Jonathan Wood

In the previous post, we went over how to use the Custom Vision Training and Prediction SDKs to programmatically predict image URLs and image files. In this post, we’re going to use those same SDKs to show how to programmatically...

Creating a model to classify images would usually involve creating your own deep learning model from scratch. This includes having a very large and diverse set of training images with a portion of them set aside as a test set,...

In the previous post, we showed how to train an image classification model using the Microsoft Custom Vision service as well as to perform a quick test on a new image. However, what if you want to integrate this model...

Let’s say you’ve been working on a machine learning model and your initial evaluation on test data looks good but is that the same kind of performance you’ll get once you deploy your model to take on actual data it...

Often times you’ll be iterating on your model to try to get it to perform well with new data, so you’ll be training on it for each of those iterations. However, once you feel like you have a model that...

When you think of data science and machine learning two programming languages are going to instantly pop into your mind: Python and R. These two languages are great and I love working with them, but coming from a .NET and...

If you’ve done even a short amount of research into data science, there is no doubt you’ve come across the Python vs. R debate. While we won’t get into which is better, there is nothing wrong with knowing both. You...

You have to admit, Microsoft Cognitive Services has a lot of really nice offerings to bring to your applications. One of the newer ones is the Video Indexer. This a powerful service since when you upload your videos it analyzes...

With the announcement of the general availability of Azure Databricks, in this post we’ll take this opportunity to get a brief feel to what Azure Databricks is and what it can do. What is Databricks? Databricks is a data solution...

In our previous post, we went over what Microsoft’s LUIS, or Language Understanding, is and showed how to create a new LUIS app as well as calling it using the APIs. In this post we will use the same LUIS...

In our previous post, we feed Twitter data to the Text Analytics API which was able to detect the language of each tweet. We will expand upon our previous work and continue to use the API and our Twitter data...

To aid in building applications that have better natural language understanding, Microsoft came out with LUIS or Language Understanding Intelligent Services. LUIS can be used for understanding speech for the Bot Framework, Bing Speech, or even with Cortana. In this...

Data comes in all forms. Lately, we’ve been going over mostly numerical and categorical data. Even though the categorical data contains words, we transform it into numerical data for our algorithms. However, what if your data is only words? That’s...

Microsoft has a lot of fascinating APIs available to build intelligent applications with using their Cognitive Services. Among those services is the Text Analytics API. This API offers a wide range of valuable text-based functionality such as sentiment analysis and...

In our last post we discussed different types your data can have. Now let’s focus on how to analyze on those types of data. Python code will be used to demonstrate a few of these concepts. To get things start...

To finish off getting insights from a sales data set, we’re going to look at using Microsoft’s PowerBI. PowerBI is a very helpful tool for looking at our data through visualizations. The insights will be the same that we got...

Statistics is becoming a must learn topic for anyone looking to get into data science. Look at any data scientist job posting, and you will be hard-pressed to find a listing that does not mention a degree in statistics, mathematics,...

In the last post, we created APIs for our machine learning models so they could be deployed and clients could invoke them. However, what if you just wanted a simple web page that included interactive and attractive graphs? That’s where...

In our previous post, we went over how to create a simple linear regression model with scikit-learn and how to use it to make predictions. But, that’s not very useful for anyone other than the creator of the model since...

In this post, we’ll look at what linear regression is and how to create a simple linear regression machine learning model in scikit-learn. If you want to jump straight to the code, the Jupyter notebook is on GitHub. What is Linear...

There are probably thousands upon thousands of tutorials, articles, videos, and blog posts on all things data science on the internet now. Yet I’m still a big fan of books. Throughout history books have given wisdom, advice, and knowledge to...

In our last post we interpreted a data set with pandas to gain some insights from it. In this post, we will do the same, but instead of interpreting the raw data we will use visualizations to help us determine...

Now that we know how the data science process works, let’s leverage some of it and try to find insights into some data. We’ll be using pandas, a popular data analysis package for Python, to load and work with our...

Before we get into the fun part of working with data, let’s break down how data science involves more than just statistics, why it’s becoming more important, and the data science process. Data Science vs. Statistics In short, data science...

Like our previous post on Python, we will walk through all the really nice offerings Visual Studio gives us now when working with R and related tools. Since we looked at installing in the previous post, and the steps are...

Yep, you read that right. Visual Studio isn't the first thing you think of when you hear "data science", but that may just change soon. In Visual Studio 2017 they have included several tools together where you can do Python, R,...

