News For Dev-ops

Do you like watching videos to learn about new and existing Visual Studio features?  Then you should check out the Visual Studio Toolbox show!  Available on both Learn  and  YouTube , Visual Studio Toolbox is a show that helps you become a more productive developer in VS by highlighting tooling within the IDE and the wider Visual Studio family.  Most of our guests are Visual Studio team members, giving you expert knowledge on features while also providing an inside look at how the features were developed.  The show airs a mix of both prerecorded and live episodes, with the latter letting you ask your VS-related questions directly to the people who make Visual Studio what it is today!   What’s new on Visual Studio Toolbox? In August, Visual Studio Toolbox aired two live episodes spotlighting the newest features in Visual Studio. The first episode streamed this month was “What’s New in Visual Studio 17.7?”.  This episode is part of a “What’s New” m...

By far, the most popular so-called DOS Extender in the early 1990's was DOS/4GW . MS-DOS game compatibility occupied a very large portion of my time during Windows 95 development, so I saw a lot of DOS Extender banners, most frequently the DOS/4GW banner. Now, you might wonder, "How did these games even run in Windows 95 if they came with a DOS Extender? Wouldn't the extender try to enter protected mode and fail, because Windows was already managing protected mode?" The trick is that these extenders were really two programs bundled together. One was a protected mode server, and the other was a protected mode client library. In the beginning, there was the Virtual Control Program Interface (VCPI), which was supported by expanded memory managers like EMM386. These expanded memory managers barely used protected mode at all: The only thing they cared about was getting access to memory above the 1MB boundary, so they set up some page tables in order to map extended memo...

Large language models such as GPT4 and chatGPT have created a revolution in the way people build innovative new applications and experiences. I describe how I got started with building LLM applications and point to some resources I created in this process that I hope will help  in your own exploration into this exciting area of software application development using powerful large language models. A personal learning journey into LLM Applications In my day job at Microsoft, I focus mostly on AI infrastructure and platforms. But I was also curious to learn how to build LLM applications, as I want to better understand the users on our platforms and also hope to develop some LLM apps I can use personally and professionally. As I was getting started, it was pretty clear that LangChain was (and is) a popular library used to build these apps, which lowers the barriers for beginners by abstracting a lot of complexity with an easy-to-use interface and providing out of the box integration...

Hello Students and Developers! We are excited to announce the release of the new Foundational C# Certification in collaboration with freeCodeCamp . freeCodeCamp is a charity that creates free learning resources for math, programming, and computer science. The Foundational C# Certification is completely free , globally available, and includes a full 35-hour C# training course hosted on Microsoft Learn . Amplify Your C# Career Trajectory C# continues to shine as a leading programming language, essential in creating dynamic web applications, Unity games, comprehensive enterprise solutions, and more. In the rapidly evolving tech landscape, having tangible proof of your skills and dedication can set you apart. Our Foundational C# Certification provides just that — a testament to the time and effort you've invested in mastering this versatile language. While no certification can guarantee a job, adding this to your portfolio demonstrates your commitment to continuous growth and your p...

Any web, desktop, or mobile developer works with images often. You reference them from C#, HTML, XAML, CSS, C++, TypeScript, and even in code comments. Some images are local, and some exist online or on network shares, while others only exist as base64 encoded strings. We refer to them in numerous ways in code, but always as string values that don’t show us what the image looks like. It would be nice if those image references could show us the images too. The feature request An option to preview images when they are hovered has gotten some attention lately, and we think it sounds like a great idea. If you think so too, remember to vote for it . The question is, what is the best solution? Various image previewers exist for different editors already, but they all do things a little differently. If we were to build this, we must do it in a way that feels native and natural to Visual Studio. To do that, we’re launching an experiment to figure out what that could look like. The experiment...

Just for fun, let's compare what happens on different processor architectures when you load a value from memory into a larger register. Possible responses are Unable: The processor does not support loading data into a larger register. Zero-extend: The processor zero-extends the small value to the large value. Sign-extend: The processor sign-extends the small value to the large value. Either: The processor has separate instructions for sign and zero extension. (blank): Does not apply because the processor doesn't have registers larger than this. Processor From byte From 16-bit From 32-bit 8086 Unable     Alpha AXP Unable Unable Sign-extend Alpha AXP with BWX Zero-extend Zero-extend Sign-extend 80386 Either Either   x86-64 Either Either Either Intel ia64 Zero-extend Zero-extend Zero-extend MIPS Either Either Either PowerPC Zero-extend Either Either SH-4 Sign-extend Sign-extend   ARM Either Either ...

On behalf of the Engineering and Product Management teams, we are happy to announce that External REST Endpoint Invocation is now GA!   What is External REST Endpoint Invocation? External REST Endpoint Invocation makes it possible for developers to call REST/GraphQL endpoints from other Azure Services from right in the Azure SQL Database. With a quick call to the system stored procedure sp_invoke_external_rest_endpoint , you can have data processed via an Azure Function, update a PowerBI dashboard, or even talk to Cognitive Services. In fact, just before this GA date, we enabled access to OpenAI, Azure Blob Storage, Azure Files, Azure Queue Services and Azure Table Services. This feature also supports header and managed identity authentication, so you can get rid of passing pesky passwords. Use cases for this feature are many and here are a few to get your creative spark going: Activate workflows Send an email / notification using Azure Logic Apps Data enrichment...