From Zero to Hero: Microsoft.Extensions.AI in .NET

AI is no longer a side project or a research curiosity, it’s becoming a core part of how modern applications are built, and .NET developers need a practical way in. This course is your hands-on introduction to AI engineering in C#, built around the Microsoft.Extensions.AI libraries that give you clean, provider-agnostic abstractions over the full AI stack. The two main themes in this course are building real AI features and making sure they actually hold up under testing. You can expect a deep dive into running local LLMs with Ollama, creating a chat client with IChatClient that preserves history, follows system instructions, and calls your own functions, all the way through to unit testing LLM-backed code and evaluating the quality of natural language responses. After that, there’s a full section dedicated to ingesting data for Retrieval-Augmented Generation using IEmbeddingGenerator and vector stores, followed by a chapter on image generation with IImageGenerator. Finally, you’ll learn how to work with on-device AI through Microsoft.Maui.Essentials.AI and Apple Intelligence, and how to take your solution to the cloud using Microsoft Foundry and AWS Bedrock.