The art of simplicity
Microsoft.Extensions.AI–Part III–Tool calling| bartwullems.blogspot.com
A feature that a lot of IoC container libraries support but that was missing in the default DI container provided by Microsoft is the suppor...| bartwullems.blogspot.com
The AI coding assistant landscape has been quietly wrestling with a fragmentation problem. If you're working with multiple AI tools, you've likely noticed the proliferation of instruction files cluttering your repositories: .cursorrules for Cursor, CLAUDE.md for Claude, .github/copilot-instructions.md for GitHub Copilot, and more. Each tool requires its own special configuration file, creating maintenance overhead and scattered documentation.| The art of simplicity
When working with Entity Framework Core, understanding change tracking behavior is crucial for both performance and data consistency. While I was ware of the AsNoTracking() method, I discovered a lesser-known but powerful alternative: AsNoTrackingWithIdentityResolution() during a code review. | The art of simplicity
Welcome to the final post in our file upload security series. We've covered content type validation, file size validation, and file signature validation—each providing a crucial layer of defense. Today, we're implementing the final and most sophisticated protection: malware scanning using Windows Antimalware Scan Interface (AMSI).| The art of simplicity
When working with Azure DevOps repositories, Personal Access Tokens (PATs) offer an alternative to traditional authentication. Although I would not recommend them for general usage, there are some scenario's where a PAT is a secure option providing security through scoped permissions, expiration dates, and the ability to revoke access without changing your primary credentials.| The art of simplicity
In our previous posts, we covered content type validation and file size validation as the first two layers of defense in our file upload security pipeline. Today, we're diving into what I consider the most critical validation step: file signature validation, also known as "magic number" validation. This is where we stop trusting what files claim to be and start verifying what they actually are.| The art of simplicity
In the first post of this series, we explored how content type validation serves as the first line of defense against malicious file uploads. Today, we're tackling another critical security concern: file size validation and why it's essential for protecting your application from resource exhaustion attacks.| The art of simplicity
File upload functionality is a common feature in web applications, but it's also one of the most common attack vectors. A recent security review of our applications revealed some vulnerabilities in our file upload handling that needed our attention. This is the first post in a series where I'll share how we systematically secured our file upload functionality.| The art of simplicity
Yes! The new Visual Studio 2026 edition is available in preview (now called Insiders). I'll take some time this week to walk through some of...| bartwullems.blogspot.com
To produce quality software it is really important to understand the concept of Technical Debt. Let’s see how Ward Cunningham explains it: ...| bartwullems.blogspot.com
Last week we had a production issue at one of my customers where a server went offline due to high memory usage. So far the bad news. The go...| bartwullems.blogspot.com
When you see the memory usage increase in your applications, it can be a challenge to find the root cause. In that case capturing and analyz...| bartwullems.blogspot.com
If you want to create and share your own model through Ollama or tweak an existing model, you need to understand the Ollama Model file. The ...| bartwullems.blogspot.com
Yes! The new Visual Studio 2026 edition is available in preview (now called Insiders). I'll take some time this week to walk through some of the features I like and maybe some of the rough edges I discover along the way.| The art of simplicity
In our efforts to improve the (code) quality of our applications, we started an initiative to get all our teams integrate their projects in SonarQube. We have SonarQube running for a long time inside our organization, but adoption remained fragmented. The initiative turned out quite successful, but as a consequence, we encountered some issues with SonarQube.| The art of simplicity
Semantic Kernel was the first AI library specifically created to build AI agent and chat experiences in .NET. Later the .NET team started working on Microsoft.Extensions.AI as a common abstraction layer for integrating AI capabilities in your .NET applications. As a consequence, these 2 libraries have some overlap and similar abstractions exist in both libraries. | The art of simplicity
