azure SQL Pricing (Southeast Asia)[/caption] As shown in the table above, there are four performance levels for Standard Single Database Model, i.e. S0, S1, S2, and S3. Four of them having the same maximum storage for each database, however, they are charged differently because the DTUs they offer are different. So, what is DTU, or the Database Transaction Unit? When the new Azure SQL database service tiers are introduced, DTU is used as a way to describe the relative capacity of a performance level based on a blended measure of CPU, memory and IO rates. DTU is the unit of measure representing the relative power of databases based on the database transaction. S0 offers 10 DTUs, which means S0 can complete only 10 transactions per second. For me, the concept of DTU is a bit vague. When I look at the old chart in Azure SQL Pricing, there was actually an additional row called “Transactions per Second” which had value about the same as or lower than the corresponding DTU. Thus, S0, for example, can in fact only complete 8.7 transactions (instead of 10) per second. So, is there any method to help us making changes in our queries so that we can utilize the given resources in a good manner? Or, how do we know where our DTUs are spent? ...

Every day after work, during dinner, our team will chat about what we have learnt, what we have done, and new project ideas. Today, I’d like to share with you one of our dinner topics about customizing authorization attribute in ASP .NET MVC5. [caption id=“attachment_21371” align=“aligncenter” width=“922”] Having dinner in airport transit area after work is enjoyable.[/caption] We’re now working on building a product management web application for a small company of around 100 employees. In the company, there are many teams, such as marketing, design, retail, product, advertising, and so on. One of the project requirements is thus to allow user logging in to the system with their own account. In ASP .NET MVC 5 project, by default, if individual user account is chosen as the authentication mode, ASP .NET Identity will use Entity Framework Code First to create a database and then store all the user information in a database. [caption id=“attachment_21378” align=“aligncenter” width=“756”] Individual User Account option in Visual Studio 2013[/caption] Role Based Access Control Normally, there will be five tables generated: AspNetUsers, AspNetUserRoles, AspNetRoles, AspNetUserLogins, AspNetUserClaims. With the help of the first three tables, we will be able to implement role-based authentication which we can restrict access to parts of our application by roles. How do we define roles? In some applications, the roles are super admin, manager, operator, agent, etc. For our case, the teams are the roles. So we will have one role for each individual team. After that, we can easily add all members in the team to the corresponding role. Then in our web application, we will be able to check if the current logged in user has the role to access or not by decorating our controllers with Authorize attribute as follows. ...

Last month, during our monthly .NET Developer Singapore Community meetup, our friend Riza from Microsoft shared with us a very cool API, Win2D. Win2D is an open-source API announced by Microsoft last year which helps developers bring hardware accelerated Direct2D graphics to Windows 8.1 (and 10) Universal Apps. This API certainly excites developers, especially game developers who are not very familiar with Direct2D but would like to do 2D immediate mode rendering in C#. After the meetup, I have tried playing with some of the basic features in Win2D. I did a simple app which will keep adding colourful circles moving around on the Surface screen. After a few weeks, I read an article online about image effects on Win2D. Hence, I decided to try it as well. My Taiwan Trip and Image Processing I just came back from my first trip to Taipei. So I would like to use some of my photos taken in the journey to show how Win2D can be used to do interesting image effects. Now, let’s start with a photo that I took outside the National Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall. [caption id=“attachment_20740” align=“aligncenter” width=“640”] Taiwan National Concert Hall[/caption] There are plenty of effects available in the Microsoft.Graphics.Canvas.Effects namespace. I will just do a few of them as a demonstration of image effects in Win2D. Gaussian Blur Effect I will start with one of the simplest effect, the Gaussian Blur. For those who are new to Gaussian Blur, it is a result of blurring an image using the Gaussian function. The new value of each pixel in the image is a weighted average of neighbour pixels of the pixel. Hence, Gaussian Blur is able to produce a blur that preserve edges and uniform blurring filters. In Win2D, Gaussian Blur effect has a property called BlurAmount. It is actually the Standard Deviation of the Gaussian function, as shown in the Settings.xml. ...

Recently, Machine Learning has become a buzz word which can be spotted on many tech-related articles and magazines. It is also one of the hottest areas for startups. However, what is Machine Learning, and why is it such a big deal? Let’s first enjoy a video showing how Machine Learning helps to improve our lives. [embed width=“800” height=“400”]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGXTWLQ76jI[/embed] The elevator shown in the video is called ThyssenKrupp Elevator, a smart elevator which is able to alert technicians when to fix them. With the help of Microsoft Azure Machine Learning, the elevator is able to send data collected by sensors installed on different parts of the elevator to the cloud. Microsoft Azure Machine Learning then provides useful information that will help technicians to maintain the elevator. This elevator is cool, isn’t it? If you would like to know more about ThyssenKrupp Elevator, you can read this article to find out more about Predictive Maintenance. [caption id=“attachment_20325” align=“alignnone” width=“600”] Doli and Terence telling us cool stories about rising of the machines.[/caption] Last month, we are proud to have Doli, Big Data engineer working in Malaysia iProperty Group, to give us a good introduction to Azure Machine Learning during the Azure Community Singapore monthly meetup. The video is actually used as an example of showing how Machine Learning can help to improve our lives during the meetup. ...