HodentekHelp: Visual Studio 2015 Community Update 3

Sunday, August 28, 2016

How do you work with projects that use Entity Framework in Visual Studio

Installing Visual Studio 2015 Community Update 3 will not automatically provide you with templates that you can use for working with Entity Frame work. You need get the NuGet Package Manager to install the Entity Framework related package as shown here:

NuGet_00.png

If the link is not showing search for NuGet.

Click the link to install and from File you can launch the NuGet Package Manager Console as shown.

NuGet_01.png

Click Package Manager Console to open the pane for entering commands to NuGet Package Manager as shown. Here I tried the to install the Entity Framework Package.

The package is installed for a saved project. In order to install the package you need to create a solution and save it. After which you can install the Entity Framework package from NuGet Package Manager.

After installing we can see the various appropriate references added to the Windows Forms project I created.

With these references you can work with Entity Framework in Visual Studio 2015 Community Update 3. The same procedure can be used for Visual Studio 2013 Community as well.

Sunday, August 14, 2016

What is R Interactive and how do you load it?

R GUI is an interactive window from R Foundation.

When you install Visual Studio 2015 Community Update 3 or install Microsoft R Client you can bring up R Interactive within Visual Studio IDE. This is really very nice and you have the full access to intellisense that makes it very easy to use the interface. You would really appreciate if you had the experience of using the Open Source R.

Here are some screen shots of its usage in Visual Studio 2015 Community Update 3. You launch R Interactive from R Tools menu in Visual Studio 2015 Community Update 3.

This brings up the message that you have logged into your Microsoft Account.

If you are logged in you get to display the R Interactive pane as shown.

This looks similar to the one from Open Source, but wait. You can load the library RODBC straight away and you get the functions that you can use, thanks to intellisense.

Now I try to establish an ODBC connection to my SQL Server 2016, voila, again intellisense to the rescue. In Open Source you have to look up some documents to get these.