Microsoft Azure

The ability to extract and semantically search through unstructured documents is becoming not just a convenience, but a necessity. This is especially true for software developers working with large repositories of technical documentation, compliance reports, or knowledge bases. In this article, we’ll explore how to build a semantic search solution using C#, PDFs, and the […] The article Semantic Search PDF Files Locally using .NET / C# and Build5Nines.SharpVector was originally published on Build5Nines. To stay up-to-date, Subscribe to the Build5Nines Newsletter. View the full article

When building Generative AI and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) LLM-based solutions, the quality and structure of input data significantly influences the performance of the LLM models. PDF documents, a prevalent format for information dissemination, often contain rich textual content that can be harnessed for such applications. However, extracting this content in a structured and usable format […] The article Extract Text from PDF Files with Python for use in Generative AI and RAG Solutions was originally published on Build5Nines. To stay up-to-date, Subscribe to the Build5Nines Newsletter. View the full article

As developers, we often find ourselves building smarter, more context-aware applications. Whether it’s powering a document search tool or implementing Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), semantic search is a powerful capability to have in your toolbox. I recently found myself needing a lightweight, local, in-memory vector database for a .NET / C# project. At the time, there […] The article Semantic Search in .NET / C# with Build5Nines.SharpVector was originally published on Build5Nines. To stay up-to-date, Subscribe to the Build5Nines Newsletter. View the full article

It wasn’t the first web framework. It may not be the flashiest these days in 2025. But Ruby on Rails was revolutionary when it hit the scene — and its fingerprints are still all over modern web development today. At a time when building web applications was often painful, verbose, and fractured across multiple layers […] The article Software Innovation: Ruby on Rails – The Framework that Rewired The Web with MVC and Convention was originally published on Build5Nines. To stay up-to-date, Subscribe to the Build5Nines Newsletter. View the full article

Topic was moved to forum Microsoft Azure

We are excited to share the launch of the next iteration of the GPT model series with GPT-4.1, 4.1-mini, and 4.1-nano to Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service. The GPT-4.1 models bring improved capabilities and significant advancements in coding, instruction following, and long-context processing that is critical for developers. We’re also excited to announce fine-tuning support for GPT-4.1 and 4.1-mini, allowing developers to further customize the models for their specific business needs... The post Announcing the GPT-4.1 model series for Azure AI Foundry developers appeared first on Microsoft Azure Blog. View the full article

Microsoft has announced a partnership with Anthropic to develop an official C# Software Development Kit (SDK) for the Model Context Protocol (MCP). This collaboration aims to streamline the integration of large language models (LLMs) into C# applications, addressing the growing demand for advanced AI functionalities in enterprise software development. Enhancing AI Integration in C# Applications […] The article Microsoft and Anthropic Collaborate to Develop Official C# SDK for Model Context Protocol was originally published on Build5Nines. To stay up-to-date, Subscribe to the Build5Nines Newsletter. View the full article

Few voices in the Microsoft and .NET space rise above the rest as much as Scott Hanselman. He’s a developer, teacher, speaker, and currently the Vice President of Developer Community at Microsoft. For over two decades, Scott has been a connecting force in the tech world, linking developers to tools, platforms, and to each other. […] The article Big Thinkers: Scott Hanselman – Empowering Developer Community Worldwide was originally published on Build5Nines. To stay up-to-date, Subscribe to the Build5Nines Newsletter. View the full article

The healthcare industry has consistently been at the forefront of technological advancements, continuously seeking ways to improve patient care and outcomes. In recent years, the integration of AI into healthcare has opened new avenues for innovation and efficiency. Azure OpenAI Service is a leading contributor to this transformation, empowering healthcare providers to create better outcomes through advanced AI capabilities, such as Azure AI Content Safety, which helps to keep content safe by monitoring content with advanced language and vision models. Here, we look at a few healthcare providers who have successfully adopted Azure OpenAI Service to save time, streamline w…

Topic was moved to forum Microsoft Azure

We are excited to share the first models in the Llama 4 herd are available today in Azure AI Foundry and Azure Databricks, which enables people to build more personalized multimodal experiences. These models from Meta are designed to seamlessly integrate text and vision tokens into a unified model backbone. This innovative approach allows developers to leverage Llama 4 models in applications that demand vast amounts of unlabeled text, image, and video data, setting a new precedent in AI development… The post Introducing the Llama 4 herd in Azure AI Foundry and Azure Databricks appeared first on Microsoft Azure Blog. View the full article

Topic was moved to forum Artificial Intelligence (AI)

