Taswar Bhatti
Practical guides on AI agents, LLM security, C#/.NET and Cloud, from Taswar Bhatti
Tag: .net

Every time Microsoft ships a new model into Foundry, I ask myself the same boring-but-important question: does this change anything for the way I actually write code? Most of the time the answer is “cool demo, doesn’t affect my day job.” This time it’s different.

MAI-Thinking-1 — Microsoft’s first reasoning model — just went into public preview in Microsoft Foundry. It’s not a chat model with a “think harder” flag bolted on. It’s built from the ground up for multi-step reasoning: the kind of work where the model has to plan, reconsider, call tools, and stitch together a long chain of context before it gives you an answer worth trusting.

If you’ve read anything else I’ve written, you know where this is going: no Python required, no notebook gymnastics, just Microsoft.Extensions.AI and a dotnet run.

What MAI-Thinking-1 Actually Is

… Read the rest “MAI-Thinking-1 Is Now in Foundry — Here’s What It Means If You Write C#”
MAI-Voice-2 Flash for .NET Developers

Every voice application I’ve ever built or reviewed has the same problem: latency. The model can sound as natural as you want, but if there’s a full second of dead air between the user finishing a sentence and the assistant responding, the whole thing feels broken. Users notice a pause before they notice voice quality.

Microsoft AI just shipped MAI-Voice-2 Flash, a text-to-speech model built specifically to fix that. It’s the low-latency sibling of MAI-Voice-2, now available through Azure Speech — not a separate SDK, not a new service to learn, just a new voice option inside the Speech service you may already be using.

Same day, Microsoft also shipped MAI-Image-2.5 Pro for high-fidelity image generation (I covered that one in a separate post if you’re building creative/image pipelines). This post is about the voice model, because if you’re … Read the rest “MAI-Voice-2 Flash for .NET Developers — Real-Time Voice on Azure Speech”

MAI-Image-2.5 Pro for .NET Developers

Every time a new image model ships, my first question isn’t “how pretty are the demo images.” It’s “can I actually put this in a pipeline and get consistent, controllable output.” Most image models are great at one beautiful hero shot and terrible at the boring part — generating twelve consistent product variants, or fixing one object in an image without regenerating the whole thing.

Microsoft AI just shipped MAI-Image-2.5 Pro, now available in public preview in Microsoft Foundry as an Azure Direct Model. It’s Microsoft’s own image generation and image-editing model — not a third-party model hosted in the catalog, but one built in-house by Microsoft AI.

That is worth pausing on. Alongside it, MAI-Voice-2 Flash also shipped for real-time voice through Azure Speech. This post is about the image model (I will cover MAI-Voice-2 Flash in another … Read the rest “MAI-Image-2.5 Pro for .NET Developers — Microsoft’s Own Image Model Lands in Foundry”

Azure 5 Highlights Thursday

Published: 2026-07-23
Source: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/5-highlights-thursday-23rd-july-2026-117-edition-taswar-bhatti-s6rkf

Hope everyone is enjoying some summer break and here is the #117 edition of 5 Highlights Thursday. I hope this newsletter will help you in your Azure journey and keep you informed. Feel free to forward this along to anyone who you think may enjoy or better ask them to subscribe.

1. Free Book – Prompt Engineering for .NET Developers

Excited to share something I’ve been working on…After many late nights of writing, testing, and refining, I’ve finished my FREE ebook: Prompt Engineering for .NET Developers. You can read the entire book from leanpub or from my github repo. taswar/PromptEngineeringForDotNetDevelopers: A free ebook for .NET developers building real AI-powered apps in C# — no Python, no hype.

2. Build Agents you Can Trust on Windows

Building Agents You Can Trust on Windows | BRK262Building Agents You Can Trust on Windows | BRK262

Through live … Read the rest “5 Highlights Thursday | 23rd July 2026 (#117 Edition)”

prompt.engineering.for.dot.net.developers

Most prompt engineering content out there assumes you’re writing Python. Jupyter notebooks, pip install, Conda environments — none of it maps to how most of us actually ship software.

If you’re a .NET developer who wants to build real AI-powered features — not toy demos — into your applications, I wrote a free ebook for exactly that: Prompt Engineering for .NET Developers.

Why I Wrote This

Every prompt engineering tutorial I found was Python-first. Meanwhile, Microsoft.Extensions.AI gives .NET developers a clean, unified abstraction over LLM providers — LM Studio, OpenAI, Azure AI Foundry — using the exact same IChatClient interface. There was no practical, runnable guide to prompt engineering that met C# developers where they already live.

So I built one.

What’s Inside

Seven focused chapters, each ending in a runnable C# project:

  1. The .NET Developer’s AI
… Read the rest “Prompt Engineering for .NET Developers”
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