.NET Blog

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Calling All Desktop Developers: How do you interact with data?

Connecting to databases and services is an important part of desktop application development for many of our customers. Visual Studio provides a variety of tools and technologies that can help you connect to and interact with your different data sources. We’d love your help in shaping our future offerings in this space! Please fill out ...

Azure Blob Storage as a Network Drive

Many applications make use of a network drive to backup and store files. When I was in university I found myself constantly coding for fun, and one example took the form of a network share for my roommates to share files wrapped in a handy little app. Unfortunately, that particular app has long since been erased from whichever hard drive it ...

.NET Framework February 2018 Security and Quality Rollup

Today, we are releasing the February 2018 Security and Quality Rollup. Security No new security fixes. See .NET Framework January 2018 Security and Quality Rollup for the latest security updates. Quality and Reliability This release contains the following quality and reliability improvements. It includes the same quality improvements that ...

Machine Learning in .NET – Help us build the right experience!

In the past few years, Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) have paved the road for building smarter applications through advancements in speech recognition, computer vision, intelligent search and much more. So far the ability to build models has largely been limited to data scientists, as a part of the .NET platform moving ...

Announcing ASP.NET MVC 5.2.4, Web API 5.2.4, and Web Pages 3.2.4

Today we released stable packages for ASP.NET MVC 5.2.4, Web API 5.2.4, and Web Pages 3.2.4 on NuGet. This release contains some minor bug fixes and a couple of new features specifically targeted at enabling .NET Standard support for the ASP.NET Web API Client. You can read about the .NET Standard support for the ASP.NET Web API Client in the ...

Two Lesser Known Tools for Local Azure Development

If you’re developing applications that target Azure services (e.g. Web Apps, Functions, Storage), you’ll want to know about two powerful tools that come with Visual Studio 2017 and the Azure development workload: * Cloud Explorer is a tool window inside Visual Studio that lets you browse your Azure resources and perform specific tasks – ...

File nesting in Solution Explorer

We are excited to share with you a new capability in Visual Studio that was a clear ask from you, the community. Visual Studio has been nesting related files in Solution Explorer for a long time now, but not everybody agrees with the rules it uses. That's not a problem any more because Visual Studio now gives you** complete control over file ...

Diagnosing Errors on your Cloud Apps

One of the most frustrating experiences is when you have your app working on your local machine, but when you publish it it’s inexplicably failing. Fortunately, Visual Studio provides handy features for working with apps running in Azure. In this blog I’ll show you how to leverage the capabilities of Cloud Explorer to diagnose issues in ...

Learn how to do Image Recognition with Cognitive Services and ASP.NET

With all the talk about artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) doing crazy things, it’s easy to be left wondering, “what are practical ways I can use this today?" It turns out there are some extremely easy ways to try this today. In this post, I’ll walk through how to detect faces, gender, ages, and hair color in photos, ...