Mike Yeager
CEO - CODE Consulting
Mike is the CEO of CODE and a skilled .NET and cloud developer. Mike excels at evaluating business requirements and turning them into results from development teams. He's been the project lead on many projects and promotes the use of modern best practices. Mike has also been an early adopter of Microsoft's Semantic Kernel, writing articles and giving presentations on it. He's worked on multiple AI projects, including the development of a copilot for working with specialized legal contracts, focusing on efficiently ingestion and searching large volumes of documents to increase the relevance and quality of the copilot's responses. Before coming to CODE, Mike was a business owner developing a high-profile software business in the leisure industry. He grew the business from 2 employees to over 30 before selling the company and looking for new challenges. He continues speaking at conferences and writing for trade magazines. In his spare time, Mike enjoys skiing, golfing, flying and playing ice hockey and his latest project is teaching development skills to kids in his home town of Taos, NM.
Detailed Bio
Mike is the CEO of CODE and a skilled .NET and cloud developer. Mike excels at evaluating business requirements and turning them into results from development teams. He's been the project lead on many projects and promotes the use of modern best practices. Mike has also been an early adopter of Microsoft's Semantic Kernel, writing articles and giving presentations on it. He's worked on multiple AI projects, including the development of a copilot for working with specialized legal contracts, focusing on efficiently ingestion and searching large volumes of documents to increase the relevance and quality of the copilot's responses.
Before coming to CODE, Mike was a business owner developing a high-profile software business in the leisure industry. He grew the business from 2 employees to over 30 before selling the company and looking for new challenges. He continues speaking at conferences and writing for trade magazines. In his spare time, Mike enjoys skiing, golfing, flying and playing ice hockey and his latest project is teaching development skills to kids in his home town of Taos, NM.
Skills
- C# / Visual Studio
- Azure DevOps
- Photino
- JavaScript/TypeScript & frameworks
- Azure SQL Database & SQL Server
- NoSQL including Cosmos DB
- SQL Server Reporting Services
- Serverless development
- Microsoft Azure development
- Mobile device development
- WPF / Xamarin / MAUI / XAML development
- CODE Framework
- Visual Studio Extensibility (VSX)
- Requirements gathering
- Use cases & documentation
- Design patterns
- Git
Contact Information:
Articles Authored
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.NET 6: Date and Time
Last updated: Wednesday, August 31, 2022
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2022 - March/April
Every day, you need to know the date and the time for a myriad of reasons. Mike walks through the current state for using Data and Time types from SQL Server in .NET code.
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.NET Core for the Desktop
Last updated: Monday, April 5, 2021
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2019 - March/April
Software vendors and conferences would tell you that the desktop is dead, but if you’re a working consultant, you know that’s not true. Mike dives into a great tool using WinForms to show you what you’ve been missing.
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Add File Storage to Azure App Services: The Work Around
Last updated: Wednesday, August 28, 2019
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2019 - September/October
When maintaining the hierarchy of a file system and integrating security limits you to a single point of access, you might have some heavy lifting to do while you wait for Microsoft to supply a tool to automate this task. Mike and his team found a great work-around that will keep you happy until the tool is available.
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Azure Skyline: Azure’s Active Directory—Authorization in the Cloud
Last updated: Monday, June 21, 2021
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2016 - July/August
If you’ve got a bunch of different passwords for each of your logins on various accounts, even if you only have a few possible email addresses, you’ve got a confusing mess. Mike clears it all up and helps you figure out which is which.
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Azure Skyline: Azure’s SQL Database—SQL Server in the Cloud
Last updated: Thursday, June 24, 2021
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2016 - March/April
Mike explores Azure SQL Database and what it has the potential to do for large and small businesses.
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Azure Skyline: Building and Deploying Services to Azure with .NET Core and Docker
Last updated: Wednesday, May 26, 2021
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2017 - March/April, EPS/CODE Articles & Whitepapers
Today’s devs have to be nimble. Your app has to work on a multitude of platforms and meet any number of platform-specific demands. Mike explains how a new tool called Docker can help you deploy your apps on everything from Linux to .NET and leave you hardly breaking a sweat.
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Azure Skyline: Data in Cloud Applications
Last updated: Tuesday, May 18, 2021
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2017 - July/August
Mike looks at the technology that allows multiple teams to connect and scale their data despite disparate data storage methods.
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Azure Skyline: Hello World—Virtual Machines in the Cloud
Last updated: Wednesday, July 7, 2021
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2015 - September/October
Mike introduces you to the wonder of the cloud through a free subscription to Microsoft’s Azure. He gives an interesting tour and helps guide you through your first app.
