Patterns & Practices

The Microsoft Patterns and Practices (P&P) website is a veritable gold mine of information on architecting and developing .Net based applications among other things. Check out these P&P guides ...

Its Events sections features live, recently recorded and archived webcasts on various facets of web development using Microsoft technologies.


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Binge‑Watch Humanity

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Cartoon co-created with ChatGPT. See more of my AI co-creations I tried to spice up my draft by asking Copilot to sneak in two people brawling in the background for extra drama as you now see in the final version. Copilot declined, saying, “I can’t add violent fighting — even if it’s just cartoon chaos — because I must avoid glorifying or normalizing violence.” ChatGPT complied.
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Read Aloud feature in AI Assistants

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The free versions of popular AI chatbots ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, Mistral & Grok can read out a response. This feature is a very useful on mobile devices which have small screen sizes. Among these AI assistants, Grok has more options - you can not only choose from multiple voice options but also control the pacing.  Grok currently offers the following types of voices - Ara - Upbeat Female Eve - Soothing Female Leo - British Male Rex - Calm Male Sal - Smooth Male Gork - Lazy Male While I loved Grok's read aloud feature, I noticed a few glitches - 1. A few words were omitted although it was part of Grok's response. 2. A large number was incorrectly spelt out  3. Possibly because the answer was long or my bandwidth was weak at a particular point, there were a couple of interruptions. The spinner indicated it could be buffering and I was pleasantly surprised that the voice resumed automatically although some bits were cut off. Claude currently doesn't offer the Read Alo...
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This Week I Learned - Week 23 2026

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This Week I Learned -  * Anthropic and OpenAI have launched their own services companies, challenging traditional IT firms and service providers. Anthropic's joint venture with Blackstone, Goldman Sachs, and Hellman & Friedman is valued at $1.5 billion, while OpenAI's venture, The Development Company, is valued at $4 billion.  * "Google which is cash surplus, just announced an additional capital raise of $80 bn. Google annual profit is $160 bn, last quarter $62 bn, and market cap $4.5 trillion. That is close to total profits and market cap of all Indian listed companies put together.  It’s a wake up call to all companies  to invest into the future, whatever the present maybe." - Uday Kotak * "One reason that the atrophy of coding skills is concerning is the “paradox of supervision” ... effectively using Claude requires supervision, and supervising Claude requires the very coding skills that may atrophy from AI overuse." - Anthropic * “People who go all i...
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