At .NET Conf 2023, Microsoft announced a new stack set on top of the (also new) .NET 8 (LTS). During this presentation, I dig into what .NET Aspire is made of, and how to build cloud ready apps on it. It may still be in preview for now, something tells me it will become a .NET staple eventually.
During my presentation at Granite State .NET (NH) Developer’s Meetup on April 18th, I recorded the presentation. During the presentation, I unintentionally updated my toolset in the middle of the demo, and pried out the demo demons.
Catch the presentation on YouTube here:
The error that came up during the publish operation was this:
Error generating project artifacts: configuring ingress for resource cache: binding for does not specify a container port, ensure WithServiceBinding for this resource specifies a hostPort value ErrorPublish profile creation failed. Unable to store profile
The solution was to also update AZ and AZD cli tools.
C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio\2022\Enterprise>winget upgrade Microsoft.Azd Found Azure Developer CLI [Microsoft.Azd] Version 1.8.100 This application is licensed to you by its owner. Microsoft is not responsible for, nor does it grant any licenses to, third-party packages. Downloading https://github.com/Azure/azure-dev/releases/download/azure-dev-cli_1.8.0/azd-windows-amd64.msi ██████████████████████████████ 9.66 MB / 9.66 MB Successfully verified installer hash Starting package install… Successfully installed
After updating the tools, publishing proceeded as expected.
It’s been a minute since I’ve felt like there was some content to share of a coding variety, and ironically, I don’t have a minute to do it. So without further ado, I’ll dig right in.
In the management of Granite State Code Camp, I devised a way to connect with all the folks who had ever been a part of one of the events I’ve hosted in Teams. I sent a calendar invite as a 1:1 meeting initiation from myself to each of all the guests in the tenant, using Graph.
This goes back to 2020, when Granite State Code Camp rode out the pandemic as an online-only event, hosted entirely in Teams. Having hosted both GSCC and the Manchester Community College’s New Hampshire CyberSecurity Symposium in the same tenant every year since, there’s a good number of guests in the tenant that all represent a decent targeted mailing list for such events.
In the meantime, while Microsoft has done a fantastic job of touting CoPilot for Visual Studio, I found that Copilot had no understanding of the latest Graph libraries. How ironic that the immense greatness of Copilot stumbles on the immense greatness of new library updates, but that’s something to explore in another post.
While the invitation automation code is messy, and not clean enough for publishing, I was then in a situation where I had a bunch of calendar invitations, and it was really hard to figure out who had accepted, who had declined, and who had ignored.
So, I wrote a console utility to find and filter all the invitations, so that I could then follow up appropriately. This code will eventually become the basis of a re-write for the invitation itself, because I like the updates to the Graph API (which I didn’t use in the part that sends the invitations). Anyway, here’s the GitHub hosted Gist including the project file that shows the package/versions I used to arrive here.
A retrospective in software development methodology is a look back at a project cycle. Usually, a retrospective refers to a formal meeting held at the end of a development cycle. Retrospectives provide context for where you are, and can help you figure out where course adjustments might be needed.
I’m going to start a series of project retrospective blog posts. My intent is to go a bit beyond the standard “lessons learned” aspect of a classic case study by discussing ways to address those lessons learned if I were delivering on the same requirements today.
I understand there’s some risk in this. The very nature of talking about “what I’d do different today” is a dynamic target. The answer could be different tomorrow, when you’re reading this. Perhaps that’ll be another chance to revisit the topic.
In these posts, I’m going to go over my own project history and do a full post-mortem on whole project deliveries. In order to protect potential client property, I’ll generally avoid identifying the client I did the work for and/or any publicly known project name. Teammates familiar with the projects will be able to identify them, but that’s ok.
Whenever working on a longer-term, non-trivial application, it’s inevitable that before the project is completed, technical debt sets in. Most commonly, some of the components are obsoleted by newer versions of tools used in the project, and there’s no immediate need or budget to update it. As long as those tools are still supported, it’s generally de-prioritized as a problem for another day. Longer term, everything is eventually obsoleted.
