Let’s dig into how we can use Machine Learning to do some college basketball predication. In the last post we discussed how to scrap the data into a SQL database. Now let’s open up that dataset and do some analytics. I will be using Microsoft’s Azure machine learning to process the data but feel free to use any tool you would like. Hopefully, I’ll give you a few ideas on how to get started and show you what worked for me and what didn’t.

Well the NCAA Tournament is now over and for most of us (me included) it could have gone a bit better. Want to step it up next year? This is part 1 of a two-part post on how to apply machine learning to NCAA game data. In this post I will walk through a short library I built for scraping stats into a SQL database. There should be enough information in the GitHub readme to get the project running but if you want to better understand what data you get and how it works, read on!

The standard template for database first entity framework builds out three types of files for use in your project. One of the scripted files, *.Context.cs, includes the basic methods you need to interact with the database. This is great for simple applications but if you intend to have a large audience use the application and would like to improve the testability of the application, it helps to make this context injectable. With this approach you can inject a context into your repositories and control the lifespan of the context to per request. This helps with security as well as improves the readability of your code.

Kendo UI templates and MVVM data-binding tooling enable a developer to build very modern and maintainable projects. Kendo UI is mostly known for their intuitive and customizable widget library. However, using these widgets should not come at the expense of more modern code management techniques such as MVVM data-binding and templates. Let’s take a look at some example projects and play around with creating templates and then binding to a view model.

Azure mobile services provides a significant number of helpful tools for fast development and easy deployment. Excellent tooling is provided such as authentication, cross platform push notifications, and quick database development. However, all this framework can lead to confusion around performing more advanced concepts. In a series of posts I hope to cover some of my findings starting with managing complex database relationships.

I recently ran into a situation where I had multiple AJAX calls completing and needed to perform some logic when they ALL finish. I can never seem to remember how to do this when I need it so, here’s a blog post, even if just for my benefit.