Jason Haley

Ramblings from an Independent Consultant

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.

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.

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.

Posted by Jason on Sunday, December 22, 2024

eShopSupport Series: EvaluationTests Project

This is the seventh part of the eShopSupport Series which covers the details of the eShopSupport GitHub repository. NOTE: This entry will make the most sense to you if you’ve first read eShopSupport: Evaluator Project EvaluationTests Project The EvaluationTests project is a recently added xUnit Test Project that uses the new Microsoft.Extensions.AI.Evaluation packages highlighted in this blog: Evaluate the quality of your AI applications with ease. I think the idea is to replace the Evaluator project but, as is, it doesn’t run all 500 evaluation questions in the dev folder (which is good since it would not be cheap to do unless you are running locally).

Posted by Jason on Wednesday, December 11, 2024

A Semantic Kernel Workshop

Announcing: A Semantic Kernel Workshop Friday Bill Wilder, Juan Pablo Garcia Gonzalez and I finally were able to make the workshop we’ve been working on for the past couple of months public. We had an in person day long event where we used the content, which was received really well. The attendees had some good questions - giving us some really good ideas on how to improve the content. Target audience: .

Posted by Jason on Sunday, December 8, 2024

Hands-on AI Workshop Dec 2024

Yesterday Bill Wilder, Juan Pablo Garcia Gonzalez and I put on a Hands-on AI Workshop in Burlington MA. The goal was to give the attendees hands on experience using Semantic Kernel. The target audience was .NET developers using Visual Studio Code or Visual Studio looking to learn GenAI. I gave the middle presentations and labs focusing on RAG. Talk: Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) This was an intro level presentation on what RAG is and the concepts you need to know to create a RAG system.

Posted by Jason on Saturday, December 7, 2024

Azure SQL, Entity Framework, Semantic Kernel Hands-on-Lab

Announcing: Build a RAG App using Semantic Kernel, Entity Framework and Azure SQL DB Hands-on-Lab A couple of weeks ago after Azure SQL DB announced their public preview of native vector support, I put a hands on lab together to help people get started with the new feature and EF Core extension. Bill Wilder and I did mentioned it in our presentations on December 12 and December 15, but I haven’t had a chance to announce it for those of you who missed our presentations.

Posted by Jason on Monday, November 25, 2024

Boston Code Camp 37 Session

Yesterday was Boston Code Camp 37. I spent the majority of the day talking with people in the community I haven’t seen for awhile, as well as some new people I hadn’t met before. I only made it to one session (Juan Pablo Garcia Gonzalez - Agentic AI: Unlocking the Power of Multi-Agent Systems), which was good and got me thinking about how to rewrite my demos in my talk to use agents.

Posted by Jason on Sunday, November 24, 2024

eShopSupport Series: Customer Web UI Project

This is the sixth part of the eShopSupport Series which covers the details of the eShopSupport GitHub repository. CustomerWebUI Project The CustomerWebUI project is a Blazor application used to capture support ticket information from customers. It is one of the two user interface projects in the solution that highlight how to adding some AI functionality into business applications can be useful. The project is located under the src folder: In this entry I’ll cover the functionality the web application provides, a few things I found interesting and some thoughts on improvements.

Posted by Jason on Saturday, October 19, 2024

eShopSupport Series: Python Inference Project

This is the fifth part of the eShopSupport Series which covers the details of the eShopSupport GitHub repository. PythonInference Project The PythonInference Project is a python project that provides a web API to classify the case type when a new customer support ticket is entered in the system. It does this by passing the user’s comment to the API, which uses a local model from Hugging Face (cross-encoder/nli-MiniLM2-L6-H768) to classify the text.

Posted by Jason on Saturday, October 12, 2024

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ai assistants api azd azure azure sql career chainlit container apps ef core entity framework core eshopsupport series evaluations function calling graph rag hands-on-lab langchain learning local rag series neo4j openai personal update 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