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Azure Skyline: Remote App—Hosting Desktop Apps in Azure
Last updated: Monday, June 28, 2021
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2016 - January/February
In this next installment of his exploration of Microsoft Azure, Mike explores the benefits of remote desktop apps.
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Azure Skyline: Terms (Resource Groups, App Service Plans and SQL Elastic Pools)
Last updated: Friday, April 30, 2021
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2018 - March/April
Azure has come out with some great new tools. Mike introduces some of them, including Resource Groups, App Service Plans, and SQL Elastic Pools.
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Azure Skyline: Using WebJobs for Event-Driven, Asynchronous Services
Last updated: Friday, June 4, 2021
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2016 - November/December
If your call to services times out after four minutes, you can have a problem if the process needed to retrieve the data or a fire-and-forget operation takes longer than that. What if the user makes a request and then wanders away from the computer? Mike solves it for you, with WebJobs in Azure Skyline.
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Azure Skyline: Visual Studio Reports in the Cloud
Last updated: Wednesday, June 9, 2021
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2016 - September/October
Every company requires reports. They’re one of the constants of the business world. Mike shows us how to use Azure and VS to get just what you need without the drudgery you’ve come to expect.
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CODE Framework Cheat Sheet
Last updated: Tuesday, December 21, 2021
Published in: EPS/CODE Articles & Whitepapers
Quick Reference for the objects and properties used in the CODE Framework
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CODE SQL Server Database Standards
Last updated: Wednesday, February 20, 2019
Published in: EPS/CODE Articles & Whitepapers
Mike Yeager explains CODE SQL Server Database Standards
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Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is: Dates and Times across Time Zones
Last updated: Tuesday, May 11, 2021
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2017 - November/December
Since cloud computing came to town, you can’t count on your system’s software and appliances all being in the same time zone. Mike addresses some thorny issues and helps you keep your data up to date.
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Extending Your Development Experience with the Visual Studio Gallery
Last updated: Wednesday, February 20, 2019
Published in: Publisher's Point
There are some big, exciting changes happening around Visual Studio! Microsoft is shifting the focus of VS from being just a developer tool to being an entire platform. As part of that shift, the Visual Studio Gallery web site went live on Feb 27, 2008. The site is your one-stop resource for cool productivity tools called Visual Studio extensions. An addition to CodePlex’s repository of collaborative projects and CodeGallery’s place to find sample apps and code snippets, Visual Studio Gallery is THE place to find extensions targeted at Visual Studio. Extensions can be anything from macros to item, project or solution templates to add-ins to full-blown extensibility packages. You’ll find both free and paid extensions built by both professional companies and community members.
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From VFP to .NET
Last updated: Tuesday, February 19, 2019
Published in: VFP Conversion Papers, CODE Focus Magazine: 2007 - Vol. 4 - Issue 1 - Sedna: Beyond Visual FoxPro 9
A practical look at what’s involved in converting your Visual FoxPro (VFP) applications to Visual Studio and SQL Server. Let me say up front that I am a long-time FoxPro developer and that I love VFP. I also love .NET and SQL Server and I’ve headed up and participated in many conversions. Most of the conversions I’ve worked on were not driven by technical necessity, but by customer demand that software be built with .NET and SQL Server. Whatever the reason, conversion from VFP to .NET is a significant undertaking.
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Introducing Photino: Create Desktop Applications with Web UIs
Last updated: Wednesday, August 31, 2022
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2021 - May/June
If you use Electron but find it makes a pretty big application, try using open source Photino, which uses .NET 5 for the host application instead of Node.js. Your apps for mobile or cross-platform can be lighter and faster.
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It’s Complicated
Last updated: Wednesday, January 10, 2024
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2022 - January/February
Software development is complicated. Mike talks about dealing with complexity on teams, and how teams can work together better to manage those giant piles of new ideas with catchy names.
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Machine Learning Saves Precious Time: Using AI to Classify Spam
Last updated: Tuesday, August 29, 2023
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2023 - September/October
Learn to use machine learning with AI to identify spam. Mike and the CODE team use AI to sort out the legitimate email messages.
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Machine Learning Saves Precious Time: Using AI to Classify Spam
Last updated: Thursday, November 30, 2023
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2023 - November/December
Like most businesses, EPS and CODE Magazine receive a fair amount of spam through the contact page on the website. Mike and his team found a way to use machine learning to train and then sort spam from legitimate customers using CODE's contact form. And it can be trained later to be better.
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Manager’s Corner: Flat Code
Last updated: Wednesday, July 7, 2021
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2015 - July/August
Mike takes a close look at how to deal with legacy code and the problems of re-using and maintaining source code.
