Adding AI to a Windows and Uno Platform Application using Microsoft.Extensions.AI

Earlier this month Microsoft introduced the preview of Microsoft.Extensions.AI.Abstractions and Microsoft.Extensions.AI libraries with the aim of making it easier for .NET developers to integrate AI services into their applications. The Uno Platform provides support for using Microsoft.Extensions in applications that target Windows and any other Uno Platform target (iOS, Android, MacCatalyst etc) via the Uno.Extensions … Read more

Switching AI Models with ChatGPT in a Windows and Uno Platform Application

In my previous post I walked through how to connect to ChatGPT in order to integrate AI into a multi-platform (Windows App SDK and the Uno Platform) based application. In this post we’re going to add the ability to switch which AI model (GPT 3, 4 etc) is used when connecting to ChatGPT. We’ll also cover … Read more

Tutorial: Hosting Microsoft Orleans Application on Azure App Service with Cosmos DB

This post is going to wrap up the tutorial series on building a Hello World application using Microsoft Orleans. We’re going to be publishing the application to Azure with the Silo and Services being pushed to an Azure App Service, and linked via a Cosmos DB storage. If you want to check out the first … Read more

Tutorial: Using Azure Table Storage or Azure Cosmos DB with Microsoft Orleans

In my previous post we looked at building a super-basic application that leverages Microsoft Orleans to host an instance (grain) of the IHelloWorld interface in a silo that can be invoked remotely. Unfortunately, whilst this was enough to get everything up and running, the configuration we used will only work in development. In this post … Read more

Persisting Cloud Events to Cosmos DB in Azure

If you start down the path of implementing Event Sourcing, you’ll most likely come across https://cloudevents.io/ which has the tag line “A specification for describing event data in a common way”. This project seems to be well supported (take a look at the contributors list) and has language projections for a number of different languages. … Read more

Pipeline Template: Applying a Launch Icon Badge to Identify Environments and Versions of your App

A question was raised this week by Sturla as to how to incorporate the Launch Icon Badge extension into the build process when making use of the templates from Pipeline Templates (Damien covers how to use this extension in a Azure DevOps pipeline in his post on the topic). By the way, a big thank … Read more

Pipeline Templates: How to use a file for release notes?

When deploying a release to AppCenter you can specify release notes that get presented to the user when they go to download a new release. This week a question was asked as to how to specify release notes from a file when submitting a new app version to AppCenter. If you looked at the complete … Read more

Pipeline Templates: Stage Dependency Fix and Improved Docs

We just released v0.5.1 of the Pipeline Templates – templates for creating build pipelines for Azure DevOps. This was a minor increment but fixed an issue that emerged due to a change in the validation of pipelines by Azure DevOps. Before we get into the details of what is included in v0.5.1, the other big … Read more