Microsoft Updates Its Free Generative AI for Beginners .NET Course

Microsoft has released version 2 of its free online course, Generative AI for Beginners .NET. This update is based on .NET 10, and it’s been completely overhauled.

“If you want to understand and build generative AI applications, from core concepts to production-ready patterns, this is your starting point,” the .NET team explains. “This new version restructured the entire curriculum into five focused lessons with full explanations, rebuilt everything on .NET 10, and moved to Microsoft.Extensions.AI as the primary abstraction.”

Those who took the original version of the course will want to take another look at version 2, as it’s an entirely new course. As noted, there are five courses–Introduction to Generative AI, Generative AI Techniques, AI Patterns and Applications, Agents with MAF (Microsoft Agent Framework), and Responsible AI–and each goes deeper than before, with better explanations and code walkthroughs.

The courses also follow modern .NET 10 patterns like dependency injection, middleware pipelines, and file-based apps, and all file-based samples now use AzureCliCredential so no one has to juggle connection strings or API keys across dozens of projects. And the course now uses the latest available models.

The most significant change, perhaps, is the move from Semantic Kernel to Microsoft.Extensions.AI (MEAI) as the primary way to communicate with AI models. MEAI is part of .NET 10, and it dramatically simplifies the code that developers need to write.

Generative AI for Beginners .NET is available now in English, with translations for Chinese, French, Portuguese, Spanish, German, Japanese, Korean, and Traditional Chinese.