SQL Server : Add a Data Connection To A SQL Server Database In Visual Studio 2013

The "Server Explorer" tool in Visual Studio 2013 is a good tool at your disposal if want to interact with the database in GUI environment.  To create a new data connection to the database in the "Server Explorer" perform the following actions:

1. Click on "Server Explorer" tab in the left hand side, then click on "Add Connection"

Hour 10 ASP.NET Core : Add appSettings.json Configuration Files For Database

Now that we have most of our static contents taken care of for our application, meaning we did everything we could without a database.  It's time to create our database.  But before we can do that we need a place to store our connection string to the database.  Usually we just store the connection string in the web.config file in our web application.  However, since ASP.NET Core is trying to break free from the old way of doing things, there's a new way to store configuration information which is more flexible the old web.config way.  As usual it also requires more work.

Hour 9: ASP.NET Core : Add Tag Helpers To NorthwindCafe Application

In this post we will add Tag Helpers support for our application.  Tag Helpers are programmable attributes that you can use throughout the application.

Follow the steps below to enable tag helpers:

1.  Right-click on the "Views" folder and create a "View Imports" file

Hour 8: ASP.NET Core : Adding Font-Awesome 5+ For Northwind Cafe Navigation Icons

In this tutorial we will add icons to your navbar.  In the previous tutorial we added a responsive layout with bootstrap.  In this post we will add some icons to your navigation.  Font-Awesome gives you professional looking vector graphics, which are implemented using CSS.

Hour 7: ASP.NET Core : Create A Responsive Layout With Bootstrap 4+

In our previous blog we created a simple _Layout.cshtml file that does not have any markup just to make things simple.  In this blog we will use Bootstrap to make the layout look more professional and responsive, so that it can be viewed in any screen size.  The previous layout looks like screenshot below.

Hour 5: ASP.NET Core : Adding The Default View With _ViewStart.cshtml And Layout Page

In ASP.NET MVC there is a default layout file that the application use when one exists.  If you look at the markup at the top of the "Index.cshtml" file you will see that there is a markup to specify the layout of the page in the code below.

Hour 1: Create ASP.NET Core Project From Scratch

Technology has moved at a breakneck speed, after working with ASP.NET Core for a while, I realized that my ASP.NET MVC blog articles have become outdated.  Don't get me wrong, MVC is still a very big part of ASP.NET Core, but that's the thing it's just a part of it.  ASP.NET Core has decoupled the infrastructure from the application.  You can deploy your web app on Docker imagine that!  No longer is IIS your primary means of hosting your ASP.NET application.

However, with this new freedom comes added complexity.  No longer can you just drag and drop components into your design surface.  Those days are long gone.  This post ist meant to ease your way into ASP.NET Core.  I will using the release candidate version two of ASP.NET Core for this post and other subsequent posts.  I found out that I can't really follow my blog posts anymore to create the project with the latest version which is 2.1.  Don't use 2.2 for now because there's still not a lot of documentation on it.  So here is the updated version  I will be using Visual Studio 2017 for my development.  You can use the command line interface and notepad to develop your ASP.NET Core application.  But, I think that borders on insanity.

R Programming: Variables

R is a programming language that is a little different in syntax then your typical mainstream languages like Java or C#. In this post we will go over how to create variables in R.

Let's create some variables about a user:

To create a variable in we use the <- key for example if you want to assign a value to variable firstName, you would write firstName <-  "John" or "John" -> firstName

R Programming : Installing Packages, devtools

Now that we R installed in Visual Studio let's install some of the more useful packages that we will use in our R development.  Packages provides you  with the tools to perform tasks, functionalities and datasets for the those features.

To install R devtools package do the following:

In your R project, type the following command into the R Interactive window install.packages("devtools")

R Programming : Installing R Tools in Visual Studio 2017

In this post we are going to go over the steps to install R Tools For Visual Studio 2017.  RStudio has a development environment that is bare bones for the free version.  Visual Studio 2017 offers a more robust development environment if you download the R Tools feature.

Connect To Microsoft Azure Subscription in Visual Studio 2015

In this blog post I am going to show how to connect to your Azure subscription in Visual Studio 2015.  As a developer it's nice to have the Azure subscription integrated into Visual Studio so that you don't have to log into the Azure portal every time you want to interact with Azure.

Follow the steps below to connect to your Microsoft Azure subscription in Visual Studio:

1.  Open Tools → Connect to Server
2.  On the top of the "Server Explorer" connections list right click on "Azure" and select "Connect to Microsoft Azure Subscription"

Create .gitignore for Visual Studio

One of the first thing you have to do when you are creating a git repository is to create a .gitignore file that tells git to ignore the files specified in the .gitignore file.  Since Visual Studio produces all kinds of files it could take a while if you tried to create a .gitignore file from scratch.  Well there's a website that will generate a .gitignore file for you.  It's called gitignore.io  all you have to do is type in the IDE in this case it's VisualStudio without any spaces and the website will generate a .gitignore file for you automatically.

Entity Framework Part 1: Installing Entity Framework 6.1.1 With NuGet

In this blog I will show how to install Entity Framework 6.1.1 with NuGet in Visual Studio 2013

1.  Create a project call "Northwind"

Create A Blank Solution in Visual Studio 2013

When you are starting a new project, you might not want to use the templates that Microsoft provided for you. There are times when you want to start off the project with a clean slate.  You can create a blank solution in Visual Studio.  However, the option to create a blank solution is kind of hidden.

Follow the steps below to create a blank solution:

1. Open Visual Studio 2013, and then click on "File", then select "New", then  "Project"

4.  Your blank solution will be displayed in "Solution Explorer"