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Manager’s Corner: It Is What It Is
Last updated: Monday, May 9, 2022
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2013 - July/August
July/August 2013 Manager's Corner by Mike Yeager
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Manager’s Corner: Motivation
Last updated: Tuesday, December 21, 2021
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2015 - March/April
Mike talks about the different kinds of motivation and how, as a manager, to contribute to maintaining motivation among the workers on your project.
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Manager’s Corner: Teams and Scalability
Last updated: Monday, August 2, 2021
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2014 - November/December
When your team drastically changes size, you’ll understand Mike’s parallel lessons from writing code.
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Manager’s Corner: The Emperor Has No Clothes
Last updated: Monday, January 3, 2022
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2013 - November/December
I’ve been working on a technical assessment of a system for a new client during the last few weeks. As I looked at line after line of the source code they gave me, I saw test-driven design (TDD), inversion of control (IOC), dependency injection (DI), and plenty of other TLAs (three letter acronyms). I saw “convention over configuration.” I saw layer upon layer of abstraction. There was more unit test code than code. Code coverage was very high. Marvelous! I can almost hear some of you salivating.
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Manager’s Corner: The Long View!
Last updated: Tuesday, February 19, 2019
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2015 - November/December
Take your company to the next level when you consider all of a client’s requests. No one can see the future, but it’s possible that the unreasonable thing that your client asks for is your best guess at how to grow your own business.
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Manager’s Corner: Words Matter
Last updated: Tuesday, September 7, 2021
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2014 - July/August
Words aren’t the only aspect of good communication. Mike teaches us that the code should stand on its own, now, next week, next year, and for the next decade.
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Manager's Corner: Meetings
Last updated: Monday, December 27, 2021
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2014 - March/April
If your calendar has more meetings scheduled into it that time to work, you’ll appreciate Mike Yeager’s suggestions for making meetings more efficient.
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Manager's Corner: Recharging
Last updated: Thursday, July 1, 2021
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2015 - September/October
Mike teaches us the value of taking a vacation--it's good for the whole team!
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Manger's Corner: Simplicity
Last updated: Monday, September 20, 2021
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2014 - May/June
Simplicity doesn’t mean more abstract: it means more basic and clear. Mike tells us how to manage projects without introducing unnecessary complexity.
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Semantic Kernal Part 3: Advanced Topics
Last updated: Wednesday, August 28, 2024
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2024 - September/October
Mike details the evolution of his team's development of a Copilot system using Microsoft's Semantic Kernel (SK) framework for Large Language Models (LLMs). Initially, Mike describes their hands-on approach to building a Copilot capable of answering legal contract queries by manually injecting relevant data into prompts. However, as the project advanced, the team adopted GPT-4 and automatic function calling, significantly simplifying their code and enhancing functionality. Mike emphasizes the transformative impact of these new technologies, which allowed for more effective and efficient application development with minimal manual intervention.
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Semantic Kernel 101
Last updated: Wednesday, January 31, 2024
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2024 - January/February
Mike Yeager introduces Semantic Kernel (SK), an open-source AI framework developed by Microsoft for .NET for working with large language models (LLMs) and specifically to help create Copilots. Yeager explains that SK serves three main purposes: to abstract the underlying LLMs, APIs, and tooling; to handle complex implementations in a generic way; and to facilitate the integration of user-generated content. He also discusses the benefits of using SK, such as its ability to create prompt templates, handle ad hoc scenarios, and assist with tasks like tokenization and text splitting. Despite still being in preview, Yeager suggests that SK is a powerful SDK that is worth exploring.
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Semantic Kernel 101: Part 2
Last updated: Thursday, February 22, 2024
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2024 - March/April
Mike continues his tutorial on working with Semantic Kernel (SK), Microsoft's framework for working with Large Language Models (LLMs), including code examples since SK V1 has just released. Mike demonstrates how to create a deployment of a GPT-4 Large Language Model in the Azure portal. Learn to create a prompt in code and execute it against the model. Learn to execute your own C# code in the same way you executed the prompts, and how to chain multiple functions together in a pipeline.
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VFP 8 Tips and Tricks
Last updated: Tuesday, February 19, 2019
Published in: CODE Focus Magazine: 2003 - Vol. 1 - Issue 1 - Visual FoxPro 8.0, VFP Conversion Papers
Some of the early adopters of VFP 8 have contributed tips for some of the new features of this exciting release.Check out their ideas, then jump into the product and try some of the new stuff. You'll find that there is much more than meets the eye, with hundreds of additions, changes, and improvements.
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VFP Conversion Roadmap Whitepaper
Last updated: Tuesday, February 19, 2019
Published in: VFP Conversion Papers, Markus Egger Talks Tech
This whitepaper discusses strategies for managers converting Visual FoxPro (VFP) applications to .NET, and lays a foundation for producing an implementation plan.