Yes! The new Visual Studio 2026 edition is available in preview (now called Insiders). I'll take some time this week to walk through some of the features I like and maybe some of the rough edges I discover along the way.| The art of simplicity
Yes! The new Visual Studio 2026 edition is available in preview (now called Insiders). I'll take some time this week to walk through some of the features I like and maybe some of the rough edges I discover along the way.| The art of simplicity
Yes! The new Visual Studio 2026 edition is available in preview (now called Insiders). I'll take some time this week to walk through some of the features I like and maybe some of the rough edges I discover along the way.| The art of simplicity
.NET Full Framework updates on your server(s) become available as Windows Updates and can be pushed through centralized tools like Microsoft...| bartwullems.blogspot.com
Yes! The new Visual Studio 2026 edition is available in preview (now called Insiders). I'll take some time this week to walk through some of the features I like and maybe some of the rough edges I discover along the way. | The art of simplicity
In one of our applications we are connecting with LDAP through System.DirectoryServices.AccountManagement.. This code worked fine for years until we had to make the switch from LDAP to LDAPS and incorporate SSL in our connections. | The art of simplicity
The XUnit team decided to do a major overhaul of the XUnit libraries and created completely new V3 packages. So don't expect backwards compatibility but a significant architectural shift that brings improved performance, better isolation, and modernized APIs to .NET testing. While the migration requires some work, the benefits should make it worthwhile for most projects.| The art of simplicity
The XUnit team decided to do a major overhaul of the XUnit libraries and created completely new V3 packages. So don't expect backwards compatibility but a significant architectural shift that brings improved performance, better isolation, and modernized APIs to .NET testing. While the migration requires some work, the benefits should make it worthwhile for most projects.| The art of simplicity
The XUnit team decided to do a major overhaul of the XUnit libraries and created completely new V3 packages. So don't expect backwards compa...| bartwullems.blogspot.com
Serilog is one of the most popular structured logging libraries for .NET, offering excellent performance and flexibility. While Serilog comes with many built-in sinks for common destinations like files, databases, and cloud services, we created a custom sink to guarantee compatibility with an existing legacy logging solution. However as we noticed some performance issues, we decided to rewrite the implementation to use a batched sink.| The art of simplicity
Ollama remains my go to tool to run LLM’s locally. With the latest release the Ollama team introduced a user interface. This means you no lo...| bartwullems.blogspot.com
I promised to continue my blog post from yesterday about Microsoft.Extensions.AI.Evaluation. Today we have a look at caching the responses and reporting.| The art of simplicity
Back from holiday with charged batteries, we continue our journey exploring the Microsoft.Extensions.AI library. Today we have a look at evaluating AI models.| The art of simplicity
In a recent code review, I stumbled upon something that made me pause: a developer had included the original AI prompt as a comment block ab...| bartwullems.blogspot.com
I always made the assumption that in some way we as humans take rational decisions in a business context. Maybe we do something foolish at h...| bartwullems.blogspot.com
At my current employer we are still using a local build server to host our Azure Pipeline agents and run our builds. Having multiple agents ...| bartwullems.blogspot.com
Due to the licensing changes for AutoMapper, we decided to make the switch to Mapster. Although most changes where rather obvious and easy t...| bartwullems.blogspot.com
As a software architect I've worked with multiple product managers over the years. Most of them position themselves as the "voice of the cus...| bartwullems.blogspot.com
As I gladly accept any kind of performance improvement I can get in my applications, I like to use the System.Text.Json source generator to ...| bartwullems.blogspot.com
The two-ear Product Manager: Why balanced listening is your superpower| bartwullems.blogspot.com
A few years ago I blogged about enabling gzip compression for ASP.NET MVC applications; https://bartwullems.blogspot.com/2013/03/enable-dyna...| bartwullems.blogspot.com
I'm on a journey discovering what is possible with the Microsoft.Extensions.AI library and you are free to join. Yesterday I looked at how ...| bartwullems.blogspot.com
Last week I finally started my journey with Microsoft.Extensions.AI after having used only Semantic Kernel for all my agentic AI workflows...| bartwullems.blogspot.com
