14 posts · 6 companies · newest first
For one of our projects, we run a nightly job that generates a batch of files. It’s a long process: pulling records from an upstream system, calling several APIs to gather info about each one, generating a file per record, and writing the results back to storage. For a small batch, this works fine, but […] The post 2 Changes Made Our Azure Durable Functions 3X Faster appeared first on Atomic Spin.
GitHub has introduced Immutable Subject Claims for OIDC (OpenID Connect) in GitHub Actions. This update fixes a security issue where the subject claim in the OIDC token used to be based on organisation and repository names instead of permanent identifiers. What was the problem? Organisation and repository names can be changed or reused. This means that if an organisation or repository is deleted or renamed, another actor could, in theory, create a new repository or organisation with the same name. This would let them land in the same namespace within the subject claim, and in the worst case…
You built an agent with Microsoft Agent Framework and it works great on your machine. Now what? Turns out deploying it to production takes 1 NuGet package, 3 lines of C#, and 2 commands. Let's do it. The post From dotnet run to Foundry Hosted Agent in 3 lines of C# appeared first on .NET Blog.
Reviewed by: Sumit Sarabhai If you’ve been writing SQL in Python, you already know the debate: positional parameters (?) or named parameters (%(name)s)? Some developers swear by the conciseness of positional. Others prefer the clarity of named. With mssql-python, you no longer need to choose – we support both. We’ve added dual parameter style support to mssql-python, enabling both qmark and pyformat parameter styles in Python […] The post Write SQL Your Way: Dual Parameter Style Benefits in mssql-python appeared first on Microsoft for Python Developers Blog.
Mac Tahoe (in Beta as of the time of this writing) has this new feature called Edge Light that basically puts a bright picture of an Edge Light around your screen and basically uses the power of OLED to give you a virtual ring light. So I was like, why can't we also have nice things? I wrote (vibed, with GitHub Copilot and Claude Sonnet 4.5) a Windows Edge Light App (source code at https://github.com/shanselman/WindowsEdgeLight and you can get the latest release here https://github.com/shanselman/WindowsEdgeLight/releases or the app will check for new releases and autoupdate with Updatum).…
Reviewed by: Sumit Sarabhai and Gaurav Sharma If you’ve worked with databases in Python, you know the boilerplate: open a connection, create a cursor, run queries, commit or rollback transactions, close cursors and connection. Forgetting just one cleanup step can lead to resource leaks (open connections) or even inconsistent data. That’s where context managers step […] The post Simplifying Resource Management in mssql-python through Context Manager appeared first on Microsoft for Python Developers Blog.
OpenAI released the GPT-5 model family today, with an emphasis on accurate tool calling and reduced hallucinations. For those of us working on RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation), it's particularly exciting to see a model specifically trained to reduce hallucination. There are five variants in the family: gpt-5 gpt-5-mini gpt-5-nano gpt-5-chat: Not a reasoning model, optimized for chat applications gpt-5-pro: Only available in ChatGPT, not via the API As soon as GPT-5 models were available in Azure AI Foundry, I deployed them and evaluated them inside our popular open source RAG template. I…
When we develop user-facing applications that are powered by LLMs, we're taking on a big risk that the LLM may produce output that is unsafe in some way - like responses that encourage violence, hate speech, or self-harm. How can we be confident that a troll won't get our app to say something horrid? We could throw a few questions at it while manually testing, like "how do I make a bomb?", but that's only scratching the surface. Malicious users have gone to far greater lengths to manipulate LLMs into responding in ways that we definitely don't want happening in domain-specific user…
For Pycon 2025, I created a poster exploring vector embedding models, which you can download at full-size. In this post, I'll translate that poster into words. Vector embeddings A vector embedding is a mapping from an input (like a word, list of words, or image) into a list of floating point numbers. That list of numbers represents that input in the multidimensional embedding space of the model. We refer to the length of the list as its dimensions, so a list with 1024 numbers would have 1024 dimensions. Embedding models Each embedding model has its own dimension length, allowed input types,…
If you are using the DefaultAzureCredential class from the Azure Identity SDK while your user account is associated with multiple tenants, you may find yourself frequently running into API authentication errors (such as HTTP 401/Unauthorized). This post is for you! These are your two options for successful authentication from a non-default tenant: Setup your environment precisely to force DefaultAzureCredential to use the desired tenant Use a specific credential class and explicitly pass in the desired tenant ID Option 1: Get DefaultAzureCredential working The DefaultAzureCredential class is…
I ❤️ when companies offer free tiers for developer services, since it gives everyone a way to learn new technologies without breaking the bank. Free tiers are especially important for students and people between jobs, where the desire to learn is high but the available cash is low. That's why I'm such a fan of GitHub Models: free, high-quality generative AI models available to anyone with a GitHub account. The available models include the latest OpenAI LLMs (like o3-mini), LLMs from the research community (like Phi and Llama), LLMs from other popular providers (like Mistral and Jamba),…
Update: The approach has slightly changed (in a good way!). Read this Microsoft Learn article for an updated guide. This year, we're seeing the rise in "reasoning models", models that include an additional thinking process in order to generate their answer. Reasoning models can produce more accurate answers and can answer more complex questions. Some of those models, like o1 and o3, do the reasoning behind the scenes and only report how many tokens it took them (quite a few!). The DeepSeek-R1 model is interesting because it reveals its reasoning process along the way. When we can see the…
The azure-search-openai-demo repository was first created in March 2023 and is now the most popular RAG sample solution for Azure. Since the world of generative AI changes so rapidly, we've made many upgrades to its underlying packages and technologies over the past two years. But we've never changed the default GPT model used for the RAG flow: gpt-35-turbo. Why, when there are new models that are cheaper and reportedly better, such as gpt-4o-mini? Well, changing the model is one of the most significant changes you can make to impact RAG answer quality, and I did not want to make the change…
There are many let's encrypt automatic tools for azure but I also wanted to see if I could use certbot in wsl to generate a wildcard certificate for the azure Friday website and then upload the resulting certificates to azure app service. Azure app service ultimately needs a specific format called dot PFX that includes the full certificate path and all intermediates. Per the docs, App Service private certificates must meet the following requirements: Exported as a password-protected PFX file, encrypted using triple DES. Contains private key at least 2048 bits long Contains all intermediate…