With the .NET Smart Components, Microsoft has introduced a collection of UI components that use artificial intelligence to support users with input. The components are considered experimental and are initially available for Blazor, ASP.NET Core Model View Controller (MVC), and ASP.NET Core Razor Pages. At launch there are three components: Smart Paste, Smart TextArea and Smart ComboBox. In the backend they require access to the Azure OpenAI service.
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Help for forms, text fields and combo boxes
Smart Paste helps users fill out forms and tries to assign the contents of the clipboard to the appropriate fields.
The Smart TextArea component extends the functionality of multi-line text fields with automatic text completion. For individual configuration, short descriptions are used to adapt the suggestions of the language model in the background to the role of the user and the associated scenario. The documentation contains the example “An open-source project owner replying to a GitHub issue”.
Finally, the Smart ComboBox displays suggestions based on the input, but does not limit itself to syntactic matching by searching for substrings, as is usual, but works semantically, for example to assign expenses for “Hospital” to the categories “Health Insurance” or “Charity”. . The embeddings for the semantic assignment can be individually adapted.
The minimum requirement for the Smart Components is .NET 6.0 or ASP.NET Core 6.0. Microsoft released the current .NET 8.0 in November 2023 and published the second preview for .NET 9.0 at the beginning of March.
The Minds Mastering Machines will take place in Cologne on April 24th and 25th, 2024. The specialist conference organized by iX and dpunkt.verlag goes beyond the AI hype and is aimed at data scientists, data engineers and developers who turn machine learning projects into reality.
The conference program offers a good 30 lectures in three tracks over two days, including on the following topics:
- Introduction to Large Language Models
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- Automatic code migration with LLMs
- Vector database optimization
- AI Act & Co.
Further details can be found in the Microsoft Developer Blog. The post emphasizes that this is an experiment, and the team is asking for feedback on how useful the smart components are. The associated repository on GitHub contains some examples and documentation for the individual components.
(rme)