I picked up a bug today where we got a NullReferenceException . I thought this was a good scenario where I could ask GitHub Copilot to find ...| bartwullems.blogspot.com
Imagine learning programming concepts not through dry textbooks or boring exercises, but by embarking on epic quests in mystical realms. Doe...| bartwullems.blogspot.com
Last year, when the AI hype really exploded, the 'go to' library to build AI solutions in .NET at that time from Microsoft was Semantic Kern...| bartwullems.blogspot.com
As rewarding coaching can be, as challenging it is. While reading the 'How to be a more effective coach?' post by JD Meier, he shared one '...| bartwullems.blogspot.com
Getting started in the world of AI development can be a challenge. Every day new libraries, models and possibilities appear. So what is your...| bartwullems.blogspot.com
Although GitHub Copilot is now available for some time in VSCode, Visual Studio and almost every other popular IDE, for a lot of people it s...| bartwullems.blogspot.com
After using the GitHub Copilot Agent mode for some time in VS Code, I finally found some time to give it a try in Visual Studio. Agent mode ...| bartwullems.blogspot.com
So far my ‘go to’ approach for using language models locally was through Ollama and Semantic Kernel. With the announcement of Foundry Local ...| bartwullems.blogspot.com
Last week I was watching a panel session recorded at the GOTO conference last year. During this session Daniel North, the originator of BDD,...| bartwullems.blogspot.com
For the last 2 days I have been struggling with a breaking change I had in my ASP.NET Core web api that caused the consuming application to ...| bartwullems.blogspot.com
If you are new to GitHub Copilot or other AI coding assistants, it can be a challenge to get good results as you are still learning on how t...| bartwullems.blogspot.com
After upgrading the .NET Aspire NuGet packages to the latest version on one of my projects, I started to get the following compiler error: ...| bartwullems.blogspot.com
While working in Visual Studio today I noticed a message appear at the top my idea. The message stated the following: Speed up your git ex...| bartwullems.blogspot.com
Let's continue our joruney in discovering Scalar . Today I want to talk about how we can integrate security. Most API's that we build today ...| bartwullems.blogspot.com
A long time ago, we made the decision to implement some features using batch processes that were scheduled to run at night (most of them as ...| bartwullems.blogspot.com
While everyone is focusing all the announcements at Build 2025, I'm still processing some of the older recently announced features. A featur...| bartwullems.blogspot.com
Today while explaining my son how our heating system works, it brought me back to my earlier post about organization charts. Same as in hea...| bartwullems.blogspot.com
In this post I continue my investigation of using Scalar as an alternative to Swashbuckle that I was using before to expose my OpenAPI metad...| bartwullems.blogspot.com
In boardrooms and mission statements across the globe, "servant leadership" has become the philosophy du jour. Leaders proudly proclaim thei...| bartwullems.blogspot.com
With the release of .NET 9 , Microsoft has removed Swashbuckle from the default Web API templates. If you have never heard about Swashbuckl...| bartwullems.blogspot.com
Today I lost a lot of time investigating a stupid(aren’t they all?) issue with some failing tests on the build server. The strange thing was...| bartwullems.blogspot.com
I know, I know, .NET 10 is already in preview and I am still catching up on what was added to .NET 9.0. Today while upgrading an older appli...| bartwullems.blogspot.com
This week a colleague contacted me with an issue he encountered after upgrading to .NET 8.0. On the project involved we were using the WsFed...| bartwullems.blogspot.com
I got contacted by someone from my team that INSERTs were failing on one of our database instances. A look at Application Insights showed th...| bartwullems.blogspot.com
Yesterday on my way home, I was listening to the SoftwareCaptains podcast episode with Mathias Verraes (sorry, the episode is in Dutch). On...| bartwullems.blogspot.com
A while back I talked about a memory leak we had in one of our applications. As a consequence, it brought the full production environment t...| bartwullems.blogspot.com
Today I had to make a fix in an old project that was still using Team Foundation Version Control (TFVC). It immediately made me appreciate G...| bartwullems.blogspot.com
I don't see criticism and (a certain level of) conflict as unhealthy in an organization. The contrary! It is when people stop raising their ...| bartwullems.blogspot.com
The Phi family keeps growing with the recent introduction of the Phi-4-Reasoning, Phi-4-mini and Phi-4-multimodal models. These new models i...| bartwullems.blogspot.com
