Overview of 2022 and Content Creation with AI

Intro

Welcome to RoguePlanetoid podcast where each episode you can find insights for developers, whether you are a beginner or an experienced professional for Microsoft and related platforms, along with related technology and so much more to help Keep Current, Keep Coding.

Welcome

Welcome I'm Peter and this is episode one of the RoguePlanetoid podcast where I'll give an overview of 2022 and discuss content creation with AI. However, it is great to first say this is the very first podcast and episode I've done on my own, although I've been involved with podcasts before having written a few episodes for Scottish Murders, which is a fortnightly podcast dedicated to murders carried out in Scotland or of Scottish people, which included one about the Lockerbie Bombing and took part in the Ghost Hunt episode which was part of a Scottish Collaboration last year and am currently the voice of the intro to the "Dawn's Digest" feature!

This podcast will be where I'll give insights for developers, whether beginner or experienced professionals, using Microsoft and related platforms, along with related technology and more with the first topic for this episode being an overview of 2022!

Overview of 2022

For me 2022 was the busiest year I have had as a developer which including attending events, writing articles and speaking at more events in a year than ever before! The main event for Microsoft developers is Microsoft Build 2022, which I attended virtually and have been able to do for the past few years too. I was able to get involved myself when I represented part of the community during one of the sessions where spoke about what I had been working on with the Uno Platform where I had developed a Pomodoro application that I had also done a talk about, and it was amazing to be a part of the session and help represent the community. You can find out more about Microsoft Build from build.microsoft.com or check out the link in the show notes.

2022 also marked ten years since I attended Microsoft Build 2012 in Seattle, where I not only made the most of the experience as a developer but also made time to visit the Space Needle including places nearby and took a trip to the Boeing Factory and Museum of Flight which was incredible. For .NET developers there is .NET Conf which is a virtual conference held each year and it saw the release of .NET 7, which is a standard-term support version for one year, but .NET 8 will be release in November 2023 which will be a long-term support version for three years so .NET 7 is a great stepping stone to that version including enhancements to performance along with fully integrating .NET MAUI or .NET multi-platform app UI which allows developers to create native cross-platform desktop and mobile applications using .NET which replaces Xamarin. You can find out more about .NET Conf at dotnetconf.net or check out the link in the show notes.

Content Creation with AI

2022 saw the introduction of what would have seemed like magic only a few years ago is now a reality, with the launch of ChatGPT, which is an AI-based chatbot able to respond to a variety of prompts from users, so to put it to the test I got it to write an introduction about itself with the prompt “Write an introduction about ChatGPT” and it answered with the following “ChatGPT is a state-of-the-art language model developed by OpenAI, which uses deep learning algorithms to generate human-like text responses. It is trained on a massive amount of text data and can generate responses to a wide range of topics, making it suitable for various applications, including conversational AI, language translation, and text summarization. ChatGPT is designed to answer questions and provide information in a concise and informative manner, making it a useful tool for improving communication and solving problems efficiently.”. ChatGPT has also helped not only to write an introduction about itself, but I also asked it to create a slogan for this podcast which I shortened to Keep Current, Keep Coding.

ChatGPT is not merely limited to answering questions about itself but can produce astonishing content from the simplest of prompts, as a developer you can ask it to write code, although whether what it produces makes sense or even works is another matter, in fact answers written by ChatGPT are banned from being used on StackOverflow.com as of the recording of this episode. Code generated by ChatGPT can be a good starting point, or even help make understanding concepts a little easier by showing an example but one thing it is good at is generating test data which at least doesn't need to be accurate or make sense so there's probably still a place for ChatGPT in the workflow of a developer somewhere, especially as will also be able to take advantage of an API for developers to use ChatGPT in your applications. So, if you want to try ChatGPT, for free when its available as due to high demand for the service it sometimes is not available, or there will be a paid tier to use it when you want, if you want to find out more about ChatGPT then you can visit chat.openai.com or check out the link in the show notes.

Microsoft Designer is, as of recording this episode, an invite only service where you can create designs from a variety of templates, but something else it supports is being able to create images for free using DALL-E from a prompt which allows non-designers to create original imagery. You could even combine these images with output from ChatGPT to create content from words and images a reasonably acceptable way that wasn't even possible a few years ago! With Microsoft Designer you could create an image using the prompt “Computers in the style of Leonardo Da Vinci” or “schematics of a robot” with Microsoft Designer the possibilities are endless and as it becomes more widely available it will be interesting to see how people use it to create their designs and unique images and share them on social media. Microsoft Designer not only allows you to create images with AI using DALLE-2 but can create layouts based on dozens of templates with various options for customisation such as fonts, colours, styles and so much more and certainly makes it useful for developers who aren't designers to produce content for their projects. If you want to try Microsoft Designer for yourself before it goes fully public then look out for invites, or I have three invites available so feel free to request one Twitter at twitter.com/RoguePlanetoid. You can find Microsoft Designer at designer.microsoft.com or check out the link in the show notes.

Outro

Thanks for listening to the RoguePlanetoid podcast where you can find insights for developers, whether you are a beginner or an experienced professional using Microsoft and related platforms, along with related technology and so much more. You can also find any links in the show notes for this episode or visit rogueplanetoid.com/podcast for details of this episode and podcast. Keep Current, Keep Coding!