Reading feather files in Power BI
Now that we know how to set up our local virtual environment and install the required packages, we can start reading the feather file in Power BI. First act...
Posts by Year
2024
Using Python in Power BI
In the former blog post we set up the virtual environment for Python in Power BI. In this post, I will show you how to use Python in Power BI. To check Be ...
Setting up Python for Power BI
It is possible to use Python in Power BI. This is a great feature because it allows you to use Python scripts to manipulate your data. In this post, I will s...
Setting up a virtual environment in Python
Intro Python knowns the concept of virtual envirnomnets. A virtual environment is a self-contained directory tree that contains a Python installation for a ...
2023
Dot NET Conf 2023 sessions online
This week .NET 8 was released and just like last year accompanied by 3 days of conference filled with great sessions and new announcements. The sessions are ...
Make use of colored braces in Visual Studio
I have always been a fan of extensions that make my life easier. One of those extensions was the Rainbow braces extension by Mads Kristensen. This extension ...
Booth duty at Microsoft Build Netherlands 2023
Just came back from Utrecht Netherlands where I helped out at the Global AI booth at Microsoft Build Netherlands 2023. It was a great experience to talk to p...
Obtained my AI Skills challenge certification
A while ago I wrote about the upcoming AI skills challenge. I’m happy to announce that I’ve completed the challenge and obtained my certification.
Microsoft Learn AI Skills Challenge
In the past AI was a bit of a strange thing for most people and companies. But today AI is everywhere and it is here to stay. Nowadays most people have heard...
MVP award regained
Last year I didn’t get renewed as an MVP. I was disappointed but I understood the decision as many lost it that time due to the culling after the Covid-19 er...
Gave a talk at Team4Talent Netherlands .NET event
I just finished my talk at the Team4Talent Netherlands .NET event. I gave me popular session The stuff you don’t want to write: Documentation. The session wa...
Organized and spoke at Global AI bootcamp Belgian chapter
Today I organized and spoke at the Belgian chapter of the Global AI bootcamp. The event was held at Spoor 18 offices in Mechelen. We had 4 interesting sessio...
2022
Graduated Postgraduate Studies Big Data & Analytics in Business and Management
Today was a great day. I graduated cum laude my postgraduate studies in Big Data & Analytics in Business and Management at KUL university. I’m really hap...
How to disable all those Edge tabs while alt tabbing in Windows
Likely due to some upgrade on my laptop but lately I’ve been seeing way more screens while Alt+Tab ing on Windows. Not annoying but still a load of screens t...
Not renewed as an MVP
Today I got notified that I didn’t make it for another year as an MVP… That left me with a pretty hollow feeling at first as I’ve been an MVP for 16 years no...
Delivered a presentation about what is new in the technical preview of Power Virtual Agents at aMS Delhi
This morning I gave an online presentation at aMS Delhi about Power Virtual Agents - what’s new.
Delivered a talk about what is new in the technical preview of Power Virtual Agents
Yesterday evening I had the pleasure to speak at an in person event in Belgium for the Belgian poweraddicts community.
Delivered my session Power to the Virtual Agents at aMS Berlin
Today I had the pleasure to talk about Power Virtual Agents at aMS Berlin 2022. I got some very nice feedback at the end of the session from the audience who...
First in person azug event since quite some time
This felt so great!
Delivered a presentation at DevDays Europe 2022
Today I had the opportunity to speak at Devdays Europe 2022. Normally it would’ve been in Vilnius, a city I only visited once before and liked a lot, but due...
Using SqlBulkCopy with .NET lists
Recently I was in a situation where I had to quickly inject loads of data into a SQL database. The basic setup of the application:
Registered for MVP summit 2022 edition
That time of year again… the MVP summit. Due to Covid-19 unfortunately again virtual but still great to look forward to. Seeing new technology being presente...
Python script to generate a new Jekyll post with front matter
Even though I stopped blogging for a while due to various reasons I tried to pick up the pace again since beginning of this year. The old blog was hosted on ...
15 years as a Microsoft MVP
I got my blue ring which marks 15 years of being a Microsoft MVP. I’m quite proud of that particular achievement to be honest. I started out as an ASP.NET MV...
Using the switchstartup extension in Visual Studio
Last week I wrote about making use of the Current selection setting to quickly have the startup project set when you’re having the focus on that particular p...
Using the current selected project as startup project in Visual Studio
A feature in Visual Studio which I noticed already being available in VS 2019 before, likely after an update, is the ability to set a project as startup in a...
Happy New Year, Happy 2022
Another year has gone and what a year it has been. Covid-19 still ruled the major headlines, people got vaccinated (or not) and all around the globe people t...
2019
Spoke at Azure Saturday Cologne 2019 yesterday
Yesterday I had the pleasure to speak at Azure Saturday Cologne, Germany about Visual Studio Code. The room was filled with interested people and I went off ...
Using appsettings.json in a .NET Core console application
Most samples one sees about using settings in .NET Core is about setting up an ASP.NET Core application. Very handy but sometimes I simply want to make use o...
I went speaking at Azure Day Poland
Today I was in Poland for the annual Azure Day Poland. A great gathering of (inter)national speakers about Microsoft Azure technology in the beautiful city o...
Got my picture drawn by Reverentgeek
At the MVP summit currently and there’s a talented person which takes your picture and uses his iPad pro and pencil to make a nice looking drawing out of it....
Making use of the tree command in DOS
A couple of weeks ago I was playing around with NServicebus on localhost. The nice thing about it is that it’ll make use of files in different subfolders if ...
Making use of the Idempotent flag when generating scripts with Entity Framework Core
Today I was setting up a new project but was making use of Entity Framework Core. Seems I found an interesting flag -Idempotent to generate SQL statements fr...
