Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB and Cognitive Service – Get Started

Do you love to develop mobile apps? Do you love to write code for Android or iPhone or Windows platform? If so, you will love to read following post.

Recently, we conducted a 2-day Xamarin Event at Rajarambapu Institute of Technology, Islampur. They have one of the best libraries we have ever seen. Mayur Tendulkar is Program Manager on Xamarin team at Microsoft India and he was the speaker for this session. Other than having tea 5 times a day we had his fantastic session and a lot of Gyan!

Don’t you think they have a beautiful library?

 

With Xamarin you can develop applications for Android, IOS and Windows with JUST ONE LANGUAGE! Yes, you heard it right! You can write applications on all three platform with all Native API’s of that platform with just one language that is C#.

Well, we learned 2 major things and settled with 3 projects: –

1. Cognitive services –

Microsoft has this beautiful service which will make a lot of your work easier. Microsoft Cognitive Service will help you to build some powerful apps with algorithms to see, hear, speak, understand and interpret using natural methods of communication.

With just few lines of code you can add features like Detect the emotion of a person, find face, Translate any text to any language etc.

To develop these apps you will need to have Microsoft Azure subscription. If you want to try out features of Microsoft Azure you can get a month free Azure account. – https://azure.microsoft.com/en-in/offers/ms-azr-0044p/

We developed 2 apps using Cognitive Services

• Translator App

This is one easy app that will help you to translate text from any language to any other language. With just a few lines of code, you can develop this app. Mayur has simplified the steps to create this app. You can follow the steps at https://github.com/mayur-tendulkar/Mini-Hacks/tree/master/Translator%20API

• Emotion Detection App

Do you love to use emojis and play around it? You will love to work on this app with minimum efforts using Microsoft Emotion API. You can create this with simple steps which will help you to detect emotions of the user. Follow these steps to create a simple app https://github.com/mayur-tendulkar/Mini-Hacks/tree/master/Emotion%20API

2. Azure Cosmos DB

Okay so now this is one interesting topic which might catch your interest! Most of us have been using Relational Database for our data, we keep try maintaining the schema and keep making it more complex which has some advantages but with more tables and more relation, it keeps getting complex.

So, what is the solution to make your database Schema Free? Yes you are thinking the right way, we will use NoSQL for this. Microsoft provides one awesome service which they have recently included in Azure, this new service is Cosmos DB. 

Cosmos DB has enables us to elastically and independently scale throughput and storage across any number of Azure’s geographic regions. Key features of the Cosmos DB are: –

1. Global Distribution of DB with a click of a button.
2. Multiple data models and some popular APIs for accessing and querying data.
3. Scale database throughput per second and change anytime you want.
4. With very low end-to-end latency you can build highly responsive applications.
5. 99% availability with a single region.
6. Low cost of ownership.

More details about the feature can be found here https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cosmos-db/introduction

In our session, we developed an app for a Tea company which have their stores located in multiple regions of the world. We used Cosmos DB to replicate the DB and use the API to perform CRUD operations on our DB. With few lines of code, we were able to develop this app. The steps which we followed for the app can be found here https://github.com/mayur-tendulkar/CosmosDB

Some glimpse of the sessions

 

I hope this post will help you to introduce you to Azure Cognitive Services and Cosmos DB. Will love to hear your feedback, please drop a comment.

Dhanyawad,

Sanket Ghorpade

Pre-requisites for WP app dev

Do you want to know how to get started with Windows Phone app development? Follow the  steps to know the prerequisites for the app development. I will divide the steps into different categorize to make it more easy to understand.

Before you get started with it, you must know few things about Windows Phone which will be helpful to understand this article properly. At the beginning Windows Mobile was launched which eventually failed due to some reasons, later Microsoft came up with Windows Phone which soon caught the eyes of crowd using other smartphones or were thinking to buy one. There are three major versions of Windows Phone which you should remember if you are going to develop Windows Phone application.

• Windows Phone 7– This was the first version of Windows Phone, which later exalted to Windows Phone 7.8, this is no longer used(used rarely) and the support for this phone is going to end soon. These phones can not be upgraded to higher version anymore.
• Windows Phone 8– This version made numerous changes in the Phone with different architecture and new features including bluetooth and UI improvements. This version phones are still used and can be up gradable to higher versions phone.
• Windows Phone 8.1– This version phone is currently the latest in Windows Phone world and consist many new features which helped to grow the market of Windows Phone tremendously.

We will be looking for the development of Windows Phone 8 and Windows Phone 8.1

 Tools

You will require Visual Studio tool for the development. Few get confuse as which version to install as there exists many versions of Visual Studio in store. Let me help you with it, you can Download Visual Studio from this link http://dev.windows.com/en-us/develop/download-phone-sdk

I would recommend you to download the Visual Studio 2013 and Install it, if you face any issues while installing, post the screenshot of the same in comments below.

**Note**: Windows Phone SDK will install in any windows 8 but the emulator will work in only Windows 8(or 8.1) pro or Windows 8(or 8.1) evolution version due to the presence of Hyper-v which is required to run the emulator. But if you have Windows Phone then you can deploy the apps on your phone directly without using emulator.

Language

For the app development, we can develop with more than one languages like C#, HTML5 but we will be learning app development using C#(C sharp) because I personally feel it is preferable over any other languages when it comes to Windows Phone or Windows Store app development.

We will also learn XAML language which will be used for the UI design of the app. Till the time you download the Visual Studio and install it (Yahh! it’s big, and takes time- but don’t worry every good thing takes time to land up 😉 ) You can take course of C# fundamentals for absolute beginners and XAML deep dive. Trust me you will enjoy the course 😉

Ideas

What after the first two steps, the most important thing left is- IDEAS. Yes now whatever you do, whenever you do anything start thinking about ideas, start observing the surrounded areas and think what kind of app do you want to build for Windows Phone.

And so the journey begins, start developing the apps, start creating your own innovations.

Soon will publish next post regarding app development. Meanwhile don’t forget to take App development course from MVA.

Your thoughts on this post and suggestions are welcomed. Keep spreading words.

**Dream Big, Aim Big, Change Big**

-Regards

Sanket Ghorpade