Jason Haley

Ramblings from an Independent Consultant

PC Build 2025

On July 3, I was greeted by the following image - reminding me I needed to get new hardware … by October 14, 2025. Of course it wasn’t a surprise, I knew I needed to replace it for the past year or so but it seems there is never a good time to configure a brand new desktop. Until this month when my project work happened to end mid-month - giving me a couple of weeks between projects … so last week I ordered the parts. NOTE: Why build a PC and not just buy one? Personal preference - I honestly haven’t even looked at Dell or any other prebuilt PCs this time around, I just like the idea of knowing how the thing is put together and configured (even though I have a history of having to assemble things twice before getting it right). About the retiring PC (2014 PC) I …

Posted by Jason on Thursday, July 31, 2025

Virtual Boston Azure AI - Microsoft Build Recap

Last night Bill, Udai, Veronika and I gave our top picks from Microsoft Build at the Virtual Boston Azure AI meetup. In order to not overlap topics, we each picked areas to cover - mine was Copilot and Copilot Studio. My picks: Copilot Wave 2 Spring release features – this was announced in April but still hasn’t landed for us. You’ll know when this lands due to the look of Copilot changing. The navigation will be on the left side of the screen with the new release (instead of the right where it is now). Publish custom agents to SharePoint sites – This adds SharePoint as a channel to push a Copilot Studio agent to. Additional maker controls for knowledge (Copilot Studio) – This is several things together: Ability to upload related files into a file collection Ability to change settings on …

Posted by Jason on Thursday, May 29, 2025

Updated Semantic Kernel Blogs and Github Repo

This weekend I upgraded the semantic-kernel-getting-started repository to the latest code. It was mostly to move to .NET 9 (I’d forgotten it was still all .NET 8) and the latest version of the Semantic Kernel libraries. However there were a few things that needed changed: Planners Were Deprecated The Planners were deprecated last year (more information here: Semantic Kernel: Package previews, Graduations & Deprecations). This means the blog posts Semantic Kernel Hello World Planners Part 1 and Semantic Kernel Hello World Planners Part 2 are not longer relevant. I’ve updated those blog posts indicating the deprecation and have removed the code projects from the solution in Github (the code is still there but not loaded with the solution). Bing Search APIs Deprecated The Bing …

Posted by Jason on Monday, May 26, 2025

Microsoft Build 2025: Azure AI Search

Microsoft Build 2025: Azure AI Search If you use Azure AI Search for your RAG applications, you are going to be excited about the new features that were just announced at Microsoft Build 2025. If you want a video that provides a good overview, I’d recommend watching Pablo Castro’s talk Knowledge Retrieval: RAG for enterprise agents with Azure AI Search, he did a great job highlighting most of the new features. Agentic Retrieval (new feature) From the documentation site: “… agentic retrieval is a new parallel query processing architecture that incorporates user conversation history and Azure OpenAI models to plan, retrieve and synthesize queries for improved results. It produces high-quality grounding data for custom chat and generative AI solutions that include agents.” This …

Posted by Jason on Tuesday, May 20, 2025

Custom AI Search Skill to Convert Markdown Tables to JSON

Custom Azure AI Search Skill to Convert Markdown Tables to JSON I was recently asked what options there are for handling large tables in PDFs, when ingesting files for a RAG application. The question was concerning a retrieval system that was having a problem identifying relevant data in some tables. The problem seemed to be due to the headings not being in the same chunk as the data - so the data doesn’t have any context to indicate its meaning. This blog by Lu Zhang (Microsoft) - A Heuristic Method of Merging Cross-Page Tables based on Document Intelligence Layout Model describes how to identify and merge tables using the Azure AI Document Intelligence Layout Model, she also provides working code to do it on GitHub. She goes over how to get the tables, locate them and figure out …

Posted by Jason on Sunday, May 18, 2025

My Session at Boston Global AI Bootcamp

Yesterday was Boston Azure AI’s Edition of the Global AI Bootcamp at the NERD in Cambridge. We had a lot of interest in the event - 85 people on the RSVP list and almost that on the waitlist. Since the space we had couldn’t handle any more people, unfortunately we couldn’t let more people in. However since there was such good interest in a Saturday AI oriented bootcamp, we are working on planning another one soon - so if you happen to be one of those people that couldn’t attend - stay tuned! This year we only had one challenge with the facilities … lack of power strips. Thanks to Rich Crane and Mill 5 for getting a bunch of power strips at the last minute for us! Also a big thanks to Daymark for providing the breakfast and lunch - they were really good and …

