Jason Haley

Ramblings from an Independent Consultant

Virtual Boston Azure AI - Microsoft Build Recap

Last night Bill, Udai, Veronika and I gave our top picks from Microsoft Build at the Virtual Boston Azure AI meetup. In order to not overlap topics, we each picked areas to cover - mine was Copilot and Copilot Studio. My picks: Copilot Wave 2 Spring release features – this was announced in April but still hasn’t landed for us. You’ll know when this lands due to the look of Copilot changing.

Posted by Jason on Thursday, May 29, 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.

Posted by Jason on Monday, May 26, 2025

Microsoft Build 2025: Azure AI Search

Microsoft Build 2025: Azure AI Search If you use Azure AI Search for your RAG applications, you are going to be excited about the new features that were just announced at Microsoft Build 2025. If you want a video that provides a good overview, I’d recommend watching Pablo Castro’s talk Knowledge Retrieval: RAG for enterprise agents with Azure AI Search, he did a great job highlighting most of the new features.

Posted by Jason on Tuesday, May 20, 2025

Custom AI Search Skill to Convert Markdown Tables to JSON

Custom Azure AI Search Skill to Convert Markdown Tables to JSON I was recently asked what options there are for handling large tables in PDFs, when ingesting files for a RAG application. The question was concerning a retrieval system that was having a problem identifying relevant data in some tables. The problem seemed to be due to the headings not being in the same chunk as the data - so the data doesn’t have any context to indicate its meaning.

Posted by Jason on Sunday, May 18, 2025

My Session at Boston Global AI Bootcamp

Yesterday was Boston Azure AI’s Edition of the Global AI Bootcamp at the NERD in Cambridge. We had a lot of interest in the event - 85 people on the RSVP list and almost that on the waitlist. Since the space we had couldn’t handle any more people, unfortunately we couldn’t let more people in. However since there was such good interest in a Saturday AI oriented bootcamp, we are working on planning another one soon - so if you happen to be one of those people that couldn’t attend - stay tuned!

Posted by Jason on Sunday, March 23, 2025

2025 NYC AI Tour

In January, I volunteered at that New York City AI Tour Event and got to attend a few sessions in the afternoon. I spent the morning at the OpenAI booth answering general questions about Azure OpenAI. It was fun to hear what sort of projects people have and how they are using AI in general. I’d forgotten how sore you legs can get from just standing on a cement floor all day … and was reminded to wear sneakers to my next conference - NOT my normal leather boots.

Posted by Jason on Tuesday, February 25, 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.

Posted by Jason on Saturday, February 1, 2025

An AZD Template for a Chainlit Azure Container App

An AZD Template for a Chainlit Azure Container App Late last year I was looking for an AZD template that uses Chainlit for a UI application and deploys to Azure Container Apps, but couldn’t find one … so now I’m working on building one. Chainlit OpenAI AssistantsAPI Azure Container Apps Starter This is a starter template that works with Azure Developer CLI (AZD) to create a Chainlit application and deploy it to Azure in a matter of minutes.

Posted by Jason on Sunday, January 19, 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.

Posted by Jason on Sunday, December 22, 2024

eShopSupport Series: EvaluationTests Project

This is the seventh part of the eShopSupport Series which covers the details of the eShopSupport GitHub repository. NOTE: This entry will make the most sense to you if you’ve first read eShopSupport: Evaluator Project EvaluationTests Project The EvaluationTests project is a recently added xUnit Test Project that uses the new Microsoft.Extensions.AI.Evaluation packages highlighted in this blog: Evaluate the quality of your AI applications with ease. I think the idea is to replace the Evaluator project but, as is, it doesn’t run all 500 evaluation questions in the dev folder (which is good since it would not be cheap to do unless you are running locally).

Posted by Jason on Wednesday, December 11, 2024

FEATURED TAGS
ai assistants api azd azure azure ai search azure sql career chainlit container apps copilot copilot studio ef core entity framework core eshopsupport series evaluations function calling graph rag hands-on-lab langchain learning local rag series micrsoft build announcements neo4j ollama openai personal update phi4 presentation python rag rag demo series semantic kernel semantic kernel hello world series sql sql server study notes series text-to-sql vpn
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