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 code development … but it seems most people are fine with VS Code - which makes it a lot easier to support multi platform development.
Feedback and Future Workshops
The attendees all had good things to say about the workshop - however with the target audience being new to GenAI and Semantic Kernel we are realizing that there is too much material for a single day.
Next we are looking to reshaping this workshop and also create another day long event that is just focusing on agents.
We are planning more workshops this year, so if you are interested please reach out to me on twitter @haleyjason (or email - info@jasonhaley.com) and let me know if you are interested in future workshops on AI with .NET.
If you have a comment, please message me @haleyjason on twitter/X.
Published 2/25/2025