Simon Bisson
Columnist
Author of InfoWorld's Enterprise Microsoft blog, Simon BIsson prefers to think of "career" as a verb rather than a noun, having worked in academic and telecoms research, as well as having been the CTO of a startup, running the technical side of UK Online (the first national ISP with content as well as connections), before moving into consultancy and technology strategy. He’s built plenty of large-scale web applications, designed architectures for multi-terabyte online image stores, implemented B2B information hubs, and come up with next generation mobile network architectures and knowledge management solutions. In between doing all that, he’s been a freelance journalist since the early days of the web and writes about everything from enterprise architecture down to gadgets.
The key new features and changes in .NET 8
With Microsoft’s yearly .NET release just around the corner, it’s time to start thinking about the changes you will need to make to your code.
Building LLM applications with vector search in Azure Cognitive Services
Microsoft’s Cognitive Search API now offers vector search as a service, ready for use with large language models in Azure OpenAI and beyond.
Understanding OneLake and lakehouses in Microsoft Fabric
Microsoft Azure’s new, unified data platform aims to be your one-stop shop for analytics and machine learning at scale.
Tame your wild LLM with TypeChat
Large language models mean not having to use complicated regular expression handlers to turn text into data. Using TypeChat, you can ensure that that data is type-safe JSON.
The power of process mining in Power Automate
Process mining is now part of Microsoft’s process automation suite, giving you the KPIs and visualizations you need to identify bottlenecks in both manual workflows and software processes.
Customizing Microsoft Dev Boxes with code
Configuration as code is coming to Microsoft’s Azure-hosted workstations, allowing us to use WinGet, YAML files, and PowerShell DSC to deliver ready-to-run toolchains to developers.
Build custom actions for Power Automate for Windows
Bundled with Windows 11, Power Automate for Windows lets you wrap low-code workflows around your desktop applications. A new SDK supports custom actions.
Build accelerated AI apps for NPUs with Olive
Microsoft’s open-source, hardware-aware optimization tool for ONNX models is an essential part of its AI application development tool chain.
Using Microsoft Azure’s Prometheus monitoring with Kubernetes
Azure Monitor managed service for Prometheus smooths the way to multi-cluster monitoring across Azure Kubernetes Service, Azure Arc-hosted Kubernetes, and on-prem Kubernetes deployments.
Getting started with MQTT in Azure Event Grid
The addition of MQTT protocol support paves the way to bringing SCADA control systems and other industrial IoT deployments to Azure. Here’s how to get started.
Azure Cosmos DB joins the AI toolchain
Microsoft has introduced a spectrum of new tools to make it easier to customize and focus the output of GPT-based AI models. Cosmos DB plays an important role.