Competition Information
This is the second Microsoft Malware Hosted competition on Kaggle. For more detials, please see here.
The malware industry continues to be a well-organized, well-funded market dedicated to evading traditional security measures. Once a computer is infected by malware, criminals can hurt consumers and enterprises in many ways.With more than one billion enterprise and consumer customers, Microsoft takes this problem very seriously and is deeply invested in improving security. As one part of their overall strategy for doing so, Microsoft is challenging the data science community to develop techniques to predict if a machine will soon be hit with malware. As with their previous, Malware Challenge (2015), Microsoft is providing Kagglers with an unprecedented malware dataset to encourage open-source progress on effective techniques for predicting malware occurrences.

Several years ago when I was in college, I used Matlab to study Machine Learning. I just would like to pick up Deep Learning again to catch up the AI trend. The first step is to set up the tools and environment. In this post I will share how to set up my Deep Learning environment with Anaconda and Jupyter Notebook, and then install TensorFlow.

Since .NET Core and ASP.NET Core is open sourced, developers are able to step into the source code of the framework for different purposes.
As you may know, the source code of the dotnet runtime (CoreCLR), foundational libraries (CoreFX) and ASP.NET Core are hosted on GitHub. With all the source code available, is that possible to have a different debugging experience with the framework source code?

Microsoft released its serverless computing solution, Azure Functions, for easily running small pieces of business logic, or functions, in the cloud. By leveraging Azure Functions, developers are able to build HTTP-based API endpoints accessible by a wide range of applications while no need to care about the platform or server configurations. Later, Azure Bot Service got a new family member, Azure Function Bot, which is based on Azure Functions.
Prashant has published a blog post about how to create Function Bot with C#. But it seems that there is still some tricks to build and deploy your Function Bot with Node.JS.

.NET Core is designed to be cross-platform, modular and optimized for cloud. What if there is a exception or a memory issue of a .NET Core application on Linux platform? On Windows, we have a set of tools to do different analysis. For example, I can take a process dump by ProcDump and feed it to WinDBG for exception or memory analysis.
Actually, we can do similar things on Linux for .NET Core application now.

A common scenario in BOT world is you want to notify something or send some message to a backend agent proactively. The official domo of Microsoft Bot demonstrate how to achieve that. But the conversation is initiated by the user, not start from the Bot.
Skype for Business team published a document about SfB channel and Bot Framework. In this doc, they mentioned how to create outbound bots using C# Bot Builder SDK. However, the sample code is incomplete and doesn’t tell us how to send a message to the conversation.

理解区块链和比特币（一）尽量简单地介绍了比特币网络的设计和运行流程，具体的一些细节并未并未做过多的纠缠。此外，比特币现在这种独特的设计虽然解决了问题，但是依然有一些不足。比特币之后又有许多基于区块链技术的数字货币和交易系统诞生，随之也诞生了非常多的“玩法”。这篇文章再讨论一下比特币网络的一些技术细节和发展。

区块链是相当热门的一项技术创新。媒体，投资人和庄家把这项技术推到了一个极高的位置。区块链被认为在金融、征信、贸易、资产管理等众多领域都拥有广泛的应用前景。
区块链到底是什么，能解决什么样问题？如何从技术实现的角度去理解区块链？

Windows built-in DLLs exposes a lot of APIs for many low-level functionalities. It is quite useful to call native Windows API in PowerShell to accomplish specific tasks which are not being wrapped in any tools to commands. For example, if you want to set a system parameter of Windows, you will find that there is no commands or cmdlet to do that. But SystemParametersInfo function in user32.dll could help you. But writing a native Win32 application to just call this API for a specific task is too heavy. In PowerShell, everything become easy.

In this blog, I will document how to solve a typical scenario of IE 11 install/upgrade failure.