Building AI-powered applications with .NET

AI presents an enormous opportunity to make your applications more powerful and productive. It can automate many existing business processes, and can let your users zip through their tasks at much greater speed while remaining in control. Intelligent features can include semantic search, data extraction, anomaly detection, translation, summarization, sentiment scoring, autocompletion, classification and workflow automation, and of course Q&A chatbots that work with enterprise data.

Apr 29
Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre (MCEC)
1 day
07:00 - 15:00 UTC
Steve Sanderson
800 AUD
Register

For .NET developers, there’s a whole raft of new libraries, services, models, and concepts to get your teeth into. This workshop aims to cut through the complexity and focus on what you really need to know to get started with AI programming on .NET. It will emphasize the foundational topics in .NET+AI, including the new Microsoft.Extensions.AI standards.

You’ll learn:

Core concepts of AI for app developers
Embeddings, semantic search, vector databases, vector indexing
Large language models, chat, function calling, structured output, middleware pipelines
Q&A chat/RAG: Ingestion/chunking, retrieval-augmented-generation, evaluation (e.g., RAG triad pattern)
Vision and multimodality, automating business processes
Prompt engineering and prompt injection attacks/defenses
Realtime AI (just released by OpenAI)

In each case we’ll have explanations/demos plus guided exercises in C#, some being open-ended for more advanced exploration. I hope what you’ll get out of it is a broad understanding of current-day AI+.NET app development, and a sense that you’ve experienced most of the main pieces

Prerequisites

Familiarity with C# and typical .NET application patterns, such as dependency injection.

You don’t need to know web programming with ASP.NET Core or Blazor in any significant detail, though one or two exercises will use them. Mostly we’ll work in console apps to preserve focus on AI.

What to bring

You’ll need a Windows/Linux/macOS laptop with:

.NET 9 – whatever the latest preview is
An editor – either Visual Studio, VS Code, or Rider
Docker
Ollama (and while you’re on a fast network at home, run “ollama pull llama3.1” because that’s a 4.7GB download)

Optional:

If at all possible, also have an OpenAI platform subscription or Azure OpenAI deployment. It’s not strictly required since you can just use Ollama, but OpenAI/AzureOpenAI will be much faster – especially if your laptop doesn’t have a good GPU. And you’ll learn more if you can compare small models on Ollama with the big ones like GPT 4o.

Steve Sanderson

Developer, Microsoft

Steve Sanderson is a developer/architect on the .NET team at Microsoft. He's enthusiastic about helping the developer community move forwards, currently with a focus on web and AI.