Hands-On Visual Studio 2022. A developer's guide to new features and best practices with .NET 8 and VS 2022 for maximum productivity - Second Edition

Hector Uriel Perez Rojas, Miguel Angel Teheran Garcia

Visual Studio 2022 is widely recognized as the best IDE for application development across various domains. This book is a comprehensive guide for both beginners and experienced .NET developers who wish to familiarize themselves with its basic, advanced, and new features.This book is divided into three sections: the first is an overview of Visual Studio, the second part explores tools for productivity within the IDE, and the third delves into integration with GitHub and Visual Studio extensions.In this second edition, we’ve also expanded the chapters on the use of Visual Studio to environments beyond web development, such as Azure, Desktop, .NET MAUI, and others. Updates to the IDE introduced since the release year of the first edition of the book in 2022 have also been included, such as the use of GPT-based extensions like GitHub Copilot and GitHub Copilot Chat, as well as profiling tools.The book reviews breakpoint groups, a new way to configure breakpoints, as well as tools for web development, such as Browser Link, Dev Tunnels, and Web API Endpoints Explorer. For more advanced developers, the book addresses the topic of developing extensions through the use of the new Visual Studio SDK. By the end of this book, you’ll have a better understanding of Visual Studio 2022 and how to use it to its fullest potential.

Hands-On Unity 2020 Game Development. Build, customize, and optimize professional games using Unity 2020 and C#

Nicolas Alejandro Borromeo

Over the years, the Unity game engine has extended its scope from just being about creating video games to building AR/VR experiences, complex simulations, real-time realistic rendering, films, and serious games for training and education. Its features for implementing gameplay, graphics, and customization using C# programming make Unity a comprehensive platform for developing professional-level, rich experiences.With this book, you'll be able to build impressive Unity projects in a step-by-step manner and apply your knowledge of Unity concepts to create a real-world game. Complete with hands-on tutorials and projects, this easy-to-follow guide will show you how to develop your first complete game using a variety of Unity tools. As you make progress, you'll learn how to make the most of the Unity Editor and create scripts using the C# programming language. This Unity game development book will then take you through integrating graphics, sound, and animations and manipulating physics to create impressive mechanics for your games. You'll also learn how to code a simple AI agent to challenge the user and use profiling tools to ensure that the code runs in a performant way. Finally, you'll get to grips with Unity's AR Foundation for creating AR experiences for 3D apps and games.By the end of this book, you'll have developed a complete game and will have built a solid foundation using Unity's tooling ecosystem to develop game projects of any scale.

Procedural Content Generation for C++ Game Development. Get to know techniques and approaches to procedurally generate game content in C++ using Simple and Fast Multimedia Library

Dale Green

Procedural generation is a growing trend in game development. It allows developers to create games that are bigger and more dynamic, giving the games a higher level of replayability. Procedural generation isn’t just one technique, it’s a collection of techniques and approaches that are used together to create dynamic systems and objects. C++ is the industry-standard programming language to write computer games. It’s at the heart of most engines, and is incredibly powerful. SFML is an easy-to-use, cross-platform, and open-source multimedia library. Access to computer hardware is broken into succinct modules, making it a great choice if you want to develop cross-platform games with ease.Using C++ and SFML technologies, this book will guide you through the techniques and approaches used to generate content procedurally within game development. Throughout the course of this book, we’ll look at examples of these technologies, starting with setting up a roguelike project using the C++ template. We’ll then move on to using RNG with C++ data types and randomly scattering objects within a game map. We will create simple console examples to implement in a real game by creating unique and randomised game items, dynamic sprites, and effects, and procedurally generating game events. Then we will walk you through generating random game maps. At the end, we will have a retrospective look at the project. By the end of the book, not only will you have a solid understanding of procedural generation, but you’ll also have a working roguelike game that you will have extended using the examples provided.

TensorFlow 2 Reinforcement Learning Cookbook. Over 50 recipes to help you build, train, and deploy learning agents for real-world applications

Palanisamy P

With deep reinforcement learning, you can build intelligent agents, products, and services that can go beyond computer vision or perception to perform actions. TensorFlow 2.x is the latest major release of the most popular deep learning framework used to develop and train deep neural networks (DNNs). This book contains easy-to-follow recipes for leveraging TensorFlow 2.x to develop artificial intelligence applications.Starting with an introduction to the fundamentals of deep reinforcement learning and TensorFlow 2.x, the book covers OpenAI Gym, model-based RL, model-free RL, and how to develop basic agents. You'll discover how to implement advanced deep reinforcement learning algorithms such as actor-critic, deep deterministic policy gradients, deep-Q networks, proximal policy optimization, and deep recurrent Q-networks for training your RL agents. As you advance, you’ll explore the applications of reinforcement learning by building cryptocurrency trading agents, stock/share trading agents, and intelligent agents for automating task completion. Finally, you'll find out how to deploy deep reinforcement learning agents to the cloud and build cross-platform apps using TensorFlow 2.x.By the end of this TensorFlow book, you'll have gained a solid understanding of deep reinforcement learning algorithms and their implementations from scratch.

Implementing Azure DevOps Solutions. Learn about Azure DevOps Services to successfully apply DevOps strategies

Henry Been, Maik van der Gaag

Implementing Azure DevOps Solutions helps DevOps engineers and administrators to leverage Azure DevOps Services to master practices such as continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD), containerization, and zero downtime deployments.This book starts with the basics of continuous integration, continuous delivery, and automated deployments. You will then learn how to apply configuration management and Infrastructure as Code (IaC) along with managing databases in DevOps scenarios. Next, you will delve into fitting security and compliance with DevOps. As you advance, you will explore how to instrument applications, and gather metrics to understand application usage and user behavior. The latter part of this book will help you implement a container build strategy and manage Azure Kubernetes Services. Lastly, you will understand how to create your own Azure DevOps organization, along with covering quick tips and tricks to confidently apply effective DevOps practices.By the end of this book, you’ll have gained the knowledge you need to ensure seamless application deployments and business continuity.

JMeter Cookbook. 70 insightful and practical recipes to help you successfully use Apache JMeter

Bayo Erinle

Democratizing RPA with Power Automate Desktop. Boost your productivity by implementing best practices for automating repetitive desktop processes

Peter Krause

Whether you want to organize simple files or perform more complex consolidations between different Office programs and remote-control applications that don't allow outside access, Power Automate Desktop helps meet these challenges. This book shows you how to leverage this workflow automation platform by explaining the underlying RPA concepts in a step-by-step way.You’ll start with simple flows that can be easily recorded and further processed using the built-in recorder. Later, you’ll learn how to use the more advanced actions to automate folder and file management and enable Office programs to interact with each other. You’ll also get to grips with integrating desktop flows into other cloud environments and further enhance their value using AI. As you progress, you’ll understand how flows can run unattended and how they are managed in the Power Platform, as well as key concepts such as creating, modifying, debugging, and error-handling UI flows. Finally, the book will guide you to use Process Automation Designer (PAD) in conjunction with your frequently used desktop systems to automate routine tasks.By the end of this book, you’ll have become a Power Automate Desktop expert, automating both professional and personal tasks.

Mastering jBPM6. Design, build, and deploy business process-centric applications using the cutting-edge jBPM technology stack

Simone Fiorini, Arun V Gopalakrishnan