Blogs|Sep 12, 2017

Visualizing Sales Data in Python with Matplotlib

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 patterns in the data. But before we dive into the implementation, let’s review the benefits…
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Engine
Blogs|Sep 11, 2017

Turbocharge WordPress With Docker

If you’ve ever dealt with WordPress, you’ve probably noticed that it’s not the fastest software out of the box. This is not inherently a problem with WordPress, as it is a complex app that runs on a cross platform technology. Performance of WordPress though can be improved with the combined effects of several small tweaks.…
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tutorials|Sep 7, 2017

Creating Recoverable TFS Backups

One of the things I’ve come to appreciate most about the cloud software-as-a-service solutions is that it can reduce work. Although there’s still a need for IT, some tasks – such as performing backups – are provided by the vendor. If you’ve ever tried to backup a Team Foundation Server by hand, you have can…
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Blogs|Aug 28, 2017

Using Pandas to Analyze Sales Data

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 data. Feel free to follow along by downloading the Jupyter notebook. If you went through…
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azure-mobile-and-cloud-computing|Aug 24, 2017

Creating a Temporary Visual Studio Environment

Sometimes you will find that you need a cloud environment for working on a project. In some cases, you need the environment to perform a task that would take too long when you run it locally (for example, downloading a large file to transfer to Azure Blob Storage). Perhaps you need a mobile environment to…
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Blogs|Aug 21, 2017

Data Science and the Data Science Process

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 is extracting knowledge from data. But how is that different between statistics? Data science encompasses…
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DevOps|Aug 11, 2017

DevOps: Connecting VSTS to Azure

DevOps is about increasing efficiency and eliminating barriers. There’s a lot of convenience in deploying directly from Visual Studio Team Services into the Azure cloud. With plugin based build and release pipelines, it’s very easy to quickly configure a release and see the results online. You can quickly configure a release to deploy to Azure;…
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Tutorials|Jun 19, 2017

Quick Start for Moby and LinuxKit

Docker has grown wildly in the last few years. It’s gone from a fledgling startup to a billion-dollar company, and now it’s got the attention of the enterprise. A number of changes have happened at Docker too – there’s been a leadership transition as well as Docker giving many of its core components over to…
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Tutorials|Jun 15, 2017

Data Science with R in Visual Studio

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 the same, I will omit that from this post. We’ll just focus on all the…
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Tutorials|Jun 14, 2017

How to Avoid a Docker Database Disaster

Containers are cool – and everyone and their mother is trying to get on board with them. While many applications are natural fit for containers in many cases, it feels like some applications are forced into containers so vendors can say, “Hey look at me! I do containers too!” This is particularly true of database…
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Tutorials|Jun 12, 2017

Data Science with Python in Visual Studio

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, and F# data projects for analysis and visualizations. In this post we’ll go over how…
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