Building Bots with Microsoft Bot Framework. Creating intelligent conversational interfaces

Kishore Gaddam

Bots help users to use the language as a UI and interact with the applications from any platform. This book teaches you how to develop real-world bots using Microsoft Bot Framework.The book starts with setting up the Microsoft Bot Framework development environment and emulator, and moves on to building the first bot using Connector and Builder SDK. Explore how to register, connect, test, and publish your bot to the Slack, Skype, and Facebook Messenger platforms. Throughout this book, you will build different types of bots from simple to complex, such as a weather bot, a natural speech and intent processing bot, an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) bot for a bank, a facial expression recognition bot, and more from scratch. These bots were designed and developed to teach you concepts such as text detection, implementing LUIS dialogs, Cortana Intelligence Services, third-party authentication, Rich Text format, Bot State Service, and microServices so you can practice working with the standard development tools such as Visual Studio, Bot Emulator, and Azure.

Building CLI Applications with C# and .NET. A step-by-step guide to developing cross-platform CLI apps—from coding and testing to deployment

Tidjani Belmansour, Damian Brady

Developers and system administrators often face challenges like inefficient workflows, complex system operations, and the growing demand for robust automation tools. CLI applications provide a powerful solution by enhancing flexibility, efficiency, and productivity in various environments. This book will guide you through mastering the development of robust command-line tools using .NET.Written by a Microsoft Azure MVP, the book’s hands-on approach ensures practical experience with real-world projects. You’ll start with an overview of foundational principles, essential concepts, and best practices for CLI application development. From there, you’ll advance to creating interactive interfaces, integrating with external APIs and services, and implementing security measures to safeguard your applications. Each chapter will build progressively from basic to advanced topics.Beyond development, you’ll learn how to enhance application quality through testing, package for efficient distribution, and deploy effectively. The book also teaches strategies to optimize performance to ensure your applications run efficiently under heavy usage.By the end of this book, you’ll have gained a deep understanding of CLI application development with .NET to build modular, extensible, and easy-to-maintain applications.

Building Clouds with Windows Azure Pack. Click here to enter text

Amit Malik

Windows Azure Pack is an on-premises cloud solution by Microsoft, which can be leveraged by Organizations and Services providers for building an enterprise class cloud solution. WAP provides consistent experience to Microsoft Azure, along with capabilities such as multi-tenancy, high density, self-service, automated. WAP can be leveraged to provide both IaaS & PaaS Offerings to internal and external customers. In this book, we will learn about planning and deployment of Cloud Fabric for Windows Azure Pack, Azure Pack components, VM Clouds and IaaS offerings, PaaS Offering including WebSites & Service Bus, DBaaS offerings, Automation with SMA, and extending capabilities with third party products integration and tenant experience for all services.

Building Computer Vision Projects with OpenCV 4 and C++. Implement complex computer vision algorithms and explore deep learning and face detection

David Millán Escrivá, Prateek Joshi, Vinícius G. Mendonça, Roy Shilkrot

OpenCV is one of the best open source libraries available and can help you focus on constructing complete projects on image processing, motion detection, and image segmentation.This Learning Path is your guide to understanding OpenCV concepts and algorithms through real-world examples and activities. Through various projects, you'll also discover how to use complex computer vision and machine learning algorithms and face detection to extract the maximum amount of information from images and videos. In later chapters, you'll learn to enhance your videos and images with optical flow analysis and background subtraction. Sections in the Learning Path will help you get to grips with text segmentation and recognition, in addition to guiding you through the basics of the new and improved deep learning modules. By the end of this Learning Path, you will have mastered commonly used computer vision techniques to build OpenCV projects from scratch. This Learning Path includes content from the following Packt books:•Mastering OpenCV 4 - Third Edition by Roy Shilkrot and David Millán Escrivá•Learn OpenCV 4 By Building Projects - Second Edition by David Millán Escrivá, Vinícius G. Mendonça, and Prateek Joshi

