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During Microsoft Build 2023 more than 50 updates for developers were announced. From Bing to ChatGPT, to Windows Copilot, to a new Copilot Stack with common extensibility, Azure AI Studio and our newest data analytics platform Microsoft Fabric. In this book, we will unveil the hero announcements made during Microsoft Build 2023, empowering you with the knowledge and insights to unlock new opportunities, accelerate your growth, and shape the future of technology together. Check out the Microsoft Build News Book and dive in to see the full set of announcements here. Continue reading...

About the Author Cyrus Wong is the senior lecturer of Department of Information Technology (IT) of the Hong Kong Institute of Vocational Education (Lee Wa... and he focuses on teaching public Cloud technologies. He is one of the Microsoft Learn for Educators Ambassador and Microsoft Azure MVP from Hong Kong. Introduction: Discover how AI technology can streamline and enhance the grading process for educators with Azure OpenAI ChatGPT. Cyrus Wong, a senior lecturer at the Hong Kong Institute of Vocational Education, shares insights on leveraging AI to automate assignment evaluation and improve the quality of teaching. By utilizing AI-powered tools, s…

When building a large and complex system, we are often required to monitor and observe multiple services and components, each with its logging mechanism and format. As the system grows in complexity, monitoring all the different components becomes harder and harder. With Fluent Bit and Azure Data Explorer, observability becomes much easier. What is Fluent Bit? Fluent Bit is an open-source logging aggregator and processor which allows you to process logs from various sources (log files, event streams, etc…), filter and transform these logs, and eventually, forward them to one or more persistent outputs. Fluent Bit is the lightweight, performance-oriented sib…

Today we will start our Azure Logic Apps Mission Critical Series: "We Speak", with the "IBM Host Files" technologies. There are multiple types of IBM Host Files. Host files can exist in Mainframes or Midranges and have their own types and characteristics. For instance, VSAM or Virtual Storage Access Method is a file storage access method used in Mainframes and Midranges. It was introduced by IBM in 70’s and it organizes and maintains data in a catalog structure. VSAM files can be used in COBOL programs like other physical sequential files. VSAM are the logical datasets for storing records. The records in a VSAM file can be of fixed length or a variab…

We’re excited to announce that Azure CLI now supports tab completion on Windows PowerShell, a highly anticipated feature for many Windows users.   This new capability not only applies to commands and parameters but also extends to values such as account name and subscription name. When typing in a command followed by a parameter, pressing the tab key will display a list of available options for that parameter. This saves users time and effort in remembering specific arguments or looking them up in documentation. This enhanced feature is now available for CLI 2.49.0 and above. We are also pleased to announce that the performance of the completi…

As companies continue to embrace remote work and digital collaboration, leveraging the power of Microsoft Teams has become essential. Beyond its use as a productivity tool, Teams offers a valuable feature called communities that can be utilized to create a sense of community and connection, particularly among interns. By establishing intern communities several months before their official start dates, companies can enhance the intern experience, facilitate networking opportunities, and help interns settle into their new roles more smoothly. In this article, we will explore the benefits of using communities in Teams for interns and provide a step-by-step guide on how compa…

As companies continue to embrace remote work and digital collaboration, leveraging the power of Microsoft Teams has become essential. Beyond its use as a productivity tool, Teams offers a valuable feature called communities that can be utilized to create a sense of community and connection, particularly among interns. By establishing intern communities several months before their official start dates, companies can enhance the intern experience, facilitate networking opportunities, and help interns settle into their new roles more smoothly. In this article, we will explore the benefits of using communities in Teams for interns and provide a step-by-step guide on how compa…

This week at Microsoft Build, we introduced Microsoft Entra External ID, our next generation of customer identity and access management (CIAM) solution that evolves Azure AD External Identities to help developers efficiently build secure and compliant applications for customers, partners, and more. As part of the launch, I want to tell you more about the important developer centric features we’ve created. To help you get started on your application development journey we’re thrilled to announce our new Identity Platform Developer Center. It’s a one-stop shop for everything you, as developers, need to understand about identity concepts, learn the features of Microso…

