The art of simplicity

I hope that you already had a change to try .NET Aspire, a comprehensive set of tools, templates, and packages designed to help developers build observable, production-ready applications. It enhances the development experience by providing dev-time orchestration, integrations with commonly used services, and robust tooling support. .The goal is to simplify the management of multi-project applications, container resources, and other dependencies, making it easier to develop interconnected apps. To make it even better, it includes features like service discovery, connection string management, and environment variable configuration, streamlining the setup process for local development environments. And if that couldn’t convince you yet, than maybe the Aspire Dashboard will. Sounds great right? Reason enough to add it to your existing projects if you are not using it yet. A great tutorial exists on Microsoft Learn to help you add it to your existing projects. Unfortunately I had a ...

Love is in the air, and like many couples, my girlfriend and I have our Valentine's Day traditions. Hers involves cuddling up to watch a romantic movie, while I secretly wish we were watching Bruce Willis jump off a building. This year, I decided to bridge this divide with a creative solution: I built an AI-powered app that can transform any movie into a romantic masterpiece. The Valentine's Day Dilemma We've all been there. It's February 14th, and you're staring at a choice between "The Notebook" and literally anything else. While I appreciate a good love story, my heart belongs to action sequences, plot twists, and the occasional explosion. But how do you convince your romantic partner that "Die Hard" is actually a touching love story about a man trying to reunite with his wife on Christmas Eve? Enter the Romantic Movie Night Generator That's where my new web application comes in. It uses Azure OpenAI to analyze any movie poster and...

After successfully installing a new SonarQube server, I followed the documented steps to configure the Azure DevOps integration. However when trying to register our on premise Azure DevOps instance, SonarQube throwed the following exception: 2025.02.10 11:47:30 ERROR web[13308e38-2d1a-46ae-80d9-baa54c12ffac][o.s.a.c.a.AzureDevOpsHttpClient] Unable to contact Azure DevOps server for request [https://azuredevops.server.be/tfs/defaultcollection/_apis/projects?api-version=3.0]: [PKIX path building failed: sun.security.provider.certpath.SunCertPathBuilderException: unable to find valid certification path to requested target I found an old post online that links this error message to a problem with our SSL certificate. It seems that Java is unable to recognize the root certificate authority (CA). This could make sense as our internal Azure DevOps instance is using an SSL certificate signed by an internal root certificate. To fix the issue, I followed the steps described in the post: ...

As part of our build process we use SonarQube for our code quality analysis. However after upgrading to the latest version of the SonarQube tasks for Azure DevOps, we encountered the following error message "The SonarScanner did not complete successfully." This seemingly vague error can stop your build pipeline dead in its tracks, leaving us scratching our head about what went wrong. Here is the full stack trace: at java.base/java.net.URLClassLoader.findClass(URLClassLoader.java:451) ##[error]at org.sonarsource.scanner.api.internal.IsolatedClassloader.loadClass(IsolatedClassloader.java:82) at org.sonarsource.scanner.api.internal.IsolatedClassloader.loadClass(IsolatedClassloader.java:82) ##[error]at java.base/java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(ClassLoader.java:522) at java.base/java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(ClassLoader.java:522) ##[error]at org.sonarsource.scanner.api.internal.batch.DefaultBatchFactory.createBatch(DefaultBatchFactory.java:32) at org.sonarsource....

Lakera, a product company that offers solutions to monitor, protect and control your AI agents, has created Gandalf , a game that allows you to test your prompt injection skills. Named after the wise wizard from The Lord of the Rings, this engaging security game tests your abilities to outsmart AI systems through prompt injection techniques. What is prompt injection? Before diving into Gandalf , it's important to understand what prompt injection is. Prompt injection is a technique where users attempt to manipulate an AI system's behavior by crafting inputs that override or bypass its intended operating parameters. Think of it like SQL injection, but for AI language models. When we interact with AI systems, we typically provide them with a prompt - a piece of text that guides their response. However, these systems often retain their base instructions (sometimes called a system prompt) that define their behavior and limitations. Prompt injection attempts to override these i...

Azure has a lot to offer if you want start building AI enabled solutions. But where do you start? There is just so much to learn and explore that it is easy to get lost in all the services, documentation and information out there. That's where the Book of AI comes in. This comprehensive guide is designed to help you navigate the world of AI services in Azure, providing you with the resources, tutorials, and sample code you need to build innovative solutions using Azure AI services. Why use the Book of AI? The website itself gives the following arguments: I can only agree with that. Use the book of AI to try out not only the different Azure AI services but also the different SDK’s and client libraries. Not a C# developer?  No problem! All examples are available in multiple programming languages.   Eat your own AI But for me the greatest feature of the Book of AI is not the content itself but the way it has been created. Instead of manually writing the complete webs...