Building Data Science Applications with FastAPI. Develop, manage, and deploy efficient machine learning applications with Python

FastAPI is a web framework for building APIs with Python 3.6 and its later versions based on standard Python-type hints. With this book, you’ll be able to create fast and reliable data science API backends using practical examples.This book starts with the basics of the FastAPI framework and associated modern Python programming language concepts. You'll be taken through all the aspects of the framework, including its powerful dependency injection system and how you can use it to communicate with databases, implement authentication and integrate machine learning models. Later, you’ll cover best practices relating to testing and deployment to run a high-quality and robust application. You’ll also be introduced to the extensive ecosystem of Python data science packages. As you progress, you’ll learn how to build data science applications in Python using FastAPI. The book also demonstrates how to develop fast and efficient machine learning prediction backends and test them to achieve the best performance. Finally, you’ll see how to implement a real-time face detection system using WebSockets and a web browser as a client.By the end of this FastAPI book, you’ll have not only learned how to implement Python in data science projects but also how to maintain and design them to meet high programming standards with the help of FastAPI.

Building Data Streaming Applications with Apache Kafka. Design, develop and streamline applications using Apache Kafka, Storm, Heron and Spark

Chanchal Singh, Manish Kumar

Apache Kafka is a popular distributed streaming platform that acts as a messaging queue or an enterprise messaging system. It lets you publish and subscribe to a stream of records, and process them in a fault-tolerant way as they occur.This book is a comprehensive guide to designing and architecting enterprise-grade streaming applications using Apache Kafka and other big data tools. It includes best practices for building such applications, and tackles some common challenges such as how to use Kafka efficiently and handle high data volumes with ease. This book first takes you through understanding the type messaging system and then provides a thorough introduction to Apache Kafka and its internal details. The second part of the book takes you through designing streaming application using various frameworks and tools such as Apache Spark, Apache Storm, and more. Once you grasp the basics, we will take you through more advanced concepts in Apache Kafka such as capacity planning and security.By the end of this book, you will have all the information you need to be comfortable with using Apache Kafka, and to design efficient streaming data applications with it.

Building Data-Driven Applications with LlamaIndex. A practical guide to retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to enhance LLM applications

Andrei Gheorghiu

Discover the immense potential of Generative AI and Large Language Models (LLMs) with this comprehensive guide. Learn to overcome LLM limitations, such as contextual memory constraints, prompt size issues, real-time data gaps, and occasional ‘hallucinations’. Follow practical examples to personalize and launch your LlamaIndex projects, mastering skills in ingesting, indexing, querying, and connecting dynamic knowledge bases. From fundamental LLM concepts to LlamaIndex deployment and customization, this book provides a holistic grasp of LlamaIndex's capabilities and applications. By the end, you'll be able to resolve LLM challenges and build interactive AI-driven applications using best practices in prompt engineering and troubleshooting Generative AI projects.

Building ERP Solutions with Microsoft Dynamics NAV. Solve business scenarios using NAV

Stefano Demiliani

Implementing Microsoft Dynamics NAV in the real world often requires you to integrate the ERP with external applications or solve complex architectural tasks in order to have a final successful project. This book will show you how to extend a Microsoft Dynamics NAV installation to the enterprise world in a practical way.The book starts with an introduction to Microsoft Dynamics NAV architecture and then moves on to advanced topics related to implementing real-world solutions based on NAV and external applications. You will learn how an enterprise distributed architecture with NAV at the core can be implemented. Through a series of real-world cases on every topic and every industry (sales, retail, manufacturing, distribution, healthcare, and so on), you’ll see step by step how to efficiently solve a technical problem. These common problems encountered in a NAV implementation will be solved using the entire technology stack that Microsoft offers.By the end of the book, you will have the knowledge to efficiently solve certain scenarios, you will know which is the best solution architecture to propose to a customer and how to implement it.