Another inevitable part of code development is the classic “if I had it to do over again” aspect. This is a big-picture extension on the old “Make it work, make it right, make it fast” practice. The first time through a project, there’s always “make it work” moves that end up being what gets delivered, without opportunity to get to the “make it right” / “make it fast” cycles. If I had the project to do over again, I’d “make it more right” or “make it faster” by doing ‘X’.
Likewise, every project cycle has its ups and downs in terms of team interaction. Some times folks are on the ball, and the code flows. Other times, there’s what we call blockers… things that hold up progress.
A blocker could be any number of things.
A common blocker is missing or incomplete requirements. It’s hard for a programmer to teach a computer to do work if the programmer doesn’t know how to do that work.
Another common blocker is access or permissions. A programmer might have a requirement to develop code that depends on another service. If that’s the case, the programmer might be able to build an abstraction of that service, but eventually will need permission to access that service in some form to do integration testing.
In this case, I’ll still take the classic retrospective approach. I’ll address the following questions:
What did we set out to do?
How and why did we deviate from plan?
What worked?
What didn’t work?
What would we like to do next time?
How could we improve what worked?
How will we minimize the risks of what didn’t work?
How will we address any technical debt incurred?
Some retrospectives avoid management in order to avoid addressing these questions politically. In better situations, some representative of management and/or project stakeholders are included in order to get a more complete view of the project.
In my posts on the topic, it’ll just be my perspective, and I’ll be addressing the questions holistically. Having completed the projects and disbanded the delivery teams, with minor name changing to protect the innocent, politics need no longer apply.
I’ll admit, there’s some self-gratification in doing these post-mortems publicly. I’ll be able to show off experience, and hopefully grab the attention of folks who’d like to produce similar projects. My hope is to inspire more of the latter and spark up the conversation around how to apply similar solutions (preferably with the “desired state” improvements).
A lot of folks are familiar with Cortana, Microsoft’s AI bot that’s integrated into Windows 10. Cortana was inspired by a character from the video game franchise Halo. The Halo character known as Cortana was a “Smart AI”, an artificial persona, and asset of the game’s main protagonist. Apparently, there were others of her kind. Among them were Isabel, Mo Ye, Serena, and Iona.
I’ve been considering building a chatbot based on tools available to me as a bot developer. I’m not about to try building my own “Cortana”… but why not evolve a “proof of concept” that could even extend Cortana functionality…? and what better name to give it than something inspired by the same concept. I might even give Iona some of the features of the Halo character; most notably her alter ego that she uses to disguise herself as a much simpler bot. We’ll see how that pans out. For now, Iona is a much simpler bot…
I created this page partially because I wanted to publish the bot in Teams, and need a page describing the utility.
Early toying with Teams integration is going well so far:
I can’t believe I haven’t blogged this out, yet. I’ve been building chatbots for clients for years now, and presenting to the tech community on the topic at least as long.
For a while, I was doing “Bot in a Day” workshops, all over the country. Held at Microsoft Technology Centers in places like Boston, Reston, Philly… I just realized the last one I did was over a year ago, now, in Irvine, California.
The reason we don’t need to do the day long workshops anymore is because everything we did (and more!) in “Bot in a Day” can now be done reliably and repeatably in minutes… We do this using the latest iteration of the “Enterprise Template”, now known as the “Virtual Assistant Template”.
Ok, so the one-time setup can be a bit longer than an hour… but that’s (mostly) one time. If you are a C# dev, especially in the ASP.NET Core space, you probably have most of the tools installed already, anyway.
Anyway, I’ve been doing variations on this “Bot in an Hour” theme, using Virtual Assistant Template, all over New England, and will soon be taking it on the road to Washington DC, where I’ll be doing the shtick for Ignite the Tour in February 2020.
So the Virtual Assistant Template is a very quick way to build out some meaty bones of an enterprise-grade chat bot, especially in C# (though a TypeScript version is also available).
I won’t try to do what its own documentation does well, at this point. Rather, I’ll point you to that documentation.
