Jason Haley

Ramblings from an Independent Consultant

Hands-on Boston AgentCon Workshop

This past Saturday, I held my latest hands on workshop: From Static Files to Smart Agents: Unlocking Document Intelligence at AgentCon Boston. I ended up with around 30 attendees. There was quite a bit of interaction, with some real practical questions being asked about RAG and GenAI applications. Hand-on-Lab: From Static Files to Smart Agents: Unlocking Document Intelligence The repository is located at: https://github.com/JasonHaley/agentcon-boston-workshop What is it? The end result (which is the “completed” branch of the repo), is a Chainlit application designed to provide four use cases: Compare a clause between two contracts and get detail and risk analysis of the clause Analyze a clause that is in one contract but not the other Compare two complete contracts Create a …

Posted by Jason on Tuesday, September 30, 2025

Updated Semantic Kernel Blogs and Github Repo

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). Bing Search APIs Deprecated The Bing …

Posted by Jason on Monday, May 26, 2025

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. NOTE: The repository has moved to the new BostonAzureAI github. What about Visual Studio? The original labs are still on the old github that contain the Visual Studio labs, however this time we decided to simplify expectations and just focus on using VS Code. Personally I prefer Visual Studio for .NET …

Posted by Jason on Saturday, February 1, 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. Since I don’t know enough about what you can do with local models - I figured this is a great time to start digging into them. Plus, why not learn them with RAG and Semantic Kernel - two things I’ve spent a lot of time with this year. That should give me a good staring point to …

Posted by Jason on Sunday, December 22, 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: .NET developers looking to start using Gen AI in their applications Overview The workshop (currently has a long name which we’re planning on shortening soon): Building RAG-Enabled Apps and AI Agents with Semantic Kernel and Azure AI, contains 6 labs and (currently) 2 presentations. We have both Visual Studio Code and Visual Studio versions of the first 5 labs (I’m working …

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. The presentation can be downloaded on the github here The labs that were RAG related where: Lab 3: Using WebRetrieverPlugin to create a RAG application - (Visual Studio edition) Lab 4: Creating a RAG application to Search a PDF - (Visual Studio Edition) Lab 5: Putting it all together - (Visual Studio …

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. Overview The hands on lab: Build a RAG App using Semantic Kernel, Entity Framework and Azure SQL DB provides a step-by-step walk through creating a RAG application using SQL Azure DB, EntityFramework Core and Semantic Kernel. I used VS Code for the steps, but if you are an experienced .NET developer using Visual …

Posted by Jason on Monday, November 25, 2024

Virtual Boston Azure Lunchtime November 2024

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. The resources: Semantic Kernel https://github.com/microsoft/semantic-kernel Smart Components https://github.com/dotnet/smartcomponents eShopSupport https://github.com/dotnet/eShopSupport EFCore.SqlServer.VectorSearch https://github.com/efcore/EFCore.SqlServer.VectorSearch How to add genuinely useful AI to your webapp (not just chatbots) …

Posted by Jason on Friday, November 15, 2024

Virtual Boston Azure November 2024

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. The resources: Semantic Kernel https://github.com/microsoft/semantic-kernel Smart Components https://github.com/dotnet/smartcomponents EFCore.SqlServer.VectorSearch https://github.com/efcore/EFCore.SqlServer.VectorSearch How to add genuinely useful AI to your webapp (not just chatbots) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TSNAvFJoP4M …

Posted by Jason on Tuesday, November 12, 2024

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

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. Where To Get The Code The code for this entry is in my Github repo semantic-kernel-getting-started under the samples/demos folder: PropertyGraphIngestor - is the console application that extracts entities from text documents and populates a Neo4j db PropertyGraphRAG - is the console application that does property graph RAG …

Posted by Jason on Friday, August 16, 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