Azure Weekly

Issue #450 - 21st January 2024

Thankfully a much smaller edition than last week, but still packed for of great content. First up, AI. Future-Proofing AI: Strategies for Effective Model Upgrades in Azure OpenAI, some very useful Security Best Practices for GenAI Applications OpenAI in Azure, and a post covering how the barriers to entry for orgs wishing to adopt M365 Copilot have been removed: Expanding availability of Copilot for Microsoft 365.

In Analytics, the inaugural Microsoft Fabric conference has been announced: save your seat at the ultimate Fabric learning event, and a useful guide showing how to enable Copilot in Fabric for Everyone

In Serverless, .NET Aspire was announced late last year, and although the positioning is a little confused, it seems to be gaining traction. There's a useful article showing how to deploy apps to Azure Container Apps easily with .NET Aspire. A helpful post on Migrating to v4 Azure Functions Node.js with TypeScript, and a post that solves a problem I came across last week when trying to upgrade one of our internal projects: Azure Functions: .NET 8 Functions worker is missing from the Azure Function project in Visual Studio 2022.

Azure AD changed to "Entra" and the pace of innovation has continued to accelerate, so this blog post is very welcome: Microsoft Entra's Top 50 Features of 2023. Graph databases are an incredibly powerful tool. There's lots of bleeding edge research about the power of Knowledge Graphs and LLMs, but graphs can also be used for more classical problem solving too. This is a great post about such a scenario: How Kusto graph semantics can help solve a classic graph problem: the Seven Bridges of Knigsberg.

Finally, I wanted to highlight a book about Reactive Programming, that we've just made available for free. Introduction to Reactive Extensions for .NET 2nd Edition (2024). Rx.NET (160 million downloads and counting) was created by Microsoft's Cloud Programmability Group in 2009 for a Cloud Native future which has now arrived. We (endjin) became the core maintainers of the project in January 2023, and we spent 2023 H2 working on the 2nd edition of this book, which is now almost 100k words in length, has new marble and sequence diagrams explaining many of the operators, and examples which focus on cloud native scenarios such as IoT, and stream data processing. The book is available for FREE as PDF, EPUB, Online, and on GitHub. Please download and enjoy, or share with any .NET Developers in your org.