Jason Haley

Ramblings from an Independent Consultant

Demo Review: Chat Copilot

Demo Review: Chat Copilot This is the fifth C# demo in The RAG Demo Chronicles (Blog Series) and has the most extensive use of Semantic Kernel out of all the demos I’ve reviewed. The use of Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) is different with this project than the other demos I’ve reviewed - mainly because RAG is just one of its features. With this demo, I also took the time to configure the optional authentication so I could play with the MS Graph plugin … and WOW! Just adding the web searcher and MS Graph plugin really make this a powerful demo app. It gives me a lot of ideas for my own projects. Demo Details Item of Interest As of 6/9/2024 Number of Contributors: 45 Date repo created: 4/2/2023 Update within last month: Yes Link to documentation: Microsoft Learn Page …

Posted by Jason on Tuesday, June 18, 2024

Semantic Kernel Hello World WebSearchEnginePlugin

UPDATE: The Bing Search APIS are being deprecated. See the announcement for more details: Bing Search APIs retiring on August 11, 2025. I have updated the post and corresponding Github code to use the Brave connector instead. A couple of weeks ago I thought I’d written my last of these blogs, mainly due to me getting more in depth with Semantic Kernel. However, after I watched Will Velida’s video Using Bing Search API in the Semantic Kernel SDK … I couldn’t help but wonder what the API calls were behind the scenes. Will does a great job at explaining how to use the plugin and the Bing resource needed to make calls to the search API, so I won’t get into that part of it - I want to focus on the usefulness and API calls made by the plugin. The code for this …

Posted by Jason on Monday, June 10, 2024

Semantic Kernel Hello World Planners Part 2 - (Deprecated)

UPDATE: Planners have been deprecated. See this Semantic Kernel blog for more detail: Semantic Kernel: Package previews, Graduations & Deprecations Last week in the Semantic Kernel Hello World Planners Part 1 entry, I used the Handlebars planner to implement the sample Hello World functionality and then looked at the token difference between using a saved plan vs. generating a plan. In this entry I use the Function Calling Stepwise Planner to create the sample Hello World functionality and compare it to the implementation in the Semantic Kernel Hello World Plugins Part 3 entry. The code for this entry is the HelloWorld.Planner2.Console project in my GitHub repo. Function Calling Stepwise Planner As mentioned last week, the Function Calling Stepwise Planner is in the …

Posted by Jason on Monday, May 27, 2024

Semantic Kernel Hello World Planners Part 1 - (Deprecated)

UPDATE: Planners have been deprecated. See this Semantic Kernel blog for more detail: Semantic Kernel: Package previews, Graduations & Deprecations A few weeks ago in the Semantic Kernel Hello World Plugins Part 3 blog entry, I showed how to use OpenAI Function Calling. The last half of that entry was all about how to view the response and request JSON going back and forth to OpenAI, which detailed four API calls. In this entry I look at using the Handlebars Planner to accomplish the same functionality. Then I’ll show the request and response JSON for both using a saved plan as well as having the LLM create a plan and end with a token usage comparison. The code for this entry is the HelloWorld.Planner1.Console project in my GitHub repo. Planners Semantic Kernel 1.0 has two …

Posted by Jason on Sunday, May 19, 2024

Memphis Azure User Group

Last Thursday night I spoke at the Memphis Azure User Group, it was nice to meet some people in person and see how excited others are about finding valuable ways to work GenAI into their applications. I also gave my slide deck a completely new look (Memphis themed via Bing/create): Talk: Getting Started with Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) The presentation pdf can be downloaded here. Since the presentation was hybrid, there were not as many questions as the other two times I’ve given the talk … or that is my guess at the reason why it was so quiet. That also means I should have put that third demo back in the presentation (I took a demo out after the first version of the talk since there were so many questions and needed to free up time for Q&A). Next time I’ll …

Posted by Jason on Tuesday, May 7, 2024

Semantic Kernel Hello World Plugins Part 3

Last week I blogged Part 2 showing the creation of a native function plugin, in this post I want to take that native function a step further and use the OpenAI Function calling. This will allow us to not provide the current date when making the call to get a historic daily fact and have OpenAI call a function to get the current date. I’ve added the HelloWorld.Plugin3.Console project to the GitHub repo for the code in this blog entry. Semantic Kernel Plugin: Native Function and OpenAI Function Calling Function calling is also called “external tools”. I mentioned it in Demo Review: Simple RAG using Blazor, SQL Server, Azure OpenAI and Function Calling and how it changes the flow a bit. Instead of calling OpenAI and expecting an answer, we pass a question and in addition we …

Posted by Jason on Tuesday, April 30, 2024

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

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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