Here’s my presentation slides from Boston Code Camp, which was on November 23rd, 2019. It’s more complete than the stripped down version I presented as a workshop at Global AI Bootcamp 2019 today (December 14th) at MIT.
In addition to the “Welcome to the Virtual Assistant Template” presentation for Ignite the Tour, I’ll be doing a similar presentation for Granite State NH .NET Devs on December 19th at the Microsoft Store in Salem, NH.
This is a programmer’s blog, in general. I often get down to bits & bytes of computer programming techniques. I want to take a moment to consider this, though, to help some of my less technically focused friends.
Unless your company is directly hawking tech related services or products, you might not think of yourself as a “tech” company. Even if you sell via digital marketplaces such as websites, you might not think of yourself as a “tech” company. Can you get away with rolling without considering technology in your strategy?
I get it. You probably don’t provide tools for computer programmers, or computer hardware builders. You have a savvy friend who helps you with your company web site, and another one who helps you decide what laptop model to give your top staff.
That said, you have competition that’s constantly re-inventing YOUR business model with technology. Even if a startup doesn’t come out of the woodwork to take a crack at your market, a goliath like Amazon is likely already stirring the pot. By cutting across every market in the known universe, Amazon may not technically be a monopoly, but they are using technology (and especially Artificial Intelligence) to scale and stack the odds against you.
What is a CTO? A Chief Technology Officer is a title and role usually associated with someone in the executive suite of a generally publicly traded company. That said, a CTO can be a role of a privately held company, as well.
What does a CTO do, exactly? The specifics of the roles differ from company to company… especially in larger enterprises that can afford to have these roles distributed over a larger team of individuals. The following is a general description of what a CTO does. In many larger companies, a CTO role may be split across a team, with teammates having titles like Chief Intellectual Property Officer, Chief Security Officer, Chief Information Officer, and such.
The bottom line for these roles is to do what any CxO role does; improve the overall value of the organization to its stakeholders, within some aspect of technology.
Chief Technology Officer
A CTO “chief technology officer” is responsible, at the topmost level, for some or all of following:
Business strategy from a technological viewpoint.
First and foremost, a CTO is responsible for making sure technology serves the business needs and strategies of the company.
This means keeping an eye on technologies, their benefits, how much they cost, how they play together with technologies already at play in your company. Where possible it may even mean being aware of high-level technologies at play in your competitor’s companies.
This also means understanding the total costs and return on investment. In the way that a home renovator should be making sure a renovation project adds to the resale value of your home, a CTO should be making sure technical aspects of business strategy add to the “resale” value of your business.
Is there an appliance that would do the trick?
Is there a service?
Which solution costs the most up front?
Which will have the best total cost of ownership?
Should we build our own solution?
Should we hire a contractor to build a solution for us?
Which will provide the best strategic / competitive advantage?
Is there an opportunity for Artificial Intelligence
Which cloud provider(s) have offer the best value for your needs?
Technical evangelism
This is about being the technical face of the company which can aid in partnership relations, cross-partnership automation, technical talent hiring, big-picture technical vendor selection, and mergers and acquisitions.
This also means helping other employees adopt new technology solutions, and train them to use them correctly.
Technical security
There is a balance between security/risk and convenience/reward that every technology solution needs to strike. The CTO is responsible for overseeing that balance related to technology.
Technical security is also about maintaining the trust of the people who use the solutions, that the solution is correct, does the needed job, and does so while limiting the company’s risks.
Technical project oversight
While a CTO isn’t a generally a project manager in the classic sense, the CTO does oversee the technical aspects of the project. This includes helping to guide project requirements, making sure implementers have the tools they need to get the job done, and making sure project decisions are practical in terms of budget and return on investment.
It’s also about making sure projects are built according to requirements and needs, and remain on strategy as they are being built.
Technical review of vendor and product selection falls in the area.
Technical debt management
No technical decision comes without some recurring cost. This recurring cost is typically a trade-off; the lower the up-front cost, the higher the technical debt tends to be. Sometimes technical debt is a subscription fee. Other times, technical debt can be in the form of a sub-process that must be done “manually” because it costs too much to automate.
