I explored Google Gemini and was impressed by its speed compared to ChatGPT! My hands-on experience, from coding .NET regex to using the free API tier in Google AI Studio, is detailed in this article. Even though Gemini's Semantic Kernel integration is new, I easily adapted an OpenAI example. If you're curious about a powerful OpenAI alternative, especially within the Google ecosystem, you need to read this.

Recently, I explored using Semantic Kernel and OpenAI for more accurate page scanning. By converting HTML to markdown and extracting metatags with XPath, I reduced input size and improved efficiency. OpenAI’s new JSON output feature further allowed me to receive structured data, making the process more reliable.

Assuming you are skilled in C# and the .NET ecosystem, you may be wondering if you need to learn Python to do data analysis or AI/ML. The short answer is you can do everything that Python does with C# and it will likely perform better and take less time to build in C#.

I was recently working through some automation challenges and looked up c# scripting options. I wasn't really expecting to find any compelling solutions, but the world of .NET is evolving at a rapid rate in the last few years and thought I'd try my luck. I was pleasantly surprised when the dotnet tool dotnet-script came up in my search. I had not seen this tool before and it started me on a path of evaluation.

The results of my recent experiment where I evaluated the new Blazor Server Side Rendering (SSR) to see how well it works for migrating from older MVC or Razor Page project incrementally.

I recently converted one of my example projects that used MVC controller based API, Marten Event Sourcing and Rebus to use Wolverine. This article contains some of my initial impressions of Wolverine in that experience and focuses on Wolverine.http API endpoints.

I recently stumbled upon a Library called FastEndpoints while doing research and it immediately struck me as something I wanted to learn more about. I had started experimenting with Minimal APIs at the time. While I liked that Minimal APIs lower the entry point for simple API creation and are significantly more performant than MVC Controllers, they quickly turn your program.cs file into a jumbled mess with anything beyond trivial. The desire for code organization quickly pushes towards finding a sensible way to orient the code.

Not versioning APIs is one of the biggest issues I see with teams that attempt to implement a distributed architecture. Not supporting multiple versions of an API means all the teams are coupled together and requires downtime to deploy. I've actually seen where this is actually listed as a reason to use a monolith instead of a distributed architecture.

My early exploration and subsequent experiences with building a solution that leverage Marten.

I've been experimenting with Pivotal Cloud Foundry recently and put this quick tutorial together for deploying an ASP.NET Core application using PCF. I was amazed at how easy this was and I'm sure you will be too. This is a quick getting started with Pivotal Cloud Foundry and ASP.NET Core.