The Microsoft Certified: AI Business Professional - AB‑730 certification validates a candidate’s ability to use Microsoft 365 Copilot and generative‑AI productivity tools effectively in real business scenarios. It focuses on how AI enhances everyday workflows such as drafting content, analyzing information, collaborating, and making data‑driven decisions. The exam is conceptual and scenario‑based, emphasizing Copilot capabilities, limitations, governance, and responsible AI usage rather than coding or technical implementation.

Note: This is a beginner-level certification that is focused on generative AI and AI tools, and does not require any prior technical or AI experience. It is designed for anyone who wants to strengthen their AI literacy.

I am thrilled to announce that I have been selected as one of the judges for the Microsoft Imagine Cup 2025 Minimum Viable Product (MVP) competition! This prestigious event is a global technology startup competition for student founders using the Microsoft Cloud. It offers an incredible platform for young innovators to showcase their groundbreaking ideas and accelerate their startups.

The Imagine Cup is structured into several rounds, starting with the Idea Round, where participants submit their concepts using the Lean Canvas framework. Following this, the MVP Submission phase requires teams to develop a functional version of their idea, ready to demo to judges. Successful teams then advance to the Semifinals, gaining access to mentorship, global recognition, and expert guidance within Microsoft for Startups Founders Hub. The competition culminates in the World Championship, where the best startups pitch their solutions on a global stage.

What is the Microsoft Global Hackathon?

The Microsoft Global Hackathon is more than just a competition—it’s a celebration of creativity, teamwork, and the power of technology to solve real-world problems. This year, the event focused on fostering innovation and driving meaningful contributions to both technology and society. Participants worked on diverse projects, ranging from AI-driven solutions to accessibility tools, sustainability initiatives, and much more.

Key Highlights from the Session

Unified AI Platform

Azure AI Foundry consolidates various AI services that were previously scattered across different platforms. This integration simplifies AI development, making it more accessible and collaborative.

How Automatic Tuning Works

Azure SQL’s Automatic Tuning is a cutting-edge service designed to simplify and enhance database performance management. By leveraging artificial intelligence, it continuously monitors and learns from your database’s operational patterns. This intelligent system dynamically adapts to varying workloads, applying optimization strategies that evolve over time.

In the rapidly evolving landscape of artificial intelligence, certain innovations stand out, heralding new horizons for both technology and society. One such forefront organization is OpenAI, which has become synonymous with cutting-edge AI research and applications. Established with a mission to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity, OpenAI has been at the vanguard of a specific AI niche that’s been capturing imaginations worldwide: generative AI.

Generative AI refers to models and algorithms designed to produce content. Instead of just processing and analyzing input data, these models generate new data that wasn’t part of their training set. In this realm, one of the most revolutionary developments has been the advent of large language models. These are essentially vast neural networks trained on enormous amounts of text data, enabling them to generate human-like text based on the patterns they’ve learned.

In this study guide, I will share with you some of the useful resources you can use to guide you during your learning path to get this certification.

Introduction

Obtaining an AWS (Amazon Web Services) certification can be a significant milestone in your career, demonstrating your expertise in cloud computing and opening doors to exciting job opportunities. However, the pressure of certification exams can sometimes lead to nervousness, resulting in suboptimal performance. To alleviate this concern and promote learning, AWS offers a valuable promotion called the AWS Certification Free Retake. In this blog post, we will delve into the benefits of the free retake program and outline the steps to take advantage of this opportunity.

Introduction

Developers creating serverless applications now have the capability to construct AWS Serverless Application Model (SAM)-powered applications with the latest AWS::Serverless::GraphQLApi resource abstraction, enabling seamless integration with AppSync. AWS AppSync, a managed service facilitating the development of scalable APIs connecting applications to data through a GraphQL endpoint, further simplifies the process.

Why use AWS Serverless Application Model (SAM)

The AWS Serverless Application Model (SAM) is a framework, available as open-source, designed for the construction of serverless applications. It offers a concise syntax for expressing functions, APIs, databases, and event source mappings. By utilizing just a few lines of code per resource, you can define and model your desired application using YAML. During the deployment process, SAM automatically transforms and expands the SAM syntax into AWS CloudFormation syntax, enabling accelerated development of serverless applications.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming the way we live and work. From chatbots and virtual assistants to self-driving cars and predictive analytics, AI is already changing our world in countless ways. However, with great power comes great responsibility. As organizations adopt AI and build AI solutions, it’s crucial to prioritize responsible AI to ensure that these technologies are used ethically and equitably.

