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 .

Have you ever had a moment of inspiration, an idea you wanted to test in C#, but didn’t want to spin up a full project just to run a few lines of code? Same here. Well, with .NET 10 Preview 4, that pain is going away. Say hello to the new dotnet run app.cs feature. It’s like C# finally took a page from Python and JavaScript, languages that have long made it easy to run a file with a single command.

Microsoft Build 2025 centered on the future of intelligent agent-based applications. This post recaps my four-day experience in Seattle attending Build, covering keynotes, developer sessions, GitHub Copilot updates, .NET Aspire insights, and hands-on labs. Get a firsthand look at emerging trends and tools shaping how we build AI-powered solutions in the Microsoft ecosystem.

It has been over 2 years since I’ve posted an update to this blog. I miss writing. It’s time I get back to writing about what I’ve been working on and what’s on my mind. The start of a new year is as good of time as any to get back to blogging.

While I’m at it, I might as well share my New Year’s resolutions for 2024.

I was recently faced with a scenario where I needed a script to deploy an Azure Function. Specifically, there was a desire to use a REST API to deploy a .zip file of the Function app. The documentation for “Deploy ZIP file with REST APIs” indicates this is possible via a HTTP POST request to https://{APP-NAME}.scm.azurewebsites.net/api/zipdeploy. One challenge with the current documentation is the stated need to use HTTP BASIC authentication.

I recently started experimenting with the beta versions of the new Azure Storage and Event Hub extensions for Azure Functions. The new extensions use the new Azure SDK, and as a result, include support for using Azure AD to authenticate to specific Azure resources (a.k.a., managed identities). I’m a fan of having fewer secrets to manage. Less secrets . . . more better. 😉 This intent of this blog post is to share my initial experiences with the extensions.

Earlier this month I had the pleasure to join The Azure Podcast team to talk about my experiences with Azure Functions. We discussed how I came to love working with Azure, my journey from classic Cloud Services to Azure Functions, and the current state of virtual networking with Azure Functions. This was my second time on the podcast. My first appearance was a little more than 5 years ago after the release of a book I co-authored, Fundamentals of Azure.

I was recently asked how to change Azure Functions’ system keys, such as the ones automatically created by the Event Grid or Durable Functions extensions. It’s possible to change these keys via the Azure portal. There is a button in the portal to generate a new key. What if you want to change the keys programmatically? I couldn’t find official documentation which stated how to do so. After a bit of splunking through GitHub issues (here, here) and reading Mark Heath’s excellent blog post on Azure Function keys, I think I found an approach that, so far, seems to work.

I recently ran into a situation using the Azure Functions default host key where I did not understand the behavior I was observing. Thanks to the help of some fantastic colleagues, we figured out what was going on. I understand what is happening now. I want to share here in hopes that my experience will help others that may run into a similar challenge. Scenario I needed to create an Azure Function app via an ARM template.

A few months ago one of the greatest scandals to hit Azure Functions erupted . . . ASCIIartgate! #teamAsciiArt became a trending topic on Twitter. Maybe. The Big Deal In an effort to reduce the verbosity of logging output by func start in the Azure Functions Core Tools, the decision was made to remove the famed ASCII art. To be fair, running func start did output quite a bit of logs.