There are few companies in the history of technology — or business, for that matter — that can say they changed the world. Even fewer can say they did it more than once. As Microsoft marks its 50th anniversary, it’s hard not to marvel at just how much of our modern digital life bears its […] The article From BASIC to Copilot: 50 Years of Microsoft Technology Innovation and Leadership was originally published on Build5Nines. To stay up-to-date, Subscribe to the Build5Nines Newsletter. View the full article

Few names carry as much respect and recognition among software developers as Anders Hejlsberg. As the creator of Turbo Pascal, the chief architect of Delphi, the original designer of C#, and now the lead architect of TypeScript, Hejlsberg has shaped the way millions of developers write code daily. While his earlier work transformed client-side and […] The article Big Thinkers: Anders Hejlsberg – The Architect Shaping the Cloud’s Programming Future from C# to TypeScript was originally published on Build5Nines. To stay up-to-date, Subscribe to the Build5Nines Newsletter. View the full article

Large language models (LLMs) are revolutionizing the way we build software. But as the scope of intelligent applications grows, so does the need for structured, contextual communication between LLMs and real-world data, services, and business logic. This is where the Model Context Protocol (MCP) comes in — a lightweight but powerful standard for exposing structured […] The article How to Build and Deploy an MCP Server with TypeScript and Azure Developer CLI (azd) using Azure Container Apps and Docker was originally published on Build5Nines. To stay up-to-date, Subscribe to the Build5Nines Newsletter. View the full article

Topic was moved to forum Artificial Intelligence (AI)

In the vibrant and fast-paced history of software development, a few languages have quietly but profoundly reshaped the landscape. Among these is Visual Basic (VB) — a language often underestimated in its influence but undeniably responsible for bringing programming out of the ivory towers of computer science and into the hands of everyday developers, business […] The article Visual Basic: The Language That Brought Programming to the Masses was originally published on Build5Nines. To stay up-to-date, Subscribe to the Build5Nines Newsletter. View the full article

As the Executive Vice President of Microsoft’s Cloud + AI Group, Scott Guthrie (aka “ScottGu”, pronounces “Scott Goo”) has quietly yet powerfully shaped the trajectory of one of the world’s largest and most influential cloud platforms—Microsoft Azure. His influence extends beyond corporate growth, playing a pivotal role in transforming cloud computing itself, from enterprise-scale deployments […] The article Big Thinkers: Scott Guthrie – From Innovator of ASP.NET to Azure’s Global Rise was originally published on Build5Nines. To stay up-to-date, Subscribe to the Build5Nines Newsletter. View the full article

Topic was moved to forum Artificial Intelligence (AI)

A set of ‘critical’ zero-day vulnerabilities, collectively named IngressNightmare, have been discovered in the widely used Ingress-NGINX Controller for Kubernetes that can result in a ‘full takeover‘ of a Kubernetes cluster! These flaws expose over 6,500 publicly exposed clusters to the risk of unauthenticated remote code execution (RCE) and privilege escalation, putting sensitive data and […] The article IngressNightmare: Critical Zero-Day Kubernetes Vulnerabilities Put Thousands of Clusters at Risk (March 2025) was originally published on Build5Nines. To stay up-to-date, Subscribe to the Build5Nines Newsletter. View the full article

There are times when it’s necessary to download the text transcript of a YouTube video using Python. This can be done with the help of the youtube_transcript_api library. Getting access to the text content of YouTube videos can be extremely helpful when using Generative AI and Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) to create summarization, analysis, or […] The article Python: Get YouTube Video Transcript from URL for use in Generative AI and RAG Summarization was originally published on Build5Nines. To stay up-to-date, Subscribe to the Build5Nines Newsletter. View the full article

Topic was moved to forum Microsoft Azure

I’m excited to share a major leap forward in how we develop and deploy AI. In collaboration with NVIDIA, we’ve integrated NVIDIA NIM microservices and NVIDIA AgentIQ toolkit into Azure AI Foundry—unlocking unprecedented efficiency, performance, and cost optimization for your AI projects… The post Accelerating agentic workflows with Azure AI Foundry, NVIDIA NIM, and NVIDIA AgentIQ appeared first on Microsoft Azure Blog. View the full article

Topic was moved to forum Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Azure Storage Accounts are a fundamental part of cloud storage in Microsoft Azure, providing various types of storage services such as blobs, files, tables, and queues. Understanding the total size allocated to a storage account and the usage breakdown per service type is crucial for optimizing costs, managing capacity, and ensuring efficient data storage management. […] The article Get Total Size Allocated to Azure Storage Account (Blobs, Files, Tables and Queues) was originally published on Build5Nines. To stay up-to-date, Subscribe to the Build5Nines Newsletter. View the full article

