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Category: Misc Languages

Object Deconstruction in C#

Published 2023-01-19 by Kevin Feasel

Patrick Smacchia shows off a feature in C#:

C# 7.0 introduced the deconstruction syntax. It allows developers to extract in a single expression, properties of an object or elements of a tuple and then to assign them to distinct variables . Here is a small program candidate to be simplified with deconstruction:

I enjoy (more than I should) being able to say “C# got this from F#.” Object deconstruction is quite useful and it’s good to see that the C# syntax is close to what we get in F# or Python.

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Running ML.NET in F#

Published 2022-12-30 by Kevin Feasel

Matt Eland builds a notebook:

In this article I’ll outline a simple pipeline that trains a regression machine learning model and saves it to a file for use later on. We’ll look at how to load the model using F# and use it to generate new predictions for new data points.

To round things out, I’ll be showing you how to do this all in a Polyglot Notebook, though you can skim over this aspect of the experiment as almost all of the code will work just fine in a normal .fs file outside of Polyglot Notebooks.

At the end, Matt mentions that the F# code looks a whole lot like C# code and that’s my biggest problem with the library: it forces you into writing C#-style code.

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Join Types in Spark SQL

Published 2022-12-29 by Kevin Feasel

Rituraj Khare makes some connections:

In Apache Spark, we can use the following types of joins in SQL:

Inner join: An inner join in Apache Spark is a type of join that returns only the rows that match a given predicate in both tables. To perform an inner join in Spark using Scala, we can use the join method on a DataFrame.

The set of options is the same as you’d see in a relational database: inner, left outer, right outer, full outer, and cross. The examples here are in Scala, though would apply just as easily to PySpark and, of course, writing classic SQL statements.

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Closures in Scala (and All FP Languages)

Published 2022-12-28 by Kevin Feasel

Pallav Gupta explains what a closure is:

Objects are more flexible for certain use cases because they carry both data members and member functions, whereas a function does not have data members.

So if there is a requirement to pass data members along with functions, How will we achieve it in functional programming ?

The answer is yes, we can achieve it using a closure and a free variable.

Read on for an example.

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Creating an Azure Function for Cosmos DB

Published 2022-12-22 by Kevin Feasel

Hasan Savran needs a function:

Azure Cosmos DB’s Change Feed feature triggers an event for Inserts and Updates in a collection. The easiest way to handle these events is, by executing an Azure Function. In this post, I will focus on creating an Azure Function for Azure Cosmos DB by using VsCode.

Read on for step-by-step instructions. The wizard for creating Function apps and then Azure Functions is pretty well-designed.

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Advent of Code in Postgres

Published 2022-12-20 by Kevin Feasel

Ryan Booz has some videos for us:

As I go, I’ll upload my finished code to my repo and (hopefully) record a video for each day explaining my approach. I’ve finished through day 8 (as of December 14, 2022), but haven’t finished all of the videos yet. Again, my goal is to enjoy the challenge and learn, not try to be the first one done or get on a leaderboard somewhere. This also means it will probably take into January 2023 to finish the puzzles and record videos.

Enough explanation! Let’s talk about the first five puzzles, including links to the videos.

Read on for days 1-5 of the challenge.

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Building Retry Logic for Database Calls

Published 2022-12-19 by Kevin Feasel

Jose Manuel Jurado Diaz tries and tries again:

Today, I worked on a case that our customer faced an execution command timeout “Msg -2, Level 11, State 0, Line 0 – Execution Timeout Expired. The timeout period elapsed prior to completion of the operation or the server is not responding“

As this business process is running over the night and they need to ensure that the execution will be completed, they asked if there is possible to implement an Execution Retry Logic. 

In the similar way that we have for Retry-Logic for Transient Failure We could implement a similar mechanism to retry the operation, the only thing that we need is to change the commandTimeout parameter, for example, in .NET. 

Click through for an example of how you can implement this in code. I’d also recommend Polly, which is a library explicitly built for these sorts of issues.

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C# Text Classification via ML.NET 2

Published 2022-12-12 by Kevin Feasel

Matt Eland tries out ML.NET 2.0:

Recently ML.NET 2.0 was released, giving us a bevy of new features for the open source machine learning library for dotnet applications.

The release improved ML.NET’s text processing capabilities and improved some aspects of the already fantastic automated machine learning capabilities it had. Moreover, the release seemed to reaffirm ML.NET’s determination to be relevant for advanced machine learning tasks, including deep learning and transformer-based architectures.

In this article we’ll explore ML.NET 2.0’s new text classification capabilities and see how you can use C# to analyze sentiment, match utterances to intents, or otherwise classify textual data without having to write a lot of custom code.

Read on to learn more about ML.NET and plenty of turtles.

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AI: Lying at Card Games via Probabilistic Modeling

Published 2022-12-06 by Kevin Feasel

Matt Eland is on a mission:

I taught an AI to lie at my favorite card game.

In this article, I’ll explore how I did that and what considerations I had to make while designing an artificial intelligence to play a social deduction-based card game. I’ll also discuss where the project is headed and the potential approaches that you might consider building game systems as an AI developer.

The game I chose to model is One Night Ultimate Werewolf by Bezier Games. This is a social deduction game modelled on the popular party games of Werewolf and Mafia. I’ll give you a quick overview of the rules in the next section, for those unfamiliar with it.

This is an interesting overview of the card game, as well as describing the project itself.

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Azure SQL Trigger for Azure Functions

Published 2022-11-11 by Kevin Feasel

Drew Skwiers-Koballa announces a new feature:

The Azure SQL trigger for Azure Functions uses SQL change tracking functionality to monitor a SQL table for changes and trigger a function when a row is created, updated, or deleted.  Change tracking is available for Azure SQL Database, Azure SQL Managed Instance, and SQL Server, making the Azure SQL trigger for Azure Functions a flexible component for event-driven applications.

Similarly to the Azure SQL bindings for Azure Functions, a connection string for the SQL database is stored in the application settings of the Azure Function and supporting authentication options such as managed identity. In addition to the connection string, the SQL trigger is configured with a table name. The SQL trigger is specified on lines 12 and 13 in the C# Azure Function example below, which will log information about each change made to data in the dbo.Employees table.

Read on to see how it works.

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