Table of contents for Mar/Apr 2025 in CODE Magazine

When this application (The Truck) was built, its sole purpose was to maintain a client-facing portal. This included building mundane features like user and group management, menu management, entitlements, and some other minor features. The client-facing portal eventually went away, but the admin portal stayed. It was extended to manage data warehouses, data flow processes, logging, monitoring, and some reporting. This acorn of a software project became a full featured oak tree of an application. Here's a fact: You will spend more time in maintenance than in development. When I was new to this business, it was drilled into me that the real cost of software was in the maintenance, not the initial construction. There are some studies that attempt to quantify the cost of maintenance vs. development. The article:…

On January 5, 2021, OpenAI revealed DALL-E. Frankly, it blew everyone's minds. DALL-E was a modified version of GPT-3. GPT, as you might know, is a large language model (LLM), and it generates text. But DALL-E took an input prompt and generated an image out of it. No, not searched for images across the internet, but generated a brand-new image on the fly. The demand was great—everyone had to try it. There was a wait list. It took a while to generate an image and the images weren't that great, to be honest. Fast-forward barely three years later, and you have many such text-to-image models. DALL-E has undergone a few versions already. And now there's Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, Artbreeder, Deep Dream Generator, Prisma, Craiyon, starryAI, and many more. The images…

kevin@oakleafdigitalsoft-ware.com www.oakleafdigitalsoft-ware.com/blog @twitter.com/kjmcneish Kevin McNeish is author of “Coding iOS Apps with ChatGPT” and numerous other books and articles. A seven-time Microsoft MVP awardee, Kevin is an accomplished international conference speaker and President of Oak Leaf Digital, a software company specializing in innovative solutions. Kevin also teaches in-person seminars, empowering developers to maximize the potential of ChatGPT in their work. If you haven't tried AI-assisted programming yet, now is a great time to dive in. Tools such as ChatGPT have come a long way from their inception. You'll be amazed at how much more productive you'll be and wonder how you ever managed without them. In this article, I explore practical applications of ChatGPT for iOS app development, debunk common myths, and showcase its potential and pitfalls as a coding…

In recent years, AI has been revolutionizing the way we code. One of the most exciting developments in this field is GitHub Copilot, an AI-powered code assistant developed by GitHub in collaboration with OpenAI. It leverages machine learning models trained on billions of lines of public code, allowing it to understand context and provide relevant suggestions. Whether you're writing a new function or fixing a bug, Copilot is there to help streamline your coding process. Let's dive into the basics of using GitHub Copilot in Visual Studio Code (VS Code) to supercharge your development workflow. John, a principal developer at CODE Staffing, is a technical leader known for innovative solutions to tough business problems and is a persuasive communicator who can articulate technical solutions to stakeholders. He's a hands-on technical…

In this article series, you've created several .NET MAUI pages, created a top-level menu system, and programmatically navigated between pages. Using data binding greatly reduces the amount of code you need to write. Using the MVVM and DI design patterns helps you create applications that are reusable, maintainable, and testable. In this article, you'll display lists of data and navigate from a list item to the detail page for that item. NET MAUI provides ListView, CollectionView, and CarouselView controls for displaying lists. Each list control is illustrated, and you're provided with guidance on what each control is best at displaying. Paul has been working in the IT industry since 1985. In that time, he has successfully assisted hundreds of companies' architect software applications to solve their toughest business problems. Paul…

CODE Staffing is a high-tech, career development, and - for the lack of a better term “staffing company,” that provides a modern workplace with the number one goal being the development of talent and careers. CODE Staffing was started to disrupt the traditional staffing industry. We provide an environment that attracts top talent. We offer unrivaled benefits and a cool workplace culture with unlimited upward career development opportunities. Many companies think they cannot provide a work environment that rivals the “cool Silicon Valley startups,” and many employees think they won't be able to find such a workplace outside “The Valley.” We have changed that equation! Our Mission CODE Staffing delivers unparalleled contingent technical staffing solutions to our clients. We empower their businesses with the talent and expertise they need to…

Blazor is a modern web framework from Microsoft that was included in .NET 5. It's used for building interactive web applications using C# and .NET and it's based on a flexible, modular component model that's well-suited for building applications with rich, interactive web user interfaces. It should be noted that you can still use JavaScript if you'd like to, i.e., you can invoke your JavaScript functions from C# and vice versa. This article will take a deep dive into Blazor and its components, and then demonstrate how to build modern web applications using it. It will also discuss the performance and security considerations, deployment using Docker and Kubernetes, and the best practices. If you're to work with the code examples discussed in this article, you need the following installed in…

Gaurav Mittal is an accomplished author and international speaker, recognized for his published articles. He has spoken at global conferences and served on several judging panels. In addition to his professional achievements, Gaurav actively contributes to non-profit organizations through volunteer work. Outside of work, he enjoys spending time with his children and playing sports. Managing different feature types effectively is essential to ensure that the final model can leverage the unique information each type provides. In this article, I'll demonstrate how to address such scenarios, sharing my experience working with a dataset that included categorical, numerical, and unstructured text columns after feature selection, and explaining the preprocessing steps used to ready the data for model training. Data Preparation To prepare your data for machine learning, particularly when working with a…