MVP’s Favorite Content: New Series to Elevate Your Skills

by Contributed | Oct 27, 2023 | Technology

This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.

In this blog series dedicated to Microsoft’s technical articles, we’ll highlight our MVPs’ favorite article along with their personal insights.

Sander ten Brinke, Developer Technologies MVP in Netherlands

Performance Improvements in .NET 8 – .NET Blog

“For the last few years, I have looked forward to Stephen Toub’s blog posts about performance improvements in .NET. It shows that performance is very important to the .NET team, and it’s jaw dropping when you realize that this blog post will take HOURS to read. The blog post goes very in-depth, and you will learn many new things about .NET when reading it.”

Jev Suchoi, Developer Technologies MVP in Netherlands

Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework for Azure – Cloud Adoption Framework | Microsoft Learn

“It is the most comprehensive and tightly packed content library for Azure Cloud. Not only encapsulating technology and architecture topics but also addresses cultural and business best practices. It even covers well-known anti-patterns.

I use the Cloud Adoption Framework daily to explain “how to Cloud” to clients”.

*Relevant Blog:

– Mastering Cloud Adoption Framework: Quick Start Backlog essentials :flexed_biceps: – (devjev.nl)

– The perfect Azure naming convention – (devjev.nl)

Luke Murray, Microsoft Azure MVP in New Zealand

What’s new in the Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework – Cloud Adoption Framework | Microsoft Learn

“I use this almost every day as a reference point to learn and accelerate adoption! One of my favourite pages is the ‘What’s New’! As Cloud Adoption can change and new content gets added, the What’s New page helps me keep up to date with the latest Cloud Adoption frameworks.”

*Relevant Blog: Cloud Adoption Framework for Azure – Tools and Templates – luke.geek.nz The Cloud Adoption Framework also includes various templates and assessments to keep track of your Cloud Journey across the Strategy, Plan, Ready, Adopt and Govern cycles. The blog post, written below, is only a fraction of the content available.

Nobushiro Takahara, Data Platform MVP in Japan

Migrate SQL Server workloads to Azure SQL – Training | Microsoft Learn

“This Microsoft Learn content is a exhaustive and easy-to-understand guide that provides useful information for Fit & Gap analysis, migration planning (assessment), and migration methods for migrating SQL Server on on-premise environment to Azure. It also describes how to assess the database using Microsoft Data Migration Assistant and specific procedures for data migration, so I believe that this is a good content you should refer to when planning a migration.”

(In Japanese: Azureへオンプレミス環境のSQL Serverを移行するための Fit & Gap 分析に役立つ情報、および、移行計画(アセスメント)、移行方式に関する情報が網羅的に分かりやすくまとまっています。また、Microsoft Data Migration Assistant を使用したデータベース評価の仕方、および、データ移行などの具体的な手順が記載されており、移行計画を立てる際に是非参照したほうが良いコンテンツだと思います。)

*Relevant Blog: 【保存版】SQL ServerのAzure移行に向けた移行フローチャート – NOBTAの気ままにITブログ (nobtak.com)

Deploy Semantic Kernel with Bot Framework

by Contributed | Oct 26, 2023 | Technology

This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.

If you’ve been working with Azure OpenAI for a while, chances are you’ve heard of Semantic Kernel. It is a library implemented in multiple programming languages that can handle prompt templates, manage conversation state, integrate with plugins and many other features essential to building an advanced LLM-infused application. But how exactly do you “deploy” Semantic Kernel?

Being a software library, Semantic Kernel can be deployed to any compute option capable of running Python, C# or Java. You’ve probably seen sample repositories with Jupyter notebooks you can use to explore the functionality. But in most cases you can’t give your end-users a notebook! In this article, we’ll give you an example and a solution accelerator that you can use to bring your AI application to production faster.

Solution Architecture

Below is the architecture diagram for the solution accelerator we put together. You can also pull the source code and deploy it yourself from our Github repo!

As you can see in the diagram, Semantic Kernel is at the core of the solution, and will act as the orchestrator of the chat experience. It is deployed into an App Services instance, which will also be running the Bot Framework SDK. This enables our bot to be deployed across multiple channels, including web pages, Teams, and even third-party chat platforms like Slack.

The flow of chat messages is as follows:

• End-users connect to a messaging channel your bot is published to, such as Web or Teams;


• Messages get processed through Azure Bot Services, which communicates with a .NET application running on App Services.


• The .NET application runs a Semantic Kernel Stepwise Planner at its core. The planner elaborates a series of steps to process the user’s request, and then executes it.


• Each step of the plan is formulated through Azure OpenAI, and the executed against Cognitive Search (traditional RAG pattern), Azure SQL (structured data RAG) or any other externally connected plugins.