Free book a developers guide to building AI applications
I noticed that Microsoft hands out a free ebook about AI and chatbots. It’s an easy read of about 50 pages.
Change the language version of a C# project
The C# team brings out new features in small releases like C# 7.1, 7.2 or 7.3 for example. Now you might notice that when you create a new project that not a...
Must have extensions for Visual Studio
I started a new job at a new client recently and of course I had to install a new laptop provided by the client.
4 stages of production pain
Recently I was in a discussion about (Azure) DevOps, bugs and their severity. Besides being an interesting discussion we came up with the following list:
Using blob storage with Microsoft bot builder version 4
Even though the documentation of Microsoft bot builder version 4 is really good I noticed I couldn’t find a decent explanation on how to replace the default ...
Yesterday a teacher at Azure Low Lands, today a humble student at PowerBI days
Yesterday I went talking about my experiences with chatbots I gained during the last years working at clients and in a second part of the talk how to create ...
Microsoft Professional Program in Data Science with certification
Besides my usual day to day work including Azure, C#, ASP.NET Core, (chat)bots, Cognitive Services, … I’m currently becoming more and more interested in Data...
Object.keys helped me solve a problem
Last week I took a day out of my holiday to help out a colleague. I basically already left the client but didn’t want to leave my follow up in the cold.
2018
I went speaking about Bots at CODECAMP Romania
Yesterday I went to Romania for the first time ever in my life. Reason: I went speaking at the CODECAMP conference Bucharest edition (apparently the first on...
I got reawarded as a Microsoft Azure MVP
I got reawarded as an MVP for my continued volunteering work in the Azure space. Today was a day that all MVP’s in the world got to know if they were renewed...
Viewing the SQL statements Entity Framework produces with interceptors
Recently I was involved in improving the performance and stability of a new, important, application at a client. The usage of Kendo MVC Grid was a great addi...
Global Azure Bootcamp Belgian Edition
Last Saturday was not only beautiful weather in Belgium, actually it was really great weather, but it was also Global Azure Bootcamp. Me and Tom Kerkhove ran...
I went speaking at Azure Day Poland
Today I was presenting in Poland. More specifically in Warsaw at the Microsoft building for Azure Day Poland. It was a well organized event with a great atmo...
Back from the MVP summit
Last week I was visiting the USA for the annual MVP summit. I must say, one of the best editions I attended in year. First of all, it’s always great to see s...
I broke the barrier of 190000 recognition points on the ASP.NET forums
When I started my professional career in the magical .NET world on July 1st 2002, I joined the ASP.NET forums as a member. In the beginning lurking for infor...
I went speaking at Microsoft Tech Summit Frankfurt
Normally I was only going to help out as a proctor during a workshop at Tech Summit. However on Tuesday evening I got a call from Microsoft corp in Redmond i...
I went speaking at Basta conference spring 2018 about serverless on Azure
Today I took the plane to Frankfurt, Germany to talk at Basta spring 2018 about Serverless on Azure.
Increase performance of Visual Studio 2017
Visual Studio 2017 is a great tool and I spend quite a lot of my professional days in it. On its own it’s already a great editor but the power is in extensio...
Use AsNoTracking to speed up Entity Framework performance
I’m curently busy at a large project in the insurance sector. The original architecture implemented the onion architecture and took from the database a lot o...
My presentation about Microsoft Bot Framework at Iglooconf is online
Recently I presented at Iglooconf in Finland. Besides a very well organized conference and 100 attendees we also had around 500 online spectators who followe...
I changed my Twitter handle
For years I’ve been using @KvdM for most things, Twitter, Github, … Due to some 2 factor authentication problems and as Github wasn’t really providing the ne...
2017
I just bought several books about .NET Core via the MEAP program with a discount
Due to the Christmas season and companies know that people already bought a lot of stuff for their loved ones they sometimes lower prices. Manning also does ...
Specified argument was out of the range of valid values 0x800004005
A couple of weeks ago I was going through my preparations and demos about the Microsoft Bot Framework to talk at SharePoint Saturday in Lisbon. As I didn’t u...
How to make Microsoft Edge go full screen on Windows 10
Today I got a new laptop at my current client and unlike former PC’s it now comes with Windows 10 installed. Note that this is a large enterprise hence they’...
CloudBrew 2017 was a blast
On Saturday November 25th 2017 me and my buddies from azug organized our annual CloudBrew event at the Lamot venue in pictoresque Mechelen city. The weather ...
After a year of usage I still love my Surface Book
A year ago I was at the MVP summit gathering with a bunch of international people which I can call friends and likeminded people. Not only a great trip to fi...
I attended the uNite day at Ordina
Last Thursday I was invited to come to the free local conference uNite at Ordina. It was an interesting agenda (see below) and because I used to work there f...
Free Azure learning possibilities on Pluralsight
Cloud computing has been around for quite some years now and is gaining more and more traction. More and more enterprises are also jumping on the bandwagon a...
The recording of my presentation at Techdays NL 2017 is available
In October I gave a presentation about Visual Studio Code during Microsoft Tech Days NL 2017. Well, that session got recorded and is now available on Youtube...
Moving my blog to Jekyll
Since around 2006 I’ve been using dasBlog as my main engine to keep my posts up and running. Since then a lot has changed in the world and I noticed that it ...
I got renewed as an MVP
I’m happy and honored to announce I got awarded as an Azure MVP for the coming year.
Free Azure Training Courses
If you would like to keep up date with Microsoft Azure and can spare some hours watching videos this might be something for you:
Visual Studio 2017 launch poster
A couple of weeks Visual Studio 2017 was released to the public. If you want to see the announcements and keynotes be sure to navigate to https://channel9.ms...