As solutions age, they become less competitive, thus contributing to technical debt.
Integrations between systems are often contributors to technical debt. Proper analysis will show which integrations should be automated, and which can be left to “manual” workflows.
Technical team management
A CTO is often responsible for helping to identify and hire candidates for internal positions, including technical systems implementers and integrators.
A CTO needs to know when to delegate. Delegation may be in terms of individual tasks to teammates, or project management.
A CTO is not responsible for having all the answers on the tip of their tongue, but for knowing how to find appropriate expertise within a reasonable time frame as needed.
There’s a number of reasons why bringing a CTO on staff might seem difficult.
One way to get started is to consider bringing a consultant on board to serve in the role.
Such a consultant will
be able to work part time with you while demands are lower, potentially splitting their own needs across other clients like you, thus lowering your costs.
be focused on the guidance and success of your business strategies while working for you.
be willing to sign non disclosure and non-compete agreements.
be ready to help you find a permanent placement for the role as the role grows into the need.
perform all the functions of a classic CTO while in this capacity for you.
In conclusion, there’s a no reason any company of any size today should not think of themselves as a technology company. Further, as such, having a person in the role of a Chief Technology Officer is more than practical. In all but the smallest of businesses, it’s fully necessary.
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start writing!
OK, that’s not exactly true. I didn’t write the above block of text.
But this is a good place to do some explaining, so I’ll keep it, and go forward.
My world has been a little off the normal path lately.
My preferred state is heads-down hammering out solutions with teammates.
Instead, I’ve been back & forth between virtual assistant / chat bot projects, an Angular JS (on SharePoint!) project, a touch of Xamarin, and a hobby project built on Uno Platform.
In between, I’ve been trying to re-brand my users groups, get Granite State Code Camp rolling, and prep for Ignite, Ignite Tour, while attending & absorbing Mastery (Insight’s leadership conference, held in Arizona last week).
It’s these re-brandings and event org notes I’ll chat about here, but first, back to the “Hello World!”.
You may notice this site, (along with this blog) has changed URLs. Sponsorship funds for keeping the domain and site hosted by WordPress itself got low enough that I couldn’t justify the several hundred dollar renewal. As an MVP, I was able to request an Azure sponsorship, and it was granted. As a result, I spun up a WordPress instance in Azure. I’ll take responsibility for botching the domain name transfer, so this site is now www.granitestateusersgroups.net (instead of .org).
I apologize for the 404’s that will inevitably result.
Hopefully this will last a while. When this sponsorship dries up (as all sponsorships do at some point) I’ll be able to move it to wherever the cheese shows up when that time comes.
For now, I’m psyched to have it hosted directly on Azure, including the DNS management.
Now for the users group rebrandings.
The former Granite State Windows Platform App Developers (also known as #WPDevNH) is now Granite State-NH.NET . While the focus of the #WPDevNH group had been the Windows 10 API (also known an Universal Windows Platform), Microsoft has soft-abandoned UWP, in favor of the ACTUALLY “Universal” .NET Core. Starting with .NET Core 3 (in beta now, GA due in a matter of weeks), the things that made UWP awesome will be baked into .NET Core. When .NET Core 3 gets updated to “.NET 5”, the platform will be almost as “universal” as Java, without the… JVM.
We have what feels like a string of conferences to review for the next several meetups. Xamarin Conf just occurred with a review due for it. Uno Conference is coming mid September, and we’ll do a review of that, as well. October will have the Microsoft-hosted .NET Conference. and November will have Microsoft Ignite. All of these are review worthy, so that will take us right into the holidays, believe it or not!