The Always Encrypted wizard in SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) is a popular tool that has helped many customers to start their Always Encrypted journey. The wizard allows you to easily configure cryptographic keys, encrypt your data in selected columns, or to rotate your column encryption keys. We're very excited to announce the major enhancement to the wizard in SSMS 19.1, which allows you take advantage of secure enclaves to run cryptographic operations in-place. Until now, the wizard worked by moving your data out of the database to perform cryptographic operations within the SSMS process, regardless if your database was configured with a secure enclave…

Regardless of whether you are familiar with SQL CLR, or are looking to explore the world of opportunities it offers, this article is for you. Our focus will be on embedding C# code inside SQL Server and Azure SQL Managed Instance engines. We will also talk about how you can run CLR seamlessly, regardless of where you are running your SQL instance - on-premises, in Azure, or using a hybrid environment. First, a quick reminder of where the name comes from: CLR stands for Common Language Runtime, which is a Runtime Engine that, among other things, executes your C# code. But the nice thing about it is that it’s not limited to C#. It also executes the code writt…

Last year we introduced our expanded vision for identity and secure access and unveiled Microsoft Entra - our new product family for all identity and access products, that included Azure Active Directory (Azure AD), part of the Microsoft Entra family, Microsoft Entra Permissions Management, and Microsoft Entra Verified ID. Today, we’re excited to announce new developer-centric capabilities for customer and partner identity experiences in our next generation customer identity and access management (CIAM) solution - Microsoft Entra External ID, and a next milestone in making our Microsoft Entra Verified ID solution easy to integrate into any application with Microso…

The Azure Sphere 23.05 release, originally expected on May 24, is delayed. A compatibility risk concerning library version dependencies was found by quality assurance tests, and we will issue a new OS to fix this. We expect the new OS to go live in Retail Eval on 5 June and we are planning to use a shorter Retail Eval period of seven days. The retail evaluation period provides a period for backwards compatibility testing. During this time, customers can verify that applications and devices operate properly with a new OS before it's deployed broadly via the Retail feed. The Retail feed will continue to deliver OS version 23.02 until we publish the 23.05 update. …

This is the third post in a 3-part blog series on Power BI with Azure Databricks SQL authored by Andrey Mirskiy and Diego Fanesi. Read Part 1: Power Up your BI with Microsoft Power BI and Azure Databricks Lakehouse: part 1 - Essentials and Part 2: Power Up your BI with Microsoft Power BI and Lakehouse in Azure Databricks: part 2 - Tuning Power BI In the previous part of this series, we discussed some of the Power BI optimization techniques to achieve better performance of your reports and dashboards. In this part we will be focusing on tuning your Delta lake and Azure Databricks SQL Warehouses to achieve greater performance. We previously discussed how to us…

In some situations, we need to test the connectivity latency using Python. Here you could find a small script about how to do it. import pyodbc import time def ConnectToTheDB(): try: print('Connecting to the DB') start_time = time.time() conn = pyodbc.connect("DRIVER={ODBC Driver 17 for SQL Server};server=tcp:servername.database.windows.net,1433;UID=username;PWD=password;database=DBName;APP=Testing Connection;timeout=30;MARS_Connection=no"); print("Connected to the Database %s seconds ---" % ((time.time() - start_time)) ) return conn except BaseException as e: print("An error occurred co…

This article is brought to you by the Nonprofit Tech Acceleration (NTA) for Black and African American Communities Program Technical Team. For information on how to take advantage of the granted offerings or free technical consultation, please visit: Supporting Black Community Nonprofits | Microsoft Nonprofits VM & VE, there are two different solutions that are a part of MC4N (Microsoft Cloud for Nonprofits). Volunteer Management: It's built on Microsoft Power Apps, with the Nonprofit Common Data Model as its foundation. Volunteer Engagement: It's built on Microsoft Power Portal, with the Nonprofit Common Data Model as its foundation. Volunteer Engagement…

