Jason Haley

Ramblings from an Independent Consultant

Semantic Kernel Hello World Plugins Part 2

Two weeks ago I blogged Part 1, in which I moved the prompt to a prompt template. In this part, I implement a native function that will take in the current date and make the call to the LLM. I’ve put the code for this blog in the HelloWorld.Plugin2.Console project in the same repo as the other SK entries: semantic-kernel-getting-started. Semantic Kernel Plugin: Native Function There is a good Microsoft Learn module: Give your AI agent skills that walks you through the details of what a native function is and how to implement them. The functions in that learn module don’t make calls to OpenAI - which is something I wanted to do … so I had to do some digging on how to make this work. Turns out it isn’t that hard to do - though I also discovered there is a lot of SK demo …

Posted by Jason on Friday, April 26, 2024

My Session at Boston Global Azure Bootcamp

This past weekend was Boston Azure’s Edition of the annual Global Azure Bootcamp. This year we focused on AI and hands-on-labs. The odd thing about when we scheduled the meetup was we had a lot of people sign up for the group just to rsvp - before most of the existing members had gotten around to rsvp’ing. We did not expect that. It is a mystery as how they heard about the event so quick. We only had one room reserved, so there really was a hard cap on how many people we could let in. There were a couple of challenges to start the day off with: getting into the room (not uncommon with Saturday events) and finding an availble room with tables and outlets (necessary for hands-on-labs). However, once we got those resolved it was pretty smooth sailing from there. It did end up …

Posted by Jason on Tuesday, April 23, 2024

Semantic Kernel Hello World Plugins Part 1

A couple of weeks ago, in my last entry I created a simple Hello World application with Semantic Kernel. Since then, I’ve worked my way through the MS Learning path: APL-2005 Develop AI agents using Azure OpenAI and the Semantic Kernel SDK - which I highly recommend if you are also learning SK. In this entry I’m going to start with the code from the last entry and extract the prompt to a plugin. I’ve put the code for this blog in the same repo as the last entry: semantic-kernel-getting-started Semantic Kernel Plugins There are two types of plugin functionality in the sample code: prompts and native functions. Just a quick review, the hello world example is to call OpenAI with a simple prompt with today’s day and return a historical fact about the date. The output …

Posted by Jason on Thursday, April 11, 2024

Semantic Kernel Hello World

This past Thursday night after the Virtual Boston Azure meetup, Bill Wilder (@codingoutloud) created an AI mini-workshop (hands on) for the attendees that were interested in getting hands on with code using the Azure OpenAI API. This post is me using the same idea but with Semantic Kernel. OpenAI Chat Hello World C# Bill provided the following code for us to get a simple OpenAI chat working: using Azure; using Azure.AI.OpenAI; string? key = "..."; string? endpoint = "..."; string? deployment = "..."; // output today's date just for fun Console.WriteLine($"\n----------------- DEBUG INFO -----------------"); var today = DateTime.Now.ToString("MMMM dd"); Console.WriteLine($"Today is {today}"); …

Posted by Jason on Saturday, March 30, 2024

Boston Code Camp 36 Sessions

Yesterday was Boston Code Camp 36 hard to believe it has been going on for 20+ years now. For me it is one of those regular events for the Boston tech community that is well worth spending a Saturday attending. It was nice to see a lot of regular faces and meet some new people. Talk: Getting Started with Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) I was surprise the room was full, it was good to see so many developers, students and architects - mostly with .NET backgrounds looking to get started with RAG applications. The presentation pdf can be downloaded here. I am already making changes to it for the next time. I had some good questions and also noticed there are some concepts that are more confusing and need explained better. Talk: Azure OpenAI Patterns for Software Engineers This was my …

Posted by Jason on Sunday, March 24, 2024

Demo Review: Azure Vector Search AI Assistant

Demo Review: Azure Vector Search AI Assistant This is the fourth C# demo in The RAG Demo Chronicles (Blog Series) and is the first demo so far that saves its history to a database. This Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) demo is a little different than the last three because it primarily uses data from a database as the content to search instead of documents. It also uses Semantic Kernel more than other demos have, which is neat to see too. This demo has me thinking about the many times in my career when executives or product managers have wanted a tool easy enough to use to create their own reports. Certainly, gets the ideas flowing! Demo Details NOTE: The demo is on the cognitive-search-vector branch Item of Interest As of 2/27/2024 Author: 3 Date created: 5/7/2023 Update within last …

Posted by Jason on Monday, February 26, 2024

Demo Review: Azure Search OpenAI Demo (Python)

Demo Review: Azure Search OpenAI Demo (Python) This is the last in the family of Azure Search OpenAI demos that I’m covering (I’m not looking at the Java version). I reviewed the C# version and the Javascript/Typescript version earlier this month. Of the three I’m covering, this one seems to be the most active, popular and have the most documentation. At the beginning of this month, the Hack Together: The AI Chat App Hack used this demo at the sample repository, marking it as a solid reference implementation for RAG. NOTE: That event included several RAG themed sessions that were recorded and are available on a youtube playlist. In case you are wondering what the differences are between the demos (besides the language they are written in), here is a feature comparison of …

Posted by Jason on Friday, February 23, 2024

Demo Review: Azure Search OpenAI Javascript/Typescript

Demo Review: Azure Search OpenAI Javascript/Typescript This is the second in the family of Azure Search OpenAI demos that I’m reviewing. Last week I reviewed the C# version. As you’ll see below, the Javascript version is a bit different. The user interface (UI) functionality is provided by a set of web components that you can add to about any web application (ie. React, Angular, Vue, etc.) - in fact the web application in the demo is written in React. Also the chat communication is written to match the HTTP protocol for AI chat app which means the frontend can communicate with any backend that matches that protocol. In demos #1 and #2 we saw basically the same codebase, but two approaches to the question/answer flow of the system - this demo has three approaches. One of the …

Posted by Jason on Monday, February 19, 2024

Demo Review: Azure Search OpenAI Demo C#

Demo Review: Azure Search OpenAI Demo C# If you are looking for Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) demos that utilize Azure Search and Azure OpenAI (along with several other supporting Azure services), then there is a set of related demos that do just that in GitHub. This family of RAG demos consists of: azure-search-openai-demo-csharp - written in C#. azure-search-openai-demo - written in python. azure-search-openai-javascript - written in javascript/typescript. azure-search-openai-demo-java - written in java. This post is about #1 above, I will cover #2 and #3 in later posts, but I will leave the Java version to someone else to review. Before digging into this family of demos, it is important to note they are not the same functionality ported to different languages. The thing they have …

Posted by Jason on Wednesday, February 14, 2024

Demo Review: Simple RAG using SQL Server, OpenAI and Function Calling

Demo Review: Simple RAG using Blazor, SQL Server, Azure OpenAI and Function Calling If you are like me, a full stack C# developer who is attempting to get up to speed on how GenAI technologies are going to show up in our business applictions - then after you get the first demo up and running, this demo (also by Michael Washington) is a great next step. RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) applications typically have the following steps: Gather input from the user (Retrieval) Use the user’s input to do a query over data or documents (ofen using vector embeddings) and gather N number of the best results from that search then pass to an LLM as context to use in crafting a response for the user (Generation) Return the natual language result from the LLM describing its search result …

Posted by Jason on Sunday, February 11, 2024

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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.

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Jason Haley MVP