• Now with the data gathered from plugins, the question is resubmitted to Azure OpenAI, where a final answer is formulated and presented to the end user. This concludes a conversation turn.

Built-in use cases

1. Traditional Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)

To test out the traditional RAG pattern, we integrated a sample from the Azure Cognitive Search product called hotels-sample. It’s an index containing names, descriptions and other information about hotels, which you can search and filter through to explore the service.

First, we implemented the SearchPlugin class:

Notice how Semantic Functions – the functionality that Semantic Kernel can call upon – are structured. Each Semantic Function and each of its arguments must be annotated with a human-readable description. This description will then be passed to the LLM so it can decide when to utilize that function, and pass in the right parameters. You can check out the source code in our repo, but this function is basically submitting a search to the Azure Cognitive Search index.

With debugging enabled, we can see each step of how the interaction happens:

1. Thought: GPT-4 receives the question and determines it needs to use the SearchPlugin to respond.

2. Action: In the same step, GPT-4 formulates an action call with the appropriate parameters. The action is constructed in JSON format.

3. Observation: The plugin returns some hotel names and descriptions.

4. Final Answer: GPT-4 determines it now has all the information it needs, and provides an answer to the end user. Typically, this would be the only response the user sees!

This process of Thought-Action-Observation may repeat multiple times until the model obtains the required information. We’ll see an example of that in the next scenario.

2. Structured Data Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Much like Azure Cognitive Search, a SQL Database can be consumed by Semantic Kernel using the same technique. Again, we start by implementing a Plugin:

This is slightly more complex – we added three Semantic Functions:

• GetTables: Gets all tables in the database;


• GetSchema: Gets the schema for a specific table;


• RunQuery: Runs a query on the database;

We then expect the Semantic Kernel Planner to combine these as needed to reach a response. Let’s see an example, again with the debugging enabled to view intermediate steps:

This time, the conversation flow goes like this:

1. Thought: GPT-4 receives the question and determines it needs to use the SQLPlugin to respond.


2. Action: The first action required is to list tables to get the right table name for customers


3. Observation: The plugin returns the table names in the database.


4. Thought: Now knowing the correct table name, GPT-4 can formulate a query to get the number of customers


5. Action: The action is to run a COUNT query on the SalesLT.Customer table


6. Observation: The plugin returns the count of customers


7. Final Answer: GPT-4 determines it now has all the information it needs, and provides the number of customers to the end user. Again, in a production scenario, this is the only answer the end-user would see.

3. Upload and analyze documents

The third and final common scenario we added to the accelerator is the upload of documents. Users can use the built-in upload function to send PDF files, and the bot will break them down and use Vector search to find relevant information.

Once again, starting with the plugin implementation:

And moving on to the Web Chat:

Conclusion

Semantic Kernel is a very powerful and extensible tool, but deployment can be a challenge if you don’t know where to start. In this article, we provided a solution accelerator template you can use to quickly get to production, and create your own plugins and extensions.

Also please note that you’re responsible for what plugins you place in the hands of your end users! Imagine what would happen if a user asked “please drop the AdventureWorksLT database”. For that reason, you need to make sure your application has the precise role assignments to enable the actions it needs to perform, while limiting anything that should be out of its reach. Always keep security first!

In case you missed the GitHub repository link, here it is! Make sure to drop a star if it helped you!

https://github.com/Azure/semantic-kernel-bot-in-a-box

Delegate Azure role assignment management using conditions

by Contributed | Oct 25, 2023 | Technology

This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.

We’re excited to share the public preview of delegating Azure role assignment management using conditions. This preview gives you the ability to enable others to assign Azure roles but add restrictions on the roles they can assign and who they can assign roles to.  

As the owner of an Azure subscription, you likely get requests from developers to grant them the ability to assign roles in your subscription. You could assign them the Owner or User Access Administrator role, but those roles grant permission to assign any Azure role (including Owner!), and that’s probably a lot more permission than necessary for that developer’s scenario. You could instead make role assignments for these developers on demand, but that makes you an unnecessary and impractical bottleneck in their workflow. 

Another common case we hear about is a deployment pipeline that needs to make role assignments as part of the deployment process, for example to grant a virtual machine managed identity access to Azure Storage and other resources. You don’t want to assign the deployment pipeline the Owner or User Access Administrator role because again, it’s a lot more permission than is needed for the scenario. 

We created this feature so you can grant permission to create role assignments, but only under specific conditions, such as for specific roles. You can do this in two ways: 

• Make a role assignment that is constrained using conditions. 


• Use a new built-in role that has built-in conditions. 

Let’s look at each scenario. 

