News

Newly Open-Sourced '.NET Smart Components' Demoed at AI Event

• By David Ramel
• 08/21/2024

Yesterday's .NET Conf Focus on AI online event highlighted Microsoft's latest/greatest AI dev tooling, including the newly open-sourced .NET Smart Components.

Debuting as an "experiment" earlier this year from Blazor creator Steve Sanderson, they are AI-infused ready-made components that devs can just drop into their projects to instantly supercharge UI with AI.

Sanderson announced they were open source a day before the event in a social media post viewed by some 16,000 people. He had long been pushing for the open sourcing, which was requested by many developers.

And yesterday they were highlighted by Scott Hanselman and Maria Naggaga during the opening keynote titled "State of .NET + AI."

The duo explained the project in the context of an example shopping app, specifically showing how AI enhances text boxes used in a customer support scenario.

"They're not very sophisticated, right?" remarked Hanselman, VP of Developer Community. "Oftentimes, the support ticket page is just a bunch of text boxes that are not clever text boxes, and I just end up typing into them, and I presume that it generates some email on the back end. It's not a smart box."

When a Smart Component text box was used, they showed how its AI enhanced the experience with autocomplete functionality and the ability to take vague customer input and figure out what the user actually intended.

"And we did this with something called Smart Components," said Naggaga, senior program manager on the Visual Studio .NET team. "So Smart Components is like a UI AI element that we experimented with on the .NET team. So Steve Sanderson ... said, 'How would developers, how would consumers actually benefit from AI inside of their UI?' So this is the experience of it."

As the project's new GitHub repo shows, that experience comes in Smart Paste and Smart ComboBox in addition to the Smart TextArea that was demoed. Here they are in action:

• Smart Paste: A button that fills out forms automatically using data from the user's clipboard. You can use this with any existing form in your web app. This helps users add data from external sources without re-typing.

  

• Smart TextArea: An intelligent upgrade to the traditional textarea. You can configure how it should autocomplete whole sentences using your own preferred tone, policies, URLs, and so on. This helps users type faster and not have to remember URLs etc.

  

• Smart ComboBox: Upgrades the traditional combobox by making suggestions based on semantic matching. This helps users find what they're looking for.

  

"The .NET Smart Components are an experiment and are initially available for Blazor, MVC, and Razor Pages with .NET 6 and later," said Microsoft's Daniel Roth, principal product manager, ASP.NET, in announcing the AI-powered UI controls in March. "We expect to provide components for other .NET UI frameworks as well, like .NET MAUI, WPF, and Windows Forms, but first we're interested in your feedback on how useful these components are and what additional capabilities you'd like to see added."

Roth demoed more Smart Component functionality in his own session, "Build interactive AI-powered web apps with Blazor and .NET," which invites devs to "Learn how you can quickly and easily build interactive AI-powered web apps with Blazor and .NET using a variety of ready-made AI components from the .NET ecosystem."

He continued: "Now we've made the code for the .NET Smart Components freely available as reference implementations. They're basically a bunch of samples so that they can help bootstrap an ecosystem of AI-enabled .NET components."

Roth also gave a shout-out to that ecosystem -- specifically third-party vendors who have come out with their own AI-infused UI constructs -- showing offerings from Progress Telerik, DevExpress and Syncfusion.

No doubt open sourcing will help bootstrap that ecosystem.

Both Roth's presentation and the keynote are available for replay, along with many more sessions and the entire livestream recording of the event, nearly 8-1/2 hours of video. Those two presentations, however, are by far and away the most-viewed videos, notching about 1,400 views each, with some 12,000 views for the entire event.

As a guide to what you might want to watch, Microsoft earlier provided this list of session highlights:

• Getting Started with AI in Your .NET Applications
  • Speaker: Stephen Toub
  • Discover how easy it is to get started with AI in your .NET applications. This session will take you from a blank project to a fully integrated AI solution in no time.
• Better Together: .NET Aspire and Semantic Kernel
  • Speakers: Steve Sanderson, Matthew Bolanos
  • Understand the synergy between .NET Aspire and Semantic Kernel for developing intelligent applications.
• Interactive AI with Blazor and .NET
  • Speakers: Dan Roth
  • Learn how to create interactive AI-driven web applications using Blazor and .NET, including smart components and chatbot UI. We’ll also highlight a few AI-based demos from vendors in the .NET ecosystem.
• Navigating the World of AI Models in .NET: From Local Development to the Cloud
  • Speaker: Bruno Capuano
  • Explore various AI models and learn how to integrate them into your .NET applications. This session will cover everything from local development to cloud deployment, using real-world scenarios.
• RAG on Your Data with .NET, AI, and Azure SQL
  • Speakers: Davide Mauri
  • Learn how to build Retrieval Augmented Generation solutions on data stored in SQL Server or Azure SQL. This session will cover existing and future options, leveraging Azure SQL as a vector store.
• Integrating Semantic Search Capabilities with .NET and Azure: Milvus Vector Database
  • Speaker: Tim Spann
  • Discover how Milvus leverages vector embeddings to enable powerful semantic search and similarity matching capabilities in .NET environments. Learn best practices and see practical examples of using Milvus in .NET applications.
• H&R Block: Lessons Learned from Applying Generative AI to Apps with .NET and Azure
  • Speaker: Vin Kamat
  • Hear real-world experiences from H&R Block on researching, developing, deploying, and improving AI assistants and applications using .NET and Azure.