Notes on .NET, XAF, and building things

Twenty years of XPO, application frameworks, and lately a lot of applied AI. 256 articles and counting.

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Jun 17, 20268 min read

Getting Started with Microsoft.Extensions.AI — Part 4: Tools, Functions & the Agent Framework

Let's empower our LLMs to interact with the real world by letting them call our C# code, then see how the Agent Framework elevates this to autonomous orchestration.

Jun 15, 20267 min read

Getting Started with Microsoft.Extensions.AI — Part 3: Pipelines, Embeddings & Search

Let's dive into some powerful `Microsoft.Extensions.AI` features: building flexible request pipelines with middleware and performing semantic search with embeddings.

Jun 12, 20265 min read

Getting Started with Microsoft.Extensions.AI — Part 2: Messages & Strongly-Typed Output

Let's level up our AI interactions by building rich, multimodal messages and getting strongly-typed C# objects back from our models.

Jun 10, 20264 min read

Getting Started with Microsoft.Extensions.AI — Part 1: One Interface, Any Model

Discover how `Microsoft.Extensions.AI` provides a single `IChatClient` interface to seamlessly swap between cloud and local LLM providers with just one line of code.

Jun 8, 20264 min read

Getting Started with Semantic Kernel — Part 3: Running Local Models (LM Studio / Ollama)

In the final part of our Semantic Kernel series, I'll show you how to run your Semantic Kernel applications against local LLMs like LM Studio or Ollama, completely eliminating cloud costs while keeping your existing kernel code almost untouched.

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Jun 8, 20269 min read

Lottie: Small Animations That Make Software Feel Alive

After playing with Remotion for full videos, I wanted to look at the smaller side of motion: Lottie animations that live inside software, react to state, and make interfaces feel a little more alive.

Jun 7, 20268 min read

Jint Functions: Hosted Server-Side Functions That Can Be Gated

Jint functions turn JavaScript into hosted server-side behavior inside a .NET platform. They can live in the database, run inside a sandbox, and be gated by authentication, roles, scope, trigger type, and resource limits.

Jun 7, 202615 min read

Remotion: The Missing Bridge Between React and Video

Remotion turns React components into real video files. That sounds strange at first, but it is exactly the bridge developers need for data-driven product videos, explainers, release notes, captions, reels, AI-assisted video workflows, and the web UIs that control them.

Jun 5, 20266 min read

Getting Started with Semantic Kernel — Part 2: Kernel Functions & Plugins

In Part 2 of our Semantic Kernel series, we go beyond basic text generation. Learn how to empower your kernel to perform actions by creating prompt-based and native C# kernel functions, organizing them into plugins, and enabling automatic function calling to let the AI model execute your code.

Jun 3, 20266 min read

Getting Started with Semantic Kernel — Part 1: Your First Kernel & Chat History

Dive into Microsoft Semantic Kernel with .NET 9! In this first part, we'll build our initial Kernel, explore how prompt detail influences AI responses, and learn to maintain conversation context using Chat History, including tracking token usage.