How to delegate role assignment management using conditions

Meet Dara, a developer who needs to enable an Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) managed identity to pull images from an Azure Container Registry (ACR). Now, you can assign Dara the Role Based Access Administrator role and add conditions so she can only assign the AcrPull and AcrPush roles and only to service principals. 

Figure 1: Delegate Azure role assignment management using conditions.

Let’s look at how to do this step by step:

Step 1: When creating a new role assignment, on the Privileged administrator roles tab select the new Role Based Access Control Administrator role. You could also select any built-in or custom role that includes the Microsoft.Authorization/roleAssignments/write action.

Figure 2: Select role

Step 2: On the Members tab, select the user you want to delegate the role assignments task to.  

Figure 3: Select members

Step 3: On the Condition tab, click Add condition to add the condition to the role assignment.

Figure 4: Add condition to role assignment 

Step 4: On the Add role assignment condition page, specify how you want to constrain the role assignments this user can perform by selecting one of the templates. For example, if you only want to restrict the roles that a user can assign (ex. AcrPull and AcrPush) and the type of principals the user can assign roles to (ex. service principals), select the Constrain roles and principal types template.

Figure 5: Select role template

Step 5: On the Constrain roles and principal types pane, add the roles you want the user to be able to assign and select to what principal types the user can assign roles to.

Figure 6: Select role and principal type 

Step 6: Save the condition and complete the role assignment.  

Figure 7: Review role assignment with conditions

How to delegate role assignment management using a new built-in role with built-in conditions

Now Dara wants to control who can sign into virtual machines using Microsoft Entra ID credentials. To do this, Dara needs to create role assignments for the Virtual Machine User Login or Virtual Machine Administrator Login roles. In the past, you had to grant Dara the Owner or User Access Administrator role so she could make these assignments. Now, you can grant Dara the new Virtual Machine Data Access Administrator role. Then, Dara will only be able to assign the roles needed to manage access to the virtual machine. 

Figure 8: Virtual Machine Data Access Administrator 

Similarly, you can assign Key Vault Data Access Administrator role to trusted users managing key vaults, enabling them to assign only Azure Key Vault-related roles.

To assign the new built-in roles with built-in conditions, start a new role assignment, select the Job function roles tab, and select a role with built-in conditions, such as Virtual Machine Data Access Administrator. Then complete the flow to add a new role assignment.

Figure 9 Select Key Vault or Virtual Machine Data Access Administrator

Roles with built-in conditions have Data Access Administrator as part of the role name. Also, you can check if a role definition contains a condition. In the Details column, click View, select the JSON tab, and then inspect the condition property. Over time we’ll add more roles with built-in conditions, for the most common scenarios, to make it easy to manage resources and manage access to those resources with simple role assignments. 

Figure 10: Key Vault Data Access Admin JSON view definition

Next steps

We have several examples for you to get started and customize as needed. Delegating Azure role assignments with conditions is supported using the Azure portal, Azure Resource Manager REST API, PowerShell, and Azure CLI. Try it out and let us know your feedback in the comments or by using the Feedback button on the Access control (IAM) blade in the Azure portal!

Figure 11: Provide feedback

Stuart Kwan 

Partner Manager, Product Management 

Microsoft Entra 

Learn more about Microsoft Entra: 

• See recent Microsoft Entra blogs 


• Dive into Microsoft Entra technical documentation


• Join the conversation on the Microsoft Entra discussion space and Twitter


• Learn more about Microsoft Security  

Show declined events on the calendar

by Contributed | Oct 24, 2023 | Technology

This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.

A much-awaited calendaring feature is finally coming to Outlook: the capability of keeping the events you decline on your calendar.

In Settings, once you turn on the feature, declined events will no longer disappear but remain on your calendar so you can easily recollect related info or docs, find associated chats, or even take actions like updating your previous response (RSVP) and forwarding it to someone else; all while keeping your agenda free at that time slot.

Worldwide release for the ability to preserve declined events is planned for the second half of November 2023. Once it is out, this is what you can do to take advantage of it:

Step 1: Enable the feature

The ability to preserve declined events will be disabled by default. You can enable it in Outlook on the web or in the new Outlook for Windows by manually checking “Show declined events in your calendar…” in Settings > Calendar > Events and invitations > Save declined events.

Step 2: Decline Events

Once it’s enabled, you can start declining events or meeting invites and they will automatically be preserved.

Please note that events declined from the classic Outlook for Windows will not be preserved, but events declined from all other Outlook clients (new Outlook for Windows, Outlook on the web, Outlook for Mac, Outlook for Android, Outlook for iOS) and Microsoft Teams will be preserved.

Step 3: View Declined Events

Once preserved, declined events will be viewable on any calendar surface, including the classic Outlook for Windows, Teams, and even third-party apps.

We hope this feature will improve your calendaring experience, making your time management easier.

Cheers!