Posted by Jason on Sunday, March 23, 2025

2025 NYC AI Tour

In January, I volunteered at that New York City AI Tour Event and got to attend a few sessions in the afternoon. I spent the morning at the OpenAI booth answering general questions about Azure OpenAI. It was fun to hear what sort of projects people have and how they are using AI in general. I’d forgotten how sore you legs can get from just standing on a cement floor all day … and was reminded to wear sneakers to my next conference - NOT my normal leather boots. Over all the event was really well run and it was huge compared to the Boston version I attended late last year. If you are interested next year, I would definitely recommend signing up for the event as soon as it is announced - because it does fill up. If you have a comment, please message me @haleyjason on twitter/X. …

Posted by Jason on Tuesday, February 25, 2025

Hands-on AI Workshop Jan 2025

Yesterday Bill Wilder, Juan Pablo Garcia Gonzalez and I had the second Hands-on AI Workshop - this time in Cambridge MA. Like the last time, the goal was to give the attendees a hands on experience using Semantic Kernel. The target audience was .NET developers using Visual Studio Code looking to learn GenAI. My presentation and labs focused on RAG. Talk: Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) I made a few small changes since the December workshop, mostly in the part where I discuss chunking. NOTE: The repository has moved to the new BostonAzureAI github. What about Visual Studio? The original labs are still on the old github that contain the Visual Studio labs, however this time we decided to simplify expectations and just focus on using VS Code. Personally I prefer Visual Studio for .NET …

Posted by Jason on Saturday, February 1, 2025

An AZD Template for a Chainlit Azure Container App

An AZD Template for a Chainlit Azure Container App Late last year I was looking for an AZD template that uses Chainlit for a UI application and deploys to Azure Container Apps, but couldn’t find one … so now I’m working on building one. Chainlit OpenAI AssistantsAPI Azure Container Apps Starter This is a starter template that works with Azure Developer CLI (AZD) to create a Chainlit application and deploy it to Azure in a matter of minutes. The application code currently uses OpenAI and OpenAI Assistants API - I’m working on adding more functionality to it soon. The GitHub repository is here: chainlit-openai-assistantsapi-aca-starter. I’ve got the windows version of the README instructions out there, but haven’t updated the local environment steps for …

Posted by Jason on Sunday, January 19, 2025

Introducing: the Local RAG Series (with Semantic Kernel)

Announcing: The Local RAG Series with Semantic Kernel This year I’ve spent a lot of time focusing on Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) and its related technologies. I’ve also had my eye on agents and plan to focus on them a lot in 2025. From what I’ve seen with my limited work with agents so far is: they can be chatty. This has lead me to believe that agents will really take off once either the price of LLMs available via APIs lower (a lot) or local models become sufficient to use. Since I don’t know enough about what you can do with local models - I figured this is a great time to start digging into them. Plus, why not learn them with RAG and Semantic Kernel - two things I’ve spent a lot of time with this year. That should give me a good staring point to …

Posted by Jason on Sunday, December 22, 2024

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ai assistants api azd azure azure ai search azure sql career chainlit container apps copilot copilot studio ef core entity framework core eshopsupport series evaluations function calling graph rag hands-on-lab langchain learning local rag series micrsoft build announcements neo4j ollama openai pc build personal update phi4 presentation python rag rag demo series semantic kernel semantic kernel hello world series sql sql server study notes series text-to-sql vpn
ABOUT ME
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Jason is an experienced developer and solutions architect focused on helping companies provide real business value with custom software development using the Microsoft stack of technologies. This includes C#, .NET, Azure and AI services. In 2024, Jason was awarded a Microsoft MVP in AI - highlighting his latest focus on AI and specifically Generative AI technologies in real world business applications. The prior seven years, he was a Microsoft Azure MVP.

Let's work together to find solutions that fit your needs. Reach out today to discuss how I can support your goals—I'm here to help!

Jason Haley MVP