I don’t know what happened but somehow I succeeded to miss the latest .NET Conf Focus edition. And this time, it was all about a topic that ...| bartwullems.blogspot.com
Yesterday I wrote about a pet project I'm working that is using Angular 19. Turns out that some things have changed compared to previous ver...| bartwullems.blogspot.com
For a pet project I'm working on, I created a new Angular application using Angular 19. I used the same Github Actions setup I was using for...| bartwullems.blogspot.com
The last weeks I'm thinking a lot about organization design and how to improve/optimize our organization. I see well-intentioned improvement...| bartwullems.blogspot.com
Through the MCP integration in GitHub Copilot, your AI agent is no longer limited to interactions with your IDE but can interact with your l...| bartwullems.blogspot.com
My boss sent me a link to the following Youtube video: I especially liked the following quote in the presentation: “Take control and...| bartwullems.blogspot.com
Part of my job is working on presales activities. Typically, this involves answering RFI's and RFP's by creating solution designs, project p...| bartwullems.blogspot.com
The AI development landscape is evolving at an astonishing pace, with new tools emerging every day across every aspect of the development p...| bartwullems.blogspot.com
Every software project accumulates technical debt. Like financial debt, it compounds over time if left unaddressed, making future changes in...| bartwullems.blogspot.com
Last week I had the opportunity to participate and speak at Future Tech 2025. And although it was the 7th edition, it was my first time ther...| bartwullems.blogspot.com
As I like to experiment a lot with AI, I always have to be careful and keep my token usage under control. And although the token cost has de...| bartwullems.blogspot.com
Although the csproj file evolved and simplified a lot over time, the Visual Studio solution file (.sln) remained an ugly file format full of...| bartwullems.blogspot.com
I like to read a lot . Next to all the fiction novels, I typically go back and forth between technical and more leadership books. The last b...| bartwullems.blogspot.com
Reducing the carbon footprint and CO2 emission of our (cloud) workloads, is a responsibility of all of us. If you are running a Kubernetes c...| bartwullems.blogspot.com
As a developer there are a lot of small tasks you need to do as part of your coding, debugging and testing activities. DevToys is an offli...| bartwullems.blogspot.com
I’m really bad at remembering emoji’s. So here is cheat sheet with all emoji’s that can be used in tools that support the github emoji markd...| bartwullems.blogspot.com
.jpeg)
One of the most precious gifts I got from my parents is a love for books and reading. It's a gift that keeps on giving, opening doors to new...| bartwullems.blogspot.com
Today I was helping a colleague to get an existing application containerized. To run the containerized workload we were using Podman Desktop...| bartwullems.blogspot.com
I'm a big fan of the Central Package Management feature of NuGet. This allows to manage your NuGet package versions centrally instead of at ...| bartwullems.blogspot.com
Of course you have provided all your developers with a Github Copilot license. But do you have a clue on how they are using it? In this post...| bartwullems.blogspot.com
Retrieval-augmented regeneration, also known as RAG, is an NLP technique that can help improve the quality of large language models (LLMs). ...| bartwullems.blogspot.com
I continue my journey on getting the most out of Github Copilot. Today I want to take a look at Copilot Edits as another way to use AI in yo...| bartwullems.blogspot.com
Last week I was listening to an Coaching For Leaders podcast when Stephen M. R. Covey was the guest. Stephen is a bestselling author and for...| bartwullems.blogspot.com
While browsing through the list of changes in .NET 9, I noticed a remark about the SearchValues functionality. I had no idea what it does s...| bartwullems.blogspot.com
I lost a lot of time today with a stupid issue I had with docker. I’m playing around with OpenUI (more about it in another post) and wanted ...| bartwullems.blogspot.com
.jpeg)
For years, hiring for cultural fit has been a cornerstone of my recruitment strategy. The idea is simple: more than focusing only on skills,...| bartwullems.blogspot.com
I'm a big fan of Ollama as a way to try and run a large language model locally. Today I got into trouble when I tried to connect to Ollama. ...| bartwullems.blogspot.com
In Azure DevOps, managing external service connections for pipelines and deployments can become complex, especially when you have multiple p...| bartwullems.blogspot.com
Yesterday I talked about OllamaSharp as an alternative (to Semantic Kernel) to talk to your Ollama endpoint using C#. The reason I wanted to...| bartwullems.blogspot.com
