Michael S. Collier

It’s hard to believe how far Global Azure has come. I remember when it all started several years ago. It’s inspiring to see that Global Azure has continued to be an impactful worldwide event. It’s a fantastic testament to the strength and dedication of the Azure community.

This year, I’m thrilled to help bring Global Azure to Columbus on Saturday, April 18th. We’ve assembled a top-notch lineup of speakers from the Columbus technology community, each with practical, hands-on, real-world Azure experience. (Yes, I’ll be there too!) Whether you’re new to Azure or a seasoned pro, you’ll find sessions packed with insights you can use right away.

If you’re building modern .NET Aspire apps, you’re probably familiar with how service names and resource identifiers are often passed around as string literals, things like "apiservice" or "storage".

This week I was excited to finally get my hands on a new PC for my personal use. I purchased one of the new ARM-based Surface Laptop Copilot+ PCs. As a developer focused on .NET and Azure, I was eager to see how well this sleek new machine could handle my day-to-day workflow.

While performance and battery life have impressed me so far, I’ve run into a few bumps in the road when it comes to local development, especially in areas that rely on platform-specific tooling or containerized environments. In this post, I’ll highlight a couple of early challenges I’ve encountered and what I did to work around them. I’ll update this post as I learn more and adapt my setup.

It’s shaping up to be a fun summer of sharing and learning, and I’d love for you to be part of it!

I’ve got three user group presentations lined up through the end of August, and whether you’re into Azure development, curious about agentic workflows, or just enjoy free pizza and great conversation (who doesn’t?), there’s something here for you.

Here’s where you can find me:

July 24: Getting Started with Azure Durable Task Scheduler

📆 Thursday, July 24th @ 5:30pm

It seems increasingly clear that Semantic Kernel is where Microsoft is investing for building modern, robust AI applications. In fact, Microsoft has stated as much: “Semantic Kernel (is) central to Microsoft’s enterprise AI story”.

In typical Microsoft fashion, they offer several seemingly competing options for developers to choose from, such as AutoGen, Microsoft.Extensions.AI, and probably a few others I’m forgetting right now. This variety doesn’t make it any easier for .NET developers to figure out where to get started and where to focus their upskilling efforts.