Likewise, the former Granite State SharePoint Users Group (#NHSPUG) will tentatively be known as the Granite State Microsoft 365 Users Group. This comes with a leadership change for the group. Julie Turner stepped down, and handed reigns over to Derek Cash-Peterson. Julie and Derek are both former BlueMetal teammates of mine, now both with Sympraxis Consulting. I will continue to work with Derek on this group, as well as with Derek, Julie, Marc Anderson (also of Sympraxis), and others on SharePoint Saturday New England 2019. This Granite State Microsoft 365 Users Group feels a little over due. Our sister groups in the Boston area flipped branding to “Office 365” several years ago. We kinda skipped that trend when Microsoft lumped Windows into the offering and dubbed it “Microsoft 365”. In a sense, both the users groups I directly support will indirectly support Windows usage & development, now. I say “tentatively”, mostly cause I don’t recall if the last conversation I had with Derek about it counted as “official”.
Both these re-brandings bring the two users groups much more in line with our patron sponsor’s (Microsoft’s) exciting plans for the future. I’m psyched to help usher in these changes.
Now that this website is settling in on Azure, we’ve called the kickoff meeting for the organization of the Granite State Code Camp, already on the calendar for Saturday, November 2nd at Manchester Community College. Please stay tuned for the major milestones to be announced:
Call For Speakers
Call For Sponsors
Attendee Registration
All of those should be coming very shortly.
I’ll get the rest of this site updated with 2019 information soon. Let me know what I’m forgetting & Stay tuned!
This looks like a fantastic lineup of events being presented in the week of May 16th-23rd, generously hosted by our friends at the Microsoft Store in Salem, NH. (I’m not involved, nor is Granite State Users Groups… I’m just posting to help get the word out for a worthy cause.)
Microsoft at The Mall at Rockingham Park | Ability Week 2019
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Harry
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As many folks in my community may already be aware, I’ve been building chatbots with my team, using the Microsoft Bot Framework, a lot lately. In doing so, we’ve encountered a common issue across multiple clients.
Cognitive Content Crisis
While many peolpe are worrying about lofty issues around artificial intelligence like security, privacy, and ethics (all worthy to be sure), I’m considering something more pragmatic here. Folks go into a cognitive agent build without considering content, how it relates to AI and AI development, and how to manage it. While some of my clients with more mature projects have taken a crack at resolving this issue with custom solutions, these custom solutions are often resource intensive, fail to consider all the business requriements, and end up becoming an unnecessary bottleneck to further development. Worse, waiting till a project phase-2 or phase-3 to address it compounds the trouble.
Sadly, there’s often an enterprise content management system (ECMS) in place that could be used, instead, right from pre phase-1. With a reasonable effort, a well-featured existing ECMS can be customized along side your build out, saving a massive effort later.
The Backstory
If you check out that Microsoft Bot Framework website, one of the first things you’ll notice is that building conversational agents is a process that cuts across a number of development disciplines… and the first one that typically gets highlighted is Artificial Intelligence.
Artificial Intelligence around conversational agents could include anything from visual identification & classification to moderation, sentiment analysis, and advanced search, but it predominantly revolves around language tools… especially LUIS, QnA Maker, Azure Search, and others.
At this point, it helps to think about what Artificial Intelligence is. Artificial Intelligince is about experience. In a conversational artificial intelligence, that content is human readable, social, and web like. Experience is content…. Conversational content.
In fact, it’s almost web like. A user typically opens a chat window (which correlates a bit to a browser) and types an utterance (query). The bot catches such utterances, and depending on a number of factors of origination, data state / context, identity, and authorizations, generally produces a text based response.
Getting More Specific
In the case of a bot designed to coach folks with a chronic disease, for example, a user might ask a bot “Can I eat chocolate cake?”. The bot gets this query, and parses it into language elements… which looks something like “can I eat” as an ‘intent’, and “chocolate cake” as an entity. The bot then brings in a rules-set described by conditions it knows about the user (what disease(s) are being managed), and what the bot knows about the users current state (perhaps the blood glucose level if they’re diabetic). Based on the conditions against the rules, the response must be produced. If you have a sophistocated bot, you might have a per-entity response… Take a response like “OH, chocolate cake is wonderful, but your blood sugar level is a bit high right now. Unless you can find something in a low-carb, sugar free variety, I wouldn’t recommend it, but here’s a recipe you might try instead.” That content (including the suggested recipe) must be authored by subject matter experts, moderated by peers, approved (potentially by regulatory and maybe even legal teams), tagged to match the rules engine expectations… much like web content.
