Laszlo

Hello, I am Laszlo

.NET developer

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Chatbots: where are you?

01/27/2018

Creating a chatbot seems easier then ever. Or is it?

There are several frameworks and services making the life of developers easier, such as the bot framework and LUIS. But when someone starts to cover more-and-more real-life use cases it turns out that the developer still has a lot to do.

One of these challenges I faced in my chatbot comes from getting the user's location.  In bot framework, some channels might provide contextual information along with the user, such as Cortana, which can provide the user's actual location. This comes very handy, when our chatbot needs to know the user's actual location is.

Understanding the user

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Intercepting Service Fabric remoting calls

01/14/2018

In the previous post I described how we can update remoting calls from V1 to V2 in Service Fabric. In this post, I am describing how we can intercept V2 remoting calls and add custom headers. I will share the related code samples for Stateful and Stateless services as-well-as Actors.

The goal will be to add a custom header entry on the client side, while the service side would read (and possibly use) the value of the header value.

Background

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Understanding Span

12/02/2017

C# 7.2 has introduced Span<T> along with a some language features so developers can better optimize code when using structs / value types.

To goal of this post is to (instead of explaining) present a collection of articles and blog posts that help the reader to fully understand these new features.

Let's start by the new features. The following article shall explain

  • in keyword

  • ref readonly

  • readonly struct

  • ref struct

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Custom VS Snippets

11/20/2017

The 'copy-paste' task of developers has to be automatized. It is done by continuous improvement of languages, compilers, design patterns, libraries, packages, components, etc.

Having code templates is a bit of a different story. I have been using R# templates for a couple of years, and one can get really used to it.

Recently I have decided to plainly use Visual Studio, without the R#. One challenge I have is to move all my templates to VS snippets. I tend to use 6 snippets the most often:

  • Argument validation

  • Log informational message

  • Log error message

  • Create a test method

  • Create test setup method

  • Create test tear down method

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First look at SIMD in .Net

10/19/2017

Recently I have been reading about Performance of .Net application, I ran into the following post explaining processor and cache affects on our code.

Processor pipelining shifted my interests to Single Instruction Multiple Data. SIMD has been added to the .Net ecosystem with the RyuJIT, as the following blog post details it.

There are a couple of mathematical and graphical use-cases described where this technology is applicable, but I still see a great opportunity ahead, where mass amount of real-time numerical data needs to be processed (and we are not willing to use GPU for instance). By curiosity I have created a couple of examples and compared the performance of these use-cases to regular code.

Note that the following examples use Vector<T> which is available through a NuGet package at the time. Only regular Vector2/3/4f are available in the full framework.

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