Technology Wonders

This article walks through building a token-streaming technical chat application using ASP.NET Core 10, the new Microsoft.Extensions.AI abstraction layer, and Azure OpenAI. The server streams each response token to the browser as it is generated, and a progress bar advances in real time to show the user that work is happening. 1. Why Streaming Matters for AI Applications Large language models generate text one token at a time. A complete answer to a technical question may contain several hundred tokens and take multiple seconds to produce. Without streaming, the server silently waits for every token, then sends the full response in one HTTP reply. From the user's perspective the application appears frozen for those seconds. With streaming, each token is forwarded to the browser the moment it leaves the model, so the answer builds up visibly in real time. There are three concrete reasons this matters: Perceived performance. The user sees the response start w...

Using FusionCache in an ASP.NET Core Minimal API This article explains how the current Core_FusionCache application uses FusionCache with ASP.NET Core Minimal APIs, Entity Framework Core, SQL Server, and Redis. The application exposes product CRUD endpoints, reads product data from the Products table, caches read responses, and invalidates stale cache entries after write operations. Figure 1: FusionCache read and write flow used by this application. What is FusionCache? FusionCache is an advanced caching library for .NET applications. It gives an application a single cache API while supporting useful production features such as in-memory caching, distributed caching, fail-safe behavior, cache stampede protection, eager refresh, serialization, and backplane notifications. In this application, FusionCache is configured as a two-level cache: L1 cache: a fast in-memory cache inside the running ASP.NET Core proce...