AI in SOFTWARE ENGINEERING

10 unexpected ways to use GitHub Copilot
(GitHub Blog) GitHub Copilot is widely known for its code generation feature. Learn how the AI assistant’s abilities can extend beyond just code generation.

Business Insights

INDUSTRY RESEARCH

SAMMO: A general-purpose framework for prompt optimization
(Microsoft Research) Large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized various tasks, but prompt engineering remains a challenge. Enter SAMMO: an open-source tool that streamlines prompt optimization, especially for complex structures like Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG).

The Power of Prompting
(Microsoft Research) Microsoft discusses Prompting strategies that demonstrates how the generalist GPT-4 model can perform as a specialist on medical challenge problem benchmarks. The study shows GPT-4’s ability to outperform a leading model that was fine-tuned specifically for medical applications, on the same benchmarks and by a significant margin. 

.NET & AZURE

What's new .NET 9
(Microsoft Learning) Learn about the improvements coming in this beta release. ML.NET, C#13 and more..

GPT-4o: OpenAI's new flagship multimodeal model now in preview on Azure.
(Microsoft Blog) This groundbreaking multimodal model integrates text, vision, and audio capabilities, setting a new standard for generative and conversational AI experiences. 

What's new .NET 8
(Microsoft Learning) The successor to .NET 7, understand the runtime improvements, whats's new in the SDK, C# 12, .NET Aspire, .NET MAUI and more...

ArtificIal intelligence

Advancing transparency: Updates on responsible AI research 
(Microsoft Research) A surge of generative AI models in the past year has fueled much discussion about the impact of artificial intelligence on human history. Advances in AI have indeed challenged thinking across industries, from considering how people will function in creative roles to effects in education, medicine, manufacturing, and more. Whether exploring impressive new capabilities of large language models (LLMs) such as GPT-4 or examining the spectrum of machine learning techniques already embedded in our daily lives, researchers agree on the importance of transparency.

conversational Interfaces

Choose the right chatbot solution for your use case
(Microsoft Learning) A chatbot is an application that has written or spoken natural language as its user interface. In other words, a conversation is the means through which questions are answered, requests are serviced, and so on.

Choose an Azure Cognitive Services technology
(Microsoft Learning) Azure Cognitive Services is a set of cloud-based APIs that you can use in AI applications and data flows. It provides pretrained models that are ready to use in your applications, requiring no data and no model training on your part. The services are developed by the Microsoft AI and Research team and expose the latest deep learning algorithms. 

Microservices

Microservices Architecture
(Microsoft Learning) As the name implies, a microservices architecture is an approach to building a server application as a set of small services. That means a microservices architecture is mainly oriented to the back-end, although the approach is also being used for the front end. Each service runs in its own process and communicates with other processes using protocols such as HTTP/HTTPS, WebSockets, or AMQP.

What is the Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework for Azure?
(Microsoft Learning) This guide is an introduction to developing microservices-based applications and managing them using containers. It discusses architectural design and implementation approaches using .NET and Docker containers.

SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT

How GitHub’s Developer Experience team improved innerloop development
(GitHub Blog) GitHub's latest solution to the ubiquitous engineering problem of integration testing in a distributed service ecosystem.

How to get in the flow while coding
(GitHub Blog) Explore what flow state entails, its benefits, and three tips for reaching it the next time you code.

Migrate to cloud

Strategic Migration Assessment and Readiness Tool (SMART)
(Microsoft Learning) From business planning to training to security and governance, find out what you need to do to prepare for your Microsoft Azure migration.

Cloud Adoption Framework 
(Microsoft Learning) The Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework for Azure is a full lifecycle framework that enables cloud architects, IT professionals, and business decision makers to achieve their cloud adoption goals.