This weekend I upgraded the semantic-kernel-getting-started repository to the latest code.

It was mostly to move to .NET 9 (I’d forgotten it was still all .NET 8) and the latest version of the Semantic Kernel libraries. However there were a few things that needed changed:

Planners Were Deprecated

The Planners were deprecated last year (more information here: Semantic Kernel: Package previews, Graduations & Deprecations).

This means the blog posts Semantic Kernel Hello World Planners Part 1 and Semantic Kernel Hello World Planners Part 2 are not longer relevant. I’ve updated those blog posts indicating the deprecation and have removed the code projects from the solution in Github (the code is still there but not loaded with the solution).

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.

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. The presentation can be downloaded on the github here

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.

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.

Last week I wrote about the notebook I created when I was working out the flow of the property graph RAG implementation. In this entry I will go through the two projects I created to provide some reusable code as well as allow for better experimentation:

Related posts:

• Study Notes: Graph RAG - Property Graph RAG
• Study Notes: Graph RAG - Property Graph RAG (The Notebook)

NOTE: In order to get the most out of this blog post, you should first read the related two posts.

Monday I posted my notes on this last month’s study topic of property graph RAG, which has the general information I’ve collected. In this entry I want to go through some code I created in a polyglot notebook (ie. a notebook that has C# code instead of python), when I was working through the steps needed for a property graph RAG application.

Related posts:

• Study Notes: Graph RAG - Property Graph RAG
• Study Notes: Graph RAG - Property Graph RAG (The Projects)

Where To Get The Code

The code for this entry is in my Github repo semantic-kernel-getting-started under the notebooks folder: