Dotnet

Advent of Code 2021 - Day 5

Photo by Any Lane from Pexels I’m participating in the Advent of Code 2021. Here’s my solutions for Day 5 - Hydrothermal Vents. Going forward I’m combining the posts into a single post per day. Problem 1 Puzzles for Day 5 is about finding the intersections of lines plotted on a grid. In this case, we have a set of lines defined by the endpoints across a 1000 x 1000 grid. For puzzle 1, we will only look at horizontal and vertical lines and count the points where at least two lines intersect.

dotnet

Sunday, December 5, 2021 | 3 minutes Read

Advent of Code 2021 - Day 3

Photo by Any Lane from Pexels I’m participating in the Advent of Code 2021. Here’s my solution for Day 3, Puzzle 1 - Binary Diagnostic Problem Puzzle 1 for Day 3 involves analyzing some binary numbers that are output and using the frequency that a particular bit is 1 vs 0. For each bit position, we get the frequency across all the input data, then use that total to build two final binary numbers.

Saturday, December 4, 2021 | 8 minutes Read

Advent of Code 2021 - Day 4

Photo by Any Lane from Pexels I’m participating in the Advent of Code 2021. Here’s my solution for Day 4, Puzzle 1 - Giant Squid Bingo Problem Puzzle 1 for Day 4 is all about bingo. A giant squid has attached to the sub… for a game of bingo. In this case, we’ll process a set of 100 bingo cards and then “call” numbers one at a time until we get a bingo on one of the cards.

Saturday, December 4, 2021 | 6 minutes Read

Advent of Code 2021 - Day 2

Photo by Any Lane from Pexels I’m participating in the Advent of Code 2021. Here’s my solution for Day 2, Puzzle 1 - Dive! Problem Puzzle 1 today involves following a series of commands that will take you forward, up or down. Each line of input is a command, followed by a number in the form of : forward 10 Solution All my solutions are written in C#. You can find all my solutions in my Git repo.

Thursday, December 2, 2021 | 3 minutes Read

Advent of Code 2021 - Day 1, Puzzle 1

Photo by Any Lane from Pexels I’m participating in the Advent of Code 2021 (@adventofcode). Here’s my solution for Day 1, Puzzle 1 - Measuring depth increases Problem The elves have lost the keys to the sleigh into the ocean. Puzzle 1 involves reading depth measurements of the ocean floor to determine how quickly the depth increases. We need to determine from a list of measurements, how many of them are an increase over the previous measurement. We’re given an input list of 2000 measurements to be processed in order.

Wednesday, December 1, 2021 | 1 minute Read

Advent of Code 2021 - Day 1, Puzzle 2

Photo by Any Lane from Pexels I’m participating in the Advent of Code 2021 (@adventofcode). Here’s my solution for Day 1, Puzzle 2 - Three Measurement Sliding Window Problem Puzzle 2 involves a more refined measurement of the depth readings by comparing measurements of 3 consecutive readings to the next 3. By that we mean, taking the sum of measurements 1, 2 & 3, and then comparing that to the sum of 2, 3 & 4. If thats an increase, then we count it. We’ll use the same input list of 2000 measurements we used for Puzzle 1.

Wednesday, December 1, 2021 | 2 minutes Read

C# Advent 2020 - ASP.NET Core API Endpoints

MVC is a mess. Controllers in one folder, views in another, services in another, models and viewmodels in yet other folders. Related files are all over the place. Trying to piece together these related pieces can be a real pain. Steve “ardalis” Smith has come up with another way: ASP.NET Core API Endpoints. The concept is a simple one. Everything that’s related can easily be put in one folder, maybe even in one file. Steve explains much better: “Instead of Model-View-Controller (MVC) the pattern becomes Request-EndPoint-Response (REPR). The REPR (reaper) pattern is much simpler and groups everything that has to do with a particular API endpiont together.” By putting everything together, maintenance and development are all much easier. As Steve notes, this is a concept that the .NET team has done in creating Razor pages.

Saturday, December 19, 2020 | 6 minutes Read

The Nightmare Before Blazor

Boys and girls of every age Wouldn’t you like to see something strange? Come with me and you will see This, C# in WebAssembly This is Blazor, this is Blazor C# in my browser, what a sight This is Blazor, C# devs in WebAssembly C# in my browser, what a sight This post is part of the 2019 C# Advent. Check out all the amazing posts here.

Friday, December 13, 2019 | 11 minutes Read

Flow & Function Together - CS Advent

For this year’s #csadvent post, I am going to continue my posts about using Microsoft Flow to make our lives easier. This time, we’re adding in some Azure Functions as well. In a previous post, I covered creating a Flow that an attendee to a conference might create to watch for tweets that they might want to re-tweet. This time, we want to take on the role of conference organizers who want to watch the flow of tweets for how positive or negative people feel about our conference.

Monday, December 17, 2018 | 11 minutes Read

Using C# and Azure Text Analytics Sentiment Analysis To Respond To Customer Complaints

I’m a dev. I just make apps. I only deal with customers when something breaks and my support teams can’t fix it. They’re just an annoyance, right? Wrong. I’m going to show you how Azure Cognitive Services Text Analytics Sentiment Analysis can help you retain customers and look good while you’re doing it. Anyone who has worked in a customer service related field will tell you that it’s far less expensive to keep an existing customer happy than it is to win a new customer to your product or service. This is an unavoidable fact and yet so many companies get it wrong. They put little effort into their existing customers until it is too late. Another fact is that all of these customers have friends and social media accounts of their own. And they will share that experience, be it good or bad, to the detriment or glorious success of your company. One lost existing customer is 100 customers who will never even give your product a try. One mad customer that you’ve made happy and kept around is 10 potentially new customers who will be willing to give you a try. (Yeah, I know, people complain far more than they praise. We’re funny like that.)

Saturday, June 16, 2018 | 8 minutes Read

C# Advent Calendar 2017 - Using C# and Azure Cognitive Services Text Analytics to Identify and Relate Text Documents

One of the tasks that developers sometimes face in large companies (or even small ones) is trying to figure out how large sets of data relate to each other. If that data is text based, C# and Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services Text Analytics functions make this extremely easy to accomplish. In this post, I’ll walk through identifying language and parsing out key words and phrases that we can use to help match blocks of text together.

Tuesday, December 19, 2017 | 11 minutes Read