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).

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!

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.

Today at lunchtime Bill Wilder and I spoke at the Virtual Boston Azure meetup. Our talks were based on the same material we presented on Tuesday night, however I introduced eShopSupport as well today.

The recording of the session can be found on the (Lunchtime editions) Boston Azure YouTube channel.

Talk: Add Gen AI to your existing .NET apps with Semantic Kernel & Azure SQL

My part of the presentation PDF can be downloaded here.

Last night Bill Wilder and I spoke at the Virtual Boston Azure meetup. Our talks were about adding GenAI to .NET applications. My portion was mostly demos that focused on Azure SQL’s new native VECTOR support, Entity Framework Core and Semantic Kernel.

The recording of the session can be found on the Boston Azure YouTube channel.

Talk: Add Gen AI to your existing .NET apps with Semantic Kernel & Azure SQL

The presentation pdf can be downloaded here.

This week I presented at the TechBash conference in Pocono Manor, PA. All the resources for the conference are available on the TechBash GitHub repo. Below are links to my presentations specifically.

It was great to see companies sending their employees to conferences again. This was my first time at TechBash, and I finally got to meet Alvin Ashcraft in person (the Morning Dew). I also met a bunch of people from the Philly area and around Pennsylvania, but there were attendees from all over-even a couple of guys from Panama!

Last night I spoke at the Virtual Boston Azure meetup. The talk was about the Azure Developer CLI and geared towards developers.

The recording of the session can be found on the Boston Azure YouTube channel.

Talk: What is the Azure Dev CLI (AZD) and How Can You Use It?

The presentation pdf can be downloaded here.

The resource slides:

I added this slide after the presentation with links I mentioned after the recording was stopped:

Last Thursday night I spoke at the Wisconsin .NET User Group near Milwaukee, WI. I was nice to meet so many .NET developers interested in RAG and AI.

To carry on the tradition from my Memphis talk, I gave the presentation a local look using images related to Milwaukee generated from Bing/create.

Talk: Getting Started with Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG)

The presentation pdf can be downloaded here.

One of my demos failed to deploy before the talk, but I don’t think it was missed due to having so many good questions. It was really nice meeting a user group with so many core members. Plus the pizza was really good!

Last night was the Season of AI presentation. We started with Bill Wilder presenting the fundamentals of Generative AI and quick introduction to Azure AI Studio, then I finished up with a .NET code walkthrough implement Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) using Semantic Kernel.

It was nice to see a lot of regular faces and meet several new people.

Demo Code

The demo code is on my GitHub repo BostonAzure-June2024 under a subdirectory.

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 have it ready to use in case I need it.