Hi, I'm Taswar. 👋
If you've made it to the end of this book, thanks for spending the time. That is genuinely not a small thing — you could have been watching a movie or debugging something more urgent.
I've been writing about .NET, C#, and cloud since 2009 — starting on a small WordPress blog at taswar.zeytinsoft.com, when Silverlight was still a thing and everyone was arguing about whether jQuery counted as a real framework. That blog is still going. Recent posts range from "Law of Demeter with a girlfriend-contacts-list analogy" (2009, aged surprisingly well) to "LLM in Microsoft Foundry".
By day I work as a Cloud Solution Architect at Microsoft, focused on AI, security, and helping enterprise customers ship things that actually work in production. Outside of work, I:
- Speak at conferences AgentCon, UpdateConf, Oredev and including NDC — recent talk: "Agents That Talk Back: MCP, ACP, A2A, Oh My!"
- Run a weekly LinkedIn newsletter called 5 Highlights Thursday — five links, five short takes, every Thursday for over 110 editions and counting
- Started giving talks at the Ottawa .NET User Group and have been steadily annoying my coworkers ever since with unsolicited PR comments
Honestly, because I got tired of every good prompt engineering resource being in Python.
There are excellent Python books. Andrew Ng's DeepLearning.AI courses are fantastic. The DAIR.AI prompt engineering guide is a great reference. But every time a .NET developer wanted to build something real with AI, the answer was some version of "install Conda, then pip install twelve things that may or may not conflict, then rewrite your service in Python."
.NET developers deserve better than that.
This book exists because Microsoft.Extensions.AI (MEAI) exists, Azure AI Foundry exists, and the pattern of "one IChatClient, swap the backend" makes the AI ecosystem accessible from C# in a way it was not two years ago. If you have finished this book and shipped something with it, that is exactly what I hoped would happen.
| Where | |
|---|---|
| Blog | taswar.zeytinsoft.com — .NET, AI, cloud, honest opinions |
| linkedin.com/in/taswarbhatti — day job, connections, the 5 Highlights Thursday newsletter | |
| GitHub | github.com/taswar — sample code, this book's repo, occasional side projects |
| Support the work | buymeacoffee.com/taswar — if any of this saved you a debug session |
Writing a book is a lot more effort than I remembered from the last time I tried. The reason it got finished this time is because I know at least a few of you are out there — hitting compile errors at 11 PM, wondering why the model returned markdown-fenced JSON again, trying to explain to your manager what Temperature = 0f actually means. This book was written for you.
If you found something useful in here, tell someone. Star the repo. Share a chapter with a colleague. Open an issue with a typo you spotted. Any of that helps more than you might think.
And if you build something interesting with what you learned here — I would love to see it. Ping me on LinkedIn. Tag me. Send me a link. I read every message.
Now go ship something. 🙂
— Taswar