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Nowadays, where almost everything is turning to online and virtual modes, a very common problem any organization is facing is the processing of receipts that were scanned and submitted electronically for reimbursement purposes.  Now for any claim or reimbursements to get clear, first those must reach to proper accounts department based on the organization and the sector, and one way to perform this activity is by manual intervention. A person or a team must go through all those digitally scanned receipts manually and filter them based on the departments or any other validation and eligibility criteria they may have. The situation becomes more tragic when the volume of such scanned receipts is too high. So, get rid of this manual effort, a lot many organizations have already opted for a solution that is AI-based, and lot many are in a process of doing so. Definitely, one can go for OCR, which is short for  O ptical  C haracter  R ecognization technologies to extract data but here the pr

In this article, we will learn about how we can read or extract text from an image, irrespective of whether it is handwritten or printed. In order to read the text, two things come into the picture. The first one is  Computer Vision  and the second one is  NLP , which is short for Natural Language Processing. Computer vision helps us to read the text and then NLP is used to make sense of that identified text. In this article, I’ll mention specifically about text extraction part. How Computer Vision Performs Text Extraction To execute this text extraction task, Computer Vision provides us with two APIs: OCR API Read API OCR API,  works with many languages and is very well suited for relatively small text but if you have so much text in any image or say text-dominated image, then  Read API  is your option. OCR API  provides information in the form of Regions, Lines, and Words. The region in the given image is the area that contains the text. So, the output hierarchy would

When we are talking about a term environment along with Python, it is a context in which our Python application runs, or we can say that the Python program runs.   An environment consists of an interpreter and all the installed packages, which clearly means that one can have multiple environments on a single machine, or rather I would say, every Python application can have its own environment. Now the question is, why do we need such environments?   To know more about the virtual environment and how to create one using Visual Studio Code, watch out my recorded video on my YouTube channel named Shweta Lodha.

Azure Web PubSub service, as its name says, it is based on publish-subscribe pattern and enables us to build real-time web applications.  Some of the popular examples where we can use this service is, for any chat-based applications, any collaboration application, like white boarding application. We can also use this service for any application which needs instant push notifications. In fact, there are many more example, we can think about.  The best part is, we can use Azure Web PubSub service on all the platforms which supports WebSocket APIs and it allows up to 100 thousand concurrent connections at any point of time. Components required to create a basic chat application: Instance of Azure Web PubSub Service Publisher application Subscriber application To know about how to create and use these components, I’ve created a complete video demonstrating these on my YouTube channel named Shweta Lodha. C# Code for Publisher and Subscriber: Below is the C# code for the respective

For any web application to work there has to be an associated end point, which means whenever users sends a request, endpoint is the first thing which gets hit. If I say in simple term, endpoint is an internet facing service which could be hosted either in Microsoft Azure or outside of Azure. What is Azure Traffic Manager Now what is  Traffic Manager ? As it’s name suggests, it manages the traffic. It distributes the traffic across various Azure regions along with health monitoring capabilities. So, if you are planning for a multi-region support with high availability, it could be a perfect service for you.   Now, you must be thinking, what is the core which is making this happen? Actually it uses the DNS to route traffic to endpoints based on the selected Traffic Manger profile  and the configured routing mechanisms. I’ll shortly mention about what all routing methods are available but before that let’s take a quick look at some of the major benefits which we can achieve using Traff

By default, Visual Studio doesn’t enable preview feature selection in Visual Studio 2019 . Say you have .Net 5.0 installed on your machine and you are creating a new Console Application.   After creating the application, you will notice that, although .Net 5.0 is installed, application still picks up the .Net Core 3.1 as a default framework. In fact, application didn’t ask for framework selection too. So, how can we select the framework while creating an application itself. For doing this, we need to enable Preview Features in Visual Studio by going to Options menu as shown below:

In this article, we will learn how to get notification whenever something is changed in Azure Storage . Let’s say, we want our application to get notified whenever any new file is uploaded to the blob or say any file is deleted from the blob. How can we do that? Before directly jumping into the solution, let’s have all the major pieces listed here which will contribute towards this. Azure Storage: We need an Azure storage wherein we will be uploading our blog objects, i.e. image files. Azure Event Grid: Next we need is Azure Event Grid. It is a routing service provided by Microsoft and the best part about this service is, it has built-in support for events coming from storage blobs and resource groups. So, we need to create a subscription which will tell what event and which specific topic we are interested in. Endpoint: Lastly, we need an endpoint, which will receive notifications. So, it could be Function App, Logic App, or any custom application which is hosted somewhere a

Nowadays, there are many applications which are utilizing Azure Blob Storage for reading and writing objects. Looking at that, it’s quite common that these objects may get deleted accidentally due to user’s negligence or application's behavior.  So, my today’s writeup is around this topic wherein we will see, how can we bring back our deleted blob objects back to life. Lifecycle of blob storage is managed by a very well-known concept called Versioning . Versioning deals with the state - when any object was created, when was it modified or when was it deleted. If this topic impresses you, you can read complete blog post at C# Corner website or you can view it on my YouTube channel named Shweta Lodha.

As part of Sip and Learn series, this time I covered a very interesting topic – App registration for Microsoft Graph API in AAD. Here you will get to know how to do application registration using Azure portal and what all permissions need to be given to call particular type of API. If this topic is of use to you, do view this episode on my YouTube channel named Shweta Lodha.

I have added another episode to my technical series on my YouTube channel named Shweta Lodha . It covers the topic, how one can play with Postman for Microsoft Graph API. I also mentioned about how one can generate bearer token and what all header fields are necessary to make an API call. You can watch complete episode over there.

Last week, I started my technical series on my YouTube channel named 'Shweta Lodha' with the name Sip and Learn. As part of this series, I'm planning to share some of the interesting short technical tips and concepts which are very easy to grab in just few minutes. Here, I speak about Top Level Statements feature of C# 9.0 as part of my first episode. You can go through this session on my channel.