When moving or duplicating Azure Virtual Machines (VMs), you may encounter an issue where the VM’s disk is offline due to a signature collision. This commonly happens when: Since Windows assigns a unique identifier (disk signature) to each disk, if two disks have identical signatures, Windows prevents conflicts by marking one disk as Offline. The […] The article Fixing Disk Signature Collision in Azure VM After Cloning or Using Snapshots with Windows was originally published on Build5Nines. To stay up-to-date, Subscribe to the Build5Nines Newsletter. View the full article

Microsoft Azure Service Fabric has been a foundational platform for building and managing microservices-based applications since its release. However, with the rise of Kubernetes and other container orchestration tools, its adoption has seen changes over the years. Additionally, Microsoft introduced Microsoft Fabric, a new data and analytics platform, leading to some confusion between the two […] The article Azure Service Fabric: Is it still relevant? Service Fabric vs Microsoft Fabric? was originally published on Build5Nines. To stay up-to-date, Subscribe to the Build5Nines Newsletter. View the full article

Topic was moved to forum Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Microsoft Azure imposes limits and quotas on how many resources of each type you can provision per Azure Subscription, and even per Azure Region. Some limits are a hard maximum, while others are a soft limit that can be increases upon request. When working with Virtual Machines (VMs), Storage Accounts, Databases, and other resources in […] The article Microsoft Azure Resource and Service Limits and Quotas was originally published on Build5Nines. To stay up-to-date, Subscribe to the Build5Nines Newsletter. View the full article

Topic was moved to forum Data Engineering & Data Science

HashiCorp is now officially part of IBM following their completed acquisition which started almost a year ago. This marks a transformative milestone for the HashiCorp and Terraform communities, promising to usher in a new era of innovation and enterprise-grade cloud solutions with HashiCorp joining the IBM family. Founded over a decade ago by Mitchell Hashimoto […] The article IBM Acquisition of HashiCorp Completed: A New Era for Cloud Innovation was originally published on Build5Nines. To stay up-to-date, Subscribe to the Build5Nines Newsletter. View the full article

Topic was moved to forum Security

The need to efficiently search and retrieve documents based on their semantic content is more important than ever—especially when building Generative AI systems that implement the Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) design pattern. One robust approach to achieve this is by using vector representations of text data. These vectors, generated using advanced embedding models like Azure […] The article Enhanced In-Memory Text Vector Search in .NET with SharpVector and OpenAI Embeddings was originally published on Build5Nines. To stay up-to-date, Subscribe to the Build5Nines Newsletter. View the full article

On February 19, 2025, Microsoft unveiled a revolutionary advancement in quantum computing: the Majorana 1 chip. This cutting-edge processor is built on a novel topological quantum architecture, leveraging the unique properties of the elusive Majorana particle. This breakthrough could propel quantum computing from theoretical research to practical, scalable solutions—an achievement that has eluded scientists for […] The article Microsoft Unveils Majorana 1: A Quantum Leap in Computing was originally published on Build5Nines. To stay up-to-date, Subscribe to the Build5Nines Newsletter. View the full article

The Azure Developer CLI (azd) is a powerful tool for accelerating application deployment to Microsoft Azure. While azd defaults to Azure Bicep for Infrastructure as Code (IaC) deployment, you can configure it to work with HashiCorp Terraform too! This enables azd to be configured not just for Terraform deployments, but also to support cloud-agnostic IaC […] The article Configure Azure Developer CLI (azd) for HashiCorp Terraform Infrastructure Deployment was originally published on Build5Nines. To stay up-to-date, Subscribe to the Build5Nines Newsletter. View the full article

The React team has officially announced the deprecation of Create React App (CRA) in favor of more modern and efficient tools like Vite and Next.js. If you’ve been using CRA to bootstrap your React applications, now is the time to explore better alternatives that provide improved performance, developer experience, and scalability. Why is Create React […] The article Create React App is Now Deprecated: Time to Migrate to Vite or Next.js was originally published on Build5Nines. To stay up-to-date, Subscribe to the Build5Nines Newsletter. View the full article

Topic was moved to forum Configuration Management & Infrastructure as Code (IaC)

Topic was moved to forum Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Azure Functions is a powerful serverless compute service that enables organizations to build event-driven applications with minimal infrastructure management. While its scalability and flexibility make it an attractive choice for modern cloud applications, managing costs effectively is essential to avoid unexpected expenses. This article explores the key factors influencing Azure Functions pricing and provides a […] The article Azure Functions Cost Considerations and Optimization was originally published on Build5Nines. To stay up-to-date, Subscribe to the Build5Nines Newsletter. View the full article

