A family member's hospital stay inspired me to build AI personas of Johannes Brahms and Thomas Mann as conversation companions. This post sets out the five ingredients that make a persona feel real, shows an excerpt from my actual Brahms Instructions document, and explains how anyone — including non-technical users — can produce their own with a ready-to-use prompt.

AI is coming for most white-collar jobs. Blue-collar too, but it will take longer because of the delay before hundreds of millions of robots can be manufactured. So it is now vital for you to use AI to increase your productivity by a multiple.

I have upgraded the site from .NET 9 and the associated function from .NET 8 to .NET 10.

I've been exploring AI Agents recently and they look extremely promising.  More on this in due course.

I've been experimenting a lot using Oqtane over the last 2 months and like it quite a lot.

I upgraded this website to .NET9 at the weekend. That was straightforward, I just had to update Visual Studio 2022 to the latest version and then upgrading the site amounted to just changing the target in its project file. I also tried upgrading the associated function, but it seems (as too often with Microsoft releases) that .NET 9 is not yet really fully available. It doesn't work with functions yet!

I have just upgraded this website from .NET 7 to .NET 8, and also the associated Azure function from .NET 6 in-process to .NET 8 isolated. Upgrading an app service (website) from .NET 7 (or 6) to .NET 8 is pretty straightforward and essentially just involves changing the target framework ...

For security reasons, you should not be storing production setting values in source control. But this means that by default, you don't have your own backup of the values for your live, production settings. What if you want to store a copy of your settings (e.g. along with the artifacts) ...

I was able to migrate a legacy project using .net framework and entity framework to .NET 7 and EFCore relatively easily. EFCore Power Tools was very useful in doing a first draft of model code from the existing database.

Upgrading a .NET 6 to .NET 7 app service seems very straightforward. Upgrading Azure functions to .NET 7 looks to be a more significant change, and might require some investigation first.