News For Dev-ops

Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet foundation model is now generally available in Amazon Bedrock . Anthropic’s most intelligent model to date, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, sets a new industry standard for intelligence. The model outperforms other generative AI models in the industry as well as Anthropic’s previously most intelligent model, Claude 3 Opus, on a wide range of evaluations, all while being one-fifth of the cost of Opus. You can now get intelligence better than Claude 3 Opus, at the same cost of Anthropic’s original Claude 3 Sonnet model. The frontier intelligence displayed by Claude 3.5 Sonnet combined with cost-effective pricing, makes this model ideal for complex tasks such as context-sensitive customer support, orchestrating multi-step workflows, streamlining code translations, and creating user-facing applications. Claude 3.5 Sonnet exhibits marked improvements in near-human levels of comprehension and fluency. The model represents a significant leap in understanding nuance, humor, and...

Today we're excited to announce the release of TypeScript 5.5! If you're not familiar with TypeScript, it's a language that builds on top of JavaScript by making it possible to declare and describe types. Writing types in our code allows us to explain intent and have other tools check our code to catch mistakes like typos, issues with null and undefined , and more. Types also power TypeScript's editor tooling like the auto-completion, code navigation, and refactorings that you might see in editors like Visual Studio and VS Code. In fact, if you write JavaScript in either of those editors, that experience is powered by TypeScript! You can learn more at the TypeScript website . To get started using TypeScript through npm with the following command: npm install -D typescript or through NuGet . Here's a quick list of what's new in TypeScript 5.5! Inferred Type Predicates Control Flow Narrowing for Constant Indexed Accesses The JSDoc @import Tag Regular E...

The .NET Upgrade Assistant is a Visual Studio extension and command-line tool that helps you upgrade apps from previous versions of .NET and .NET Framework to the latest versions of .NET. It includes great support for upgrading Microsoft libraries and frameworks, as we’ve described in previous posts. We’re excited to announce the addition of Third-Party API and Package Map Support, which will allow you to easily find and replace outdated third-party APIs and packages with their newer counterparts during the upgrade process. This new feature streamlines the transition to new platforms such as UWP to WinUI or Xamarin Forms to .NET MAUI, ensuring a smoother and more efficient upgrade experience. What is Third Party API and Package Map Support? One of the challenges of upgrading an older application to the latest version of .NET is finding the equivalent APIs and NuGet packages from third party libraries. This is especially challenging when you also upgrade to a new platform, such as fro...

Last time, we learned about the sadness of treating counted strings as null-terminated strings . How can we escape this cycle of depression? Almost all of the counted-string types have a way of creating an instance with a pointer and a count. The trick is to use it. Class Creator std::wstring std::wstring(p, n) HSTRING WindowsCreateString(p, n, &s) Platform::String ref new String(p, n) winrt::hstring winrt::hstring(p, n) BSTR SysAllocStringLen(p, n) _bstr_t _bstr_t(SysAllocStringLen(p, n), FALSE) CComBSTR CComBSTR(n, p) CStringW CStringW(p, n) In most cases, the creator is fairly obvious. The one weirdo is _bstr_t , which has no built-in constructor for counted strings. Instead, you have to use the underlying Sys­Alloc­String­Len function to create the counted string, and then pass it to the constructor in attach mode ( bCopy = FALSE ). Of course, once you get the counted string in, you need a way to get it back out. Class Pointer an...

The combination of Small Language Models (SLMs) and ONNX, is a game-changer in AI interoperability. Let's show how you can harness the power of Phi-3 models within your .NET applications with C# and ONNX. In the Phi-3 Cookbook repository we can find several samples, including a Console Application that loads a Phi-3 Vision model with ONNX, and analyze and describe an image. Introduction to Phi-3 Small Language Model The Phi-3 Small Language Model (SLM) represents a groundbreaking advancement in AI, developed by Microsoft. It’s part of the Phi-3 family, which includes the most capable and cost-effective SLMs available today. These models outperform others of similar or even larger sizes across various benchmarks, including language, reasoning, coding, and math tasks. The Phi-3 models, including the Phi-3-mini, Phi-3-small, and Phi-3-medium, are designed to be instruction-tuned and optimized for ONNX Runtime, ensuring broad compatibility and high performance. You can learn more...

Amazon SageMaker now offers a fully managed MLflow capability. Data scientists can use familiar MLflow constructs to organize, track, and analyze ML experiments and administrators can setup MLflow with better scalability, availability, and security. MLflow is a popular open-source tool that helps customers manage ML experiments. Data scientists and ML engineers are already using MLflow with SageMaker. However, it required setting up, managing, and securing access to MLflow Tracking Servers. With this launch, SageMaker makes it easier for customers to set-up, and manage MLflow Tracking Servers with a couple of clicks. Customers can secure access to MLflow via AWS Identity and Access Management roles. Data scientists can use MLflow SDK to track experiments across local notebooks, IDEs, managed IDEs in SageMaker Studio, SageMaker Training Jobs, SageMaker Processing Jobs, and SageMaker Pipelines. Experimentation capabilities such as rich visualizations for run comparisons and model evalu...

This year at Microsoft Build 2024 we announced  a new set of Windows devices, Copilot+ PCs. Copilot+ PCs are a new class of Windows 11 PCs, including Arm-powered devices that are powered by the Snapdragon ® X Series. These new Arm devices have cutting-edge new processing power coming from the CPU, GPU, and NPU (neural processing unit). This new hardware, in combination with innovations in Windows 11, is a step forward for Arm gaming. A few weeks ago, we showed several initiatives that improve the gaming experience on Arm-based Copilot+ PCs: advancements such as Prism emulation, automatic super resolution (Auto SR), progress bringing fan-favorite games that use anti-cheat to Arm, and the launch of Linaro’s new game compatibility site WorksOnWoA.com . In this post, we’ll dive into each of these in more detail starting with new innovations within the latest Windows 11 release.   Windows 11 24H2 Platform Innovation Windows 11 24H2 includes many new capabilities that utilize t...