Azure Weekly

Issue #411 - 26th March 2023

As you can probably guess it's an "AI all the things" week, with lots of announcements about GPT4 / OpenAI / Copilot. But there are a couple of interesting announcements. First off is the announcement of Data Wrangler for Visual Studio Code: A Power Query-Like Experience For Python People. This will be a boon for anyone do data wrangling for analytics or Machine Learning. Next is the announcement of Semantic Kernel. I dismissed this at first until I saw the article was written by Dr. John Maeda who wrote one of my favourite books: The Laws of Simplicity. There's a follow up article by Lee Stott: Unlock the Potential of AI in Your Apps with Semantic Kernel: A Lightweight SDK for LLMs. There's also a post about Upgrading from IntelliCode custom team completions models to deep learning (we have IntelliCode set up for each of our OSS projects), and of course introducing GPT-4 in Azure OpenAI Service.

Another interesting post is: How Microsoft uses Azure Maps Creator, which shows how you can map out your office space, and the potential to overlay this with real time data show where people are - which could be very using in the new hybrid working / hot desk world that lots of people are dealing with. Another big announcement is of Microsoft Loop, which requires a new M365 policy to be created in order to enable it: Learn how to enable the Microsoft Loop app, now in Public Preview. There is also an interesting post highlighting what's new in Speech Studio: Upload Your Own Videos and Audio for Captioning and Call Center Transcription. We've made use of some of these features to do transcript analysis of customer workshops and it's incredibly useful.

Three highlights of this edition are: Azure Policy for Azure Container Apps? Yes, please!, following on from my post last week about using Playwright to automate 2FA authentication, John Reilly writes Playwright, GitHub Actions and Azure Static Web Apps staging environments and there's a Building Static Web Apps with database connections: Best Practices.

Finally Barry Smart shares a write-up about the excellent SQLBits Conference that happened earlier this month, and includes a great summary of the sessions he attended.