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What is Microsoft.Extensions.AI Library and Will It Replace Semantic Kernel?

Microsoft has published new AI library (well, technically it is just LLM library, but nowadays AI = LLM) in preview. This library is called Microsoft.Extensions.AI. With this library, developers can abstract away what LLM service (like OpenAI) they are using and easily leverage basic chat functionality from LLM. Sounds a lot like Semantic Kernel, doesn’t it? So what is the difference and when you should use this library over Semantic Kernel? Is Semantic Kernel now obsolete? Let’s find out answers… Read More »What is Microsoft.Extensions.AI Library and Will It Replace Semantic Kernel?

Reflections on 2024: A Year of Growth and Success?

Year 2024 has come to an end. In general 2024 was a hard year for lots of people. Macro economy wasn’t that good here in Finland, lots of my friends were having troubles or disturbs in their personal life and in general the mood wasn’t that good. The on-going war in Ukraine and uncertainty in the geopolitical atmosphere is taking the toll on many of us. It is just one …

DP-600: Microsoft Certified Fabric Analytics Engineer Associate

During early December, Microsoft held a Fabric certification challenge, which required participants to:

  1. Join the Fabric Community.
  2. Complete all modules in the Microsoft Learn Challenge | Ignite Edition: Fabric Challenge.
  3. Not already hold the Microsoft Certified: Fabric Analytics Engineer Associate (DP-600) certification.
  4. Be confident that they could take and pass the DP-600 exam by December 31, 2024.

By completing these requirements, Microsoft would provide a free voucher for the DP-600 …

Improve Pull Requests with Pull Request Templates

Memory. The mortal enemy of all software developers. We don’t like things that require remembering or using our memory. We prefer to automate, eliminate duplication, and avoid functions that require us to trust other people.

Creating a new pull request is a showcase of our own work. In a pull request, we expose our hidden work to the rest of the team, and they will spend their time judging it. …

How to Securely Handle Secrets with Azure Key Vault in Microsoft Fabric Notebooks

Proper secret management is one of the security fundamentals in software development. You should never hardcode credentials, secrets or tokens into your Spark Notebooks, because it creates a security vulnerability and adds extra complexity. Hardcoding secrets into Notebooks means that if you need to update any of the secrets you have to go through all the notebooks.

Azure Key Vault is a centralized secret management system, which helps you to …

Access Real-Time Data from LLM using Semantic Kernel

LLMs have been around for years now, and we have been using them for data that doesn’t change frequently. We don’t ask them for current data, like today’s weather or the balance in our bank account. Instead, we ask evergreen questions, such as who the members of the band ABBA are or whether we can eat ice cream in space (the answer is yes!).

However, since GPT-4, we have gained …

AI Toolkit for Visual Studio Code

AI Toolkit for Visual Studio Code is a “relatively” new toolset, that was previously known as Windows AI Studio. Toolkit is an extension, that allows developers to run SLMs (Small Language Models) on their local machine, or use Azure AI Studio LLM models from cloud. As you can easily use the Azure AI Studio models without any extensions like this, I find the local models more interesting …

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Force Azure OpenAI to response with JSON data

Aug 7, 2024 Microsoft announced, that they are now supporting JSON mode Azure OpenAI. This mode forces OpenAI to response only with JSON data. You could kind of do the same thing earlier, but the OpenAI response didn’t always contain only valid JSON. There could be some additional text before and after the JSON data. However now you can force the OpenAI to stay strictly in JSON format.

Supported

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DevOps: Leverage AI to Diagnose and Resolve CI/CD Pipeline Errors

CI/CD pipelines are a critical part of modern software development, but diagnosing errors when they arise can be difficult and time-consuming. In this post, we’ll look at how to use Azure OpenAI to help explain and troubleshoot common CI/CD errors. By applying AI to understand error messages and identify root causes, you can make it easier to debug errors.

Prerequisites

Before we start, we need to setup few things into …

Microsoft .NET MVP

1.8.2024 I received a message from Microsoft and after reading the first few lines I was absolutely stunned.

Of course, this wasn’t a complete surprise to me, because I had earlier filled out the application for MVP, but still, I wasn’t quite sure if I was going to be accepted or not into the program as it took some time to get validated. Well, I’m glad it turned out this …