Topic was moved to forum Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Artificial Intelligence (AI) models have rapidly evolved to perform various tasks ranging from text generation to natural language understanding. Among the different types of AI-driven models, Completions and Embeddings serve distinct purposes. While they both utilize machine learning techniques, their applications and functionality differ significantly. In this article, we’ll explore the differences between completions and […] The article Difference Between Completions and Embeddings in AI Models was originally published on Build5Nines. To stay up-to-date, Subscribe to the Build5Nines Newsletter. View the full article

Conclusion Azure Blob Storage, while inherently flat, allows users to simulate a hierarchical directory structure through the use of virtual directories. By incorporating forward slashes (/) in blob names, developers can efficiently organize data, making storage management more intuitive. In this article, we demonstrated how to create and use virtual directories within an Azure Storage […] The article Organizing Azure Blob Storage with Virtual Directories in C# was originally published on Build5Nines. To stay up-to-date, Subscribe to the Build5Nines Newsletter. View the full article

OpenAI has recently unveiled “Deep Research,” an advanced AI agent designed to autonomously conduct comprehensive research by synthesizing vast amounts of online information and executing multi-step tasks. This innovation aims to match the capabilities of human research analysts, delivering detailed reports in a fraction of the time traditionally required. Who Is It For? Deep Research […] The article OpenAI’s Deep Research Agent: Automated Research and Analysis was originally published on Build5Nines. To stay up-to-date, Subscribe to the Build5Nines Newsletter. View the full article

Docker has long been the dominant container engine, but it’s not the only one. After all, Kubernetes moved away from Docker several years ago to a different engine. An alternative to Docker for running containers on your local machine has been gaining traction in recent years: Podman. Podman is an open-source container engine developed by […] The article What is Podman and How Does it Compare to Docker? was originally published on Build5Nines. To stay up-to-date, Subscribe to the Build5Nines Newsletter. View the full article

Kubernetes is an open-source platform designed to manage, automate, and scale containerized applications efficiently. It has become the go-to solution for orchestrating containers in cloud environments. If you’ve ever wondered how large-scale applications like trading platforms handle fluctuating workloads, Kubernetes is the key player behind the scenes. To better understand Kubernetes, think of an orchestra. […] The article What is Kubernetes? was originally published on Build5Nines. To stay up-to-date, Subscribe to the Build5Nines Newsletter. View the full article

Generative AI has revolutionized how we interact with and generate text-based content, but its capabilities are significantly enhanced when paired with Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). RAG enables AI models to pull in external, high-quality sources of information, ensuring more accurate and contextually relevant responses. A crucial component of this process is loading and processing web content, […] The article Load Web Content for Generative AI + RAG Solution as Trimmed Markdown was originally published on Build5Nines. To stay up-to-date, Subscribe to the Build5Nines Newsletter. View the full article

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has rapidly become an integral part of modern society, influencing everything from job recruitment to healthcare and criminal justice. However, AI systems are only as good as the data they are trained on. When these datasets lack diversity, AI can inherit and amplify biases, leading to real-world consequences that exacerbate discrimination based […] The article Importance of Diversity of Data in AI Systems was originally published on Build5Nines. To stay up-to-date, Subscribe to the Build5Nines Newsletter. View the full article

The recent release of DeepSeek’s R1 model has sent ripples across the global technology landscape, sparking intense discussions about its disruptive potential, trustworthiness, and implications for the future of artificial intelligence. DeepSeek cost roughly $5.6 million to train, as compared to hundreds of millions that it cost OpenAI to train GPT-4o. This groundbreaking AI innovation […] The article Significance of DeepSeek R1 Model: Disruption, Trust, and the Future of AI was originally published on Build5Nines. To stay up-to-date, Subscribe to the Build5Nines Newsletter. View the full article

The MS Cloud IT Pro Podcast episode 367, hosted by Ben Segink and Scott Hoag, dives deep into a crucial IT topic: choosing between Azure Files and a traditional server with an SMB share for file storage in the cloud. This episode is essential for IT professionals navigating cloud migration strategies and balancing infrastructure needs. […] The article Azure Files vs. A Server with an SMB Share: Key Takeaways from MS Cloud IT Pro Podcast Episode 367 was originally published on Build5Nines. To stay up-to-date, Subscribe to the Build5Nines Newsletter. View the full article

On January 8, 2025, Microsoft Azure started experiencing a significant networking outage in the East US 2 region. This outage has impacted a broad range of Azure services (including Azure App Service, VMs, and more!) causing disruptions for businesses relying on these services for critical workloads. As of the time I’m writing this, the issue […] The article Major Azure Networking Outage in East US 2 Affecting VMs, App Service, and More! (Started January 8, 2025) was originally published on Build5Nines. To stay up-to-date, Subscribe to the Build5Nines Newsletter. View the full article