Explosive Tutorial With Unity3D and VRTK

Robert Rice .NET, Articles, Development Technologies & Tools, Tutorial Leave a Comment

Opinions on the emerging Virtual Reality market vary. One one end, there are those who say it’s just a gimmick and will pass shortly. On the other end, there are those who herald it as the birth pangs of a paradigm shift in how we interact with technology.

I sit somewhere in the middle. I own an HTC Vive and it is pretty dang awesome. The experience is not perfect, of course, but with interest growing and prices coming down, it’s just going to get better.

One expression of VR’s growing popularity is that Unity3D supports VR programming. And, with the free VRTK (Virtual Reality Tool Kit) framework, it’s becoming much easier to get started programming for VR. VRTK implements many basic components, such as various movement implementations, object interaction, and projectiles.

Working on a fun little side project, I noticed one implementation it did not have: a virtual reality bomb. So, I set upon to create one myself. This post details the process I went through for creating a timed, throwable, explosive object for virtual reality using Unity3D & VRTK.

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Quick Introduction To SQL Server Profiler

Brian Clay .NET, Articles, Databases, Development Technologies & Tools, Tutorial Leave a Comment

When working with SQL Server, you might run across a situation where it is just not running fast enough. While there could be many reasons for this, there are tools that can help you track down just what is going on behind the scenes. SQL Server Management Studioโ€™s SQL Server Profiler or just (Profiler) is a tool that can be used to monitor queries run on your database.

In this blog post Iโ€™ll give a brief demonstration of the SQL Server Profiler tool. Iโ€™ll show you how to keep an eye on all the queries that are being run against your database, as well as how to use a filter to narrow your search to just slower-running queries…

Quick Introduction to the Computer Vision API

Brad Kirtley .NET, API Development, Articles, ASP.NET, Development Technologies & Tools, Machine Learning, Tutorial 1 Comment

Machine learning is a hot topic these days because the biggest tech companies are focused on taking this technology to a new level. For instance, to help develop autonomous driving cars, better interaction between you and your house with products like the Amazon Echo.

Machine learning is a core sub-area of artificial intelligence. Machine learning enables computers to self-learn without being explicitly programmed. As new data comes available, the computer has the ability to learn, grow, change, and develop itself to make better decision in the future. This technology will help reduce the workload and possible incorrect diagnoses when radiologist read films, reducing the amount of accidents on our highways caused by human error, possible reduction of inappropriate message / images / videos from bullying on social network sites.

This article will touch on one of the many Artificial Intelligence APIโ€™s that Microsoft has built for public consumption. We will specifically focus on the step-by-step process of uploading a picture, passing that picture onto the Microsoft Cognitive Services – Computer Vision API, and retrieving different attributes about that image. This is an aspect of AI technology that companies like Facebook & Google are using to try to stop bullying and other issue within social networking. Let’s get started…

Using ELK In .NET Applications

Chase Aucoin .NET, Articles, Development Technologies & Tools, Microservices, moderntoolingseries 6 Comments

This article is part of a series of articles about modern tooling and techniques for building distributed systems in DotNet.

In our first article, we saw how easy it was to set up a full ELK stack by leveraging pre-built containers. In this blog, I show how to leverage ELK in a .NET application and aggregate our logs into a single place. You will see just how simple it is to start getting some insights into your application. Let’s get started…

Containers For .NET Developers

Chase Aucoin .NET, .NET Core, Articles, Development Technologies & Tools, Docker, Microservices, moderntoolingseries, Python Leave a Comment

This is going to be the first post in a series of articles about modern tooling and techniques for building distributed systems. In this post, I will show how to use Docker for Windows to set up an ELK (Elasticsearch, Kibana, Logstash) server that we are going to use in future articles. The series is particularly geared toward traditional .NET developers. Let’s get started…