I’ve been trying to wrap my head around function/tool calling for a while now, and I’m excited to share what I’ve learned with you. It’s a powerful way to let developers integrate advanced AI features directly into their applications. We’ll walk through understanding the core concepts, setting up your environment, and implementing a practical example using a C# source generator.

Microsoft recently unveiled Phi-3, the latest iteration of their Small Language Model (SLM). And hot on its heels is Ollama, a powerful tool that enables you to run SLMs and LLMs right on your own machine.

Excited to dive in? In this guide, I’ll show you how to harness the power of Phi-3 and Ollama using C# and Semantic Kernel. I’ll walk you through the process of creating a simple console application to get you started on your SLM journey.

So, let’s get coding and unlock the potential of Phi-3 and Ollama on your machine!

C# 12 is the latest, just released, version of the popular programming language that runs on the .NET 8 platform. It introduces several new features that aim to improve the expressiveness, performance, and safety of the language. In this post, we will explore some of these features and see how they can benefit your code.

My previous blog posts talks about built-in container support in the .NET SDK. It allows you to create and publish Docker images for your .NET applications without writing any Dockerfile. I also showed how to use the Chiseled Ubuntu base images optimized for .NET and containers. We saw how to publish your Docker images using the .NET SDK to GitHub Packages / Container Registry.

Today, I want to show you how to publish your Docker images using the .NET SDK to GitHub Container Registry using GitHub Actions. It brings us to the next level of automation.

In my previous blog posts, I wrote about the built-in container support in the .NET 7 SDK that allows you to create and publish Docker images for your .NET applications without writing any Dockerfile. I also showed how to use the Chiseled Ubuntu base images optimized for .NET and containers.

For this blog post, I will explain how to publish your Docker images using the .NET SDK to GitHub Packages / Container Registry. It is possible to publish to different container registries, such as Docker Hub, GitHub, Azure Container Registry, or your own private registry. I will show you how to publish to GitHub Packages / Container Registry, but the process is similar for other registries.

This blog post will help you learn how to leverage the .NET SDK’s built-in container support to effortlessly distribute and run your .NET applications in the cloud using Docker. Stay tuned!

Are you looking for a fast and easy way to create and run .NET applications using Docker containers without writing any Dockerfile? If so, you will be glad to know that Microsoft has introduced a new feature of the .NET SDK 7.0.200 that makes it possible to create and publish OCI container images directly from your project file. We have seen how “.NET 7 SDK built-in container support and Ubuntu Chiseled“ can be used together. It lets us create small and secure containers for our .NET applications easily. We went from a first docker image of 216MB down to 48.3 MB. That is more than a 77% reduction in size. .NET SDK 7.0.200 bring some new capabilities. We will explore some in this post.

Dapr is an impressive set of APIs for building distributed applications with any language and platform. It provides a set of building blocks that you can use to build microservices. Dapr is based on sidecar architecture. Meaning that you need to run a Dapr sidecar for each of your applications. How do you debug your Dapr apps effectively? If you have been using PowerShell scripts to run and attach your debugger, you know how tedious and error-prone it can be. Ready to see how to use Rider or Visual Studio to debug your Dapr apps with ease and confidence?

With my team, we like to keep our C# code base updated. So, recently we went to .NET 7 and C# 11. At the same time, we were still adopting some of the new capabilities of .NET 6 and C# 10. Our code base is large, so it takes some time. One of the new features that we planned to use was the ArgumentNullException.ThrowIfNull method, which throws an exception if an argument is null. In this post, I will show you how I effortlessly did that refactoring by letting the machine work and not the human 😁 (me). In the past, I used the same approach to migrate lots of code that used Assert.True() to Assert.That(, Is.True) and for some other even more complex cases. We will use ReSharper and Rider for that.

End of summer 2022, the .NET team at Microsoft announced two things related to containers: .NET in Chiseled Ubuntu containers and then a week after built-in container support in the .NET 7 SDK. I have talked about both topics on two episodes of the French podcast devdevdev.net by my friend Richard Clark. In this post, I will explain what those are and how to combine them.

On October 24th, Docker announced the support of WASM and WASI in a new technical preview release. I wanted to try it out and see how it works with .NET 7. If you want to know more about WASM and WASI you can read the introduction from my previous post, “Using WASM and WASI to run .NET 7 on a Raspberry PI Zero 2 W“.