Recurring meeting audit report We’re excited to announce the worldwide release of the Recurring meeting audit Power BI report template on the advanced insights app. This new template helps organizations analyze their most expensive long and large recurring meetings. We know that time is money. Every meeting that takes place has a cost associated with it and shockingly, that cost generally goes unchecked. This new capability empowers analysts to easily identify which meetings cost their companies the most money, so that they can make more informed decisions about how to optimize their team's time and resources. With the Recurring meeting audit repor…

Today, we got a service request that our customer reported a high CPU usage in Azure SQL Database. Following I would to share with you my lessons learned here. Our customer has the following Python code that is running a query against Azure SQL Database but every execution is taking too much time and the CPU is getting 100%. import pyodbc import time def ConnectToTheDB(): try: print('Connecting to the DB') start_time = time.time() conn = pyodbc.connect("DRIVER={ODBC Driver 17 for SQL Server};server=tcp:servername.database.windows.net,1433;UID=username;PWD=password;database=DBName"); print("Connected to…

We’re excited to announce Azure Files geo-redundancy for large file shares is now in public preview for standard SMB file shares. Azure Files has supported large file shares for several years, which not only provides file share capacity up to 100TiB but improved IO operations per second (IOPS) and throughput as well. Large file shares are widely adopted by customers using locally redundant storage (LRS) and zone-redundant storage (ZRS) but has not been available for geo-redundant storage (GRS) and geo-zone redundant storage (GZRS) until now. Geo-redundancy is critical for meeting various compliance and regulatory requirements. Geo-redundant storage asynchron…

Introduction: Canonical announced that the Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver) OS images will reach end-of-life (EOL) by end of May 2023. This means that Canonical will no longer provide technical support, software updates, or security patches for this version. Customers that are leveraging the Auto Guest Patching or Auto OS Image Upgrade capability on their VMs or VM Scale Sets will need to either upgrade to Ubuntu Pro or migrate to another Ubuntu image to keep their assets secure. Impact on Organizations: As mentioned in an earlier post from Microsoft, organizations that are still using Ubuntu 18.04 LTS will either need to update to Ubuntu Pro version or migrate to…

GitHub Copilot, an AI-powered pair programmer, is now available for Azure Data Studio to assist you with context-aware code completions, suggestions, and even entire code snippets. Get started today with the latest release of Azure Data Studio, version 1.44, by installing the extension for GitHub Copilot from the extension gallery. How Copilot works While the GitHub Copilot in Azure Data Studio documentation has details on how to fully navigate different code suggestion options, interacting with your newest assistant couldn’t be easier. After installing the GitHub Copilot extension and signing in with your GitHub account, when you type in the SQL editor Copil…

What is Microsoft Fabric? Microsoft Fabric is an all-in-one analytics solution for enterprises that covers everything from data movement to data science, Real-Time Analytics, and business intelligence. It covers the complete spectrum of services including data movement, data lake, data engineering, data integration and data science, real time analytics, and business intelligence. With Microsoft Fabric, there is no need to stitch together different services from multiple vendors. Instead, the customer enjoys an end-to-end, highly integrated, single comprehensive product that is easy to understand, onboard, create and operate. There is no other product on the market that…

Work with your data in place, wherever it resides, with Microsoft Fabric, our next generation data analytics service powered by one of the first true multi-cloud data lakes, called OneLake. Go from raw data to meaningful insights over data spread across your organization and in other clouds in seconds — without moving it. Microsoft Fabric provides a single integrated service that includes data integration capabilities, data engineering for shaping your data, data warehousing, the ability to build data science models, real time analytics, and business intelligence. Data from these different experiences is brought together by one unified data lake for your organ…

Get an inside look at the AI supercomputer infrastructure built to run ChatGPT and other large language models, and see how to leverage it for your workloads in Azure, at any scale. Go behind the scenes: -For how we collaborated with NVIDIA to deliver purpose-built AI infrastructure with NVIDIA GPUs -How Project Forge checkpointing works to restore job states if a long training job fails or needs to be migrated -How we used LoRA fine-tuning to update a fraction of the base model for more training throughput and smaller checkpoints -How UK-based company, Wayve, is using Azure’s AI supercomputer infrastructure for self-driving cars -And how Confide…