Having end-to-end tests and running them locally can definitely be beneficial, but one of the main reasons to have them is to run them automatically during a nightly build. Getting these tests to run in Visual Studio Team Services isn’t...

End-to-end Testing Testing where the entire application is tested in a real-world scenario such as communicating with the database, network, hardware and other applications. The above is the general definition of what an end-to-end test is. Most of these tests...

Spectron is a great tool for testing your Electron applications. However, some help is needed to get the full use out of it. This post will go through all of the npm packages I’ve found useful in my Spectron testing....

After some Spectron experience there tends to be some things that can get repetitive when creating Spectron tests. I figured creating a tool to do just that would be handy to have. So I created the spectron-cli npm package. Granted, this...

If you’re using Spectron (or even Protractor) for automating your applications probably the most time consuming thing is to figure out exactly what selectors you need in order to interact with your application. Whether to click on a button or...

Now that we've got Spectron working, let's add some more to it to help with our testing. One way of doing end-to-end testing is to have a separate file that contains our page objects and any helper functions specific to...

You've built a really awesome Electron application, but you want to include a few automated tests to make sure a regression doesn't occur? Spectron is here to help! Spectron is Electron's end-to-end testing library. Let's see how it we can set...

Now that we’ve seen the awesome new stuff in Xamarin Studio for F# let’s go a bit further and actually use some of those improvements to our advantage. However, instead of just a regular blog post, I thought it’d be...

With the (almost) stable release of Xamarin Studio 6 comes a ton of great new improvements. I absolutely love the new dark theme! However, some huge improvements were made to the IDE for F# support, as well. Improvements that I...

It’s F# Advent time again! This is a yearly event the F# community comes together for the month of December and each person releases an F# related post on a day of their choosing. Today is that day for me...

One of the pain points of using Xamarin Forms is that, just to see updates of any UI updates via XAML, you still need to save your changes, recompile, and relaunch the application. What’s more, is that you’d have to...

While this will be a short post it’s also one that may be one of the most important ones to go over - running unit tests. Most of you probably know that being able to run tests early and often...

Continuing from part 1 of this series we now have FAKE setup and ready for us to use our automated building needs. Now let’s build our Xamarin Forms application. In here we’ll go through how much FAKE helps us out...

Being a .NET developer, I’m sure one of your pain points throughout the development process in any project has been trying to setup automated building, testing, and even deploying. However, build tools have been evolving much like other development tools...

MSPmentor Senior Content Director T.C. Doyle interview with Atmosera CEO, Jon Thomsen.

One of the best and easiest ways to use F# in your projects is to use it for unit testing and the same can be said for your mobile applications with Xamarin. While C# has FluentAssertions as well as Should...

With the latest news of the release of Visual Studio 2015 some folks may not have realized but included in it is the newest release of F# 4.0. The .NET Blog has also officially announced the RTM. The most exciting...

I’ve gone to few conferences lately since starting my software development career. I plan on going to several more as I find them throughout the year. Just recently, I decided to checkout CodeStock. Why go all the way to Knoxville,...

While we certainly have been busy getting our hands dirty with Xamarin I’ve been doing some of my own. However, I’ve been messing around with using Xamarin with F#. I mentioned in a previous post that F# can be used...

Though I have posted a few times on some of the awesome things F# can do for your code, that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s always good choice for each of your applications. You may look at the code features and...

One of the most interesting things about F# is their type providers. Don Syme, just a couple of years ago, did a post giving examples of using 12 type providers that is still quite relevant. Just taking a look at...

To expand on another topic that was mentioned in the F# Infographic is that F# also has the ability to use any .NET library. From that, you may be wondering, “what about implementing interfaces that may come in other libraries?”...

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...

You may have seen a big boom lately with web technologies, especially with all of the JavaScript frameworks coming out at a pace of around one a week. But there is another boom you may have heard about…data science. Now...

Another item that was on the F# Infographic was the use of the F# Interactive or also called the FSI. The interactive window is basically a REPL for F#. A few languages have these of their own, including Python and...

Many of you may have certainly heard about F#, and as you may have seen from the previous F# Infographic, it definitely has one awesome community. I'd like to expand a bit on the community to highlight what they have...

I was lucky enough to be able to give my first technical presentation at the Carolina Code Camp, and it was definitely a great experience. When thinking of a topic for this event, I felt it would be best to learn...

My thoughts on patterns I'll be honest with you...I never did like design patterns. I never got on board with it and, instead, just coded away like I thought I was supposed to do. Now, I realize they're a bit...