Also note, the rules engine itself is also content in a sense. In order to let subject matter experts have a say in tweaking and tuning responses, (what’s a high blood glucose level? What’s too much sugar for a high blood glucose level, et al.) These rules should be expressed as content a subject matter expert could understand and update.
Another common scenario we’re seeing is HR content. Imagine you’ve got a company that produced an HR handbook every year. Well, actually, you’re a conglomerate that has a couple dozen handbooks, and each employee needs answers specific to the one for their division… Not only do you have to tag the contet by year, but by division, and even problem domain. (Imagine trying to answer the question “what is my deductible?” It’s easy enough for a bot to understand that this relates to insurance provided through benefits. The answer might be different depending on whether you mean the PPO or the PMO medical plan… or is that a dental plan question? What about vision? They probably mean this year. Depending on the division they’re a part of (probably indicated by a claim in their authorization token), they might have different providers, as well.
Back to Development
In the development world, not only do you have the problem domain complexities present, but you also have different environments to push content to… the Dev environment is the sandbox a coder works in actively, and it’s only as stable as the developer’s last compile. Then there might be environments named things like DIT, SIT, UAT, QA, and PROD. To do things right, you should update content in each of these environments discretely… updating content in QA should not affect content in SIT, UAT, or PROD.
Information Architecture
Information architecture (IA) is the structural design of shared information environments; the art and science of organizing and labelling websites, intranets, online communities and software to support usability and findability; and an emerging community of practice focused on bringing principles of design, architecture and information science to the digital landscape.[1] Typically, it involves a model or concept of information that is used and applied to activities which require explicit details of complex information systems. These activities include library systems and database development.
We’ll add artificial intelligence cognitive models and knowledge bases, especially for conversational AI, to that definition. Note that some AI applications need big data solutions. Most ECMS products are not big data solutions.
Enterprise Content Management Systems
There’s a lot of Enterprise Content Management Systems out there, many of which would be suitable for the task of handling the needs of most conversational AI content management systems.
My career path and community involvement causes me to lean toward SharePoint. If you break down the feature set, it makes sense.
Ability for SMEs to manage experience data easily without lots of training to understand create/read/update/delete (CRUD) operations
Ability to customize content type structures
Ability to concurrently manage individual experience data items
Ability to globalize the content (to support multiple languages)
Ability to customize workflows (think SME review approval, regulatory, even legal approval) on a per-experience item basis
Ability to mark up each experience item with additional metadata both for cognitive processing purposes and for deployment purposes
All of this content is then exposed to REST services, so you get the ability to integrate automation to bridge the content into the cognitive models
It’s often said that if you design your data structures properly, the rest of your application will practically build itself. This is no exception. While you will have to build your own automation to bridge the gap between your CMS and your cognitive model environments, you’ll be able to do this easily using REST services.
While you may need to come up with your own granularity, you’ll probably find some clear hits, especially in the area of QnA Maker… every Question / Answer experience pair probably fits nicely as a single content entity. You’ll probably have to add metadata to support QnA maker’s filtering, and the like.
Likewise with LUIS, you may find that each Intent and the related utterances is a single content entity. LUIS, being more sophistocated, will also need related entities and synonyms modeled in content data.
I’ve seen other CMS system used. Most notably CosmosDB and Contentful. Another choice might be some kind of data mart. All of these cases require a heavy investment in building out a UI layer for your SMEs. SharePoint takes care of the bulk of that part for you.
Got a project you want to start working on? Don’t forget to account for content management early on. As always, reach out to me if you need advice on this or any other aspect of building out a solution involving technologies like these… Connect on Twitter, Linkedin or the like…
Jim Wilcox – 2019-2020 Microsoft MVP – Developer Technologies
This showed up in the mail today! Despite the April 1st date, it’s not an April Fools’ gag after all! I’ve only ever seen one of these trophies in person before this one. I’ve been trying to stay chill about it…. but heck, here it is…
