Azure Weekly

Issue #431 - 13th August 2023

To start with, a few interesting articles about Fabric; the July update has over 60 new features, so as you can tell, things are moving at pace! From an architectural perspective, Barry Smart examines How Does Microsoft Fabric Measure Up To Data Mesh? James Serra dives into Serving layers with a data lake, and Kevin Chant looks to Prepare Azure DevOps for Microsoft Fabric Git integration.

In the AI space, there's a useful Getting Started with Azure OpenAI and GPT Models guide, and I published an extract from endjin's weekly internal Show & Tell meeting where Ian Griffiths wanted to cut through the hype and understand the fundamentals of building a GPT in A Brief Intro to Tensors & GPT with TorchSharp.

Finally, Visual Studio 2022 – 17.7 Now Available. Why am I highlighting this? A year ago, we were looking at modernizing some of our internal applications to use Dapr. We built some proof of concepts, and although we loved Dapr, we found the "inner dev loop" experience in Visual Studio too slow. Every time we made a change, we had to rebuild the containers, which then had to re-initialize, and even with powerful devrigs it just added too much friction. I added a comment on this GitHub issue Will DockerTools ever support ".NET Hot Reload"? I spotted an update saying that Ctrl+F5 support for Hot Reload is now available in Visual Studio 2022 17.7, with full F5 Hot Reload support coming in VS 2022 17.8. I dusted off a multi-container Dapr demo and was exceedingly pleased to see it worked as described.