Responsible AI

So, what exactly is responsible AI? At its core, responsible AI is about using AI in a way that is fair, transparent, and accountable. It’s about making sure that AI systems are designed and deployed with ethical considerations in mind, and that they are used in a way that benefits society as a whole.

Below follows a compilation of resources I used to study and pass the exam. Hope you find it useful. To support my work, I appreciate if you can take a minute to share the post on social and tag me to acknowledge this was useful for you.

🫶 Please share it to support my work 🫶

Feel free to reach out if you have any questions or need any help during your study journey.

The AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner exam is a certification exam offered by Amazon Web Services (AWS) that tests an individual’s understanding of the AWS Cloud. The exam covers a range of topics including AWS services, architecture, security, and pricing.

The AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner certification is useful for individuals who want to demonstrate their understanding of the AWS Cloud to potential employers, customers, or partners. It is also a good starting point for those who want to progress to more advanced AWS certifications. Having this certification can also help in increasing one’s marketability and potential for career advancement in the cloud computing industry.

Traditionally, many services and online systems would ask you for a username and password when you need to authenticate and identify yourself before using that given service or system. But, the evolution of security in Web and Tech shows that these traditional methods may not be the most secured ways to manage your accounts and authenticate on the different services and apps you use.

This is where new authentication standards such as FIDO2 are useful in battling all those issues, including scenarios that you compromise your credentials and passwords.

These databases run on the most recent version of the SQL Server Database engine and allow you to focus more on building innovative applications rather than spending time managing the hardware or infrastructure.

In this study guide, I will share with you some of the useful resources you can use to guide you during your learning path to get this certification.

In this study guide, I will share with you some of the useful resources you can use to guide you during your learning path to get this certification.

In this study guide, I will share with you some of the useful resources you can use to guide you during your learning path to get this certification.

In this study guide, I will share with you some of the useful resources you can use to guide you during your learning journey to get this certification.

The Microsoft Certified: Azure AI Engineer Associate certification enables you to get the knowledge to be subject matter expert using Cognitive Services, Machine Learning (ML), and knowledge mining to architect and implement AI solutions on Azure involving natural language processing, speech, computer vision, conversational AI and more.

To support this post, I decided to record a video with all the steps on how to create your apps, so you can refer to the video and check the steps I am doing.

Prerequisites

In order to follow this guide, you need the following:

• Azure account and subscription
• GitHub account
• Visual Studio / Visual Studio (VS) Code
• Azure Static Web Apps extension for VS Code - In case you are using VS Code
• Install Blazor and create a WebAssembly app

Create Azure Static Web App

Once you created your Blazor WebAssembly app locally, ran it successfully and upload the source files to your GitHub repository, you are good to proceed and create your Azure Static Web Apps using the Azure Portal.

But of course, besides the fact that Azure Functions is amazing to run pieces of code, you still need to create a Function App, store your code in a repo (in case you are working as team, in your company, etc..), build a pipeline to deploy your code, maybe generate some ARM templates to follow the Infrastructure as Code principle, and create/configure your Function App while deploying your code.

So, does it really worth all these steps, to run small pieces of code with simple logic? Probably not.
Fortunately, the Azure Logic Apps’ team introduced an action named Inline Code, that enables us to run simple and small pieces of code, using Javascript, inside our Logic Apps’ workflows. This action is still in Preview mode, but you should be able to easily use it.

As part of my plan to start studying for the Microsoft certification Azure IoT Developer Specialty, I decided to start to play around with some tools and sample projects to build simple IoT applications.

So, I started by do some research in order to understand which tools usually other techs would use to build their IoT applications. And then, I realized that Microsoft has a IoT DevKit available to allow you to easily build your first IoT application. Consequently, I just ordered my DevKit from Amazon, and started to do some experiments with it, by testing some of the sample projects available on their Github workspace.

Few years ago, when I started to work with one of my clients, between an extensive number of important projects, there was a initiative being implemented by the team to redesign our work processes and improve productivity and quality of our applications and the services we provide.

So we decided to adopt Azure DevOps to mitigate some pain points we were facing at that time.

Preparation

Since it is my first course, I will share with you all the experience and some lessons learned during the process of producing this course.

• Install dotnet core 3 SDK latest version
• Install Blazor templates by executing the following command on the command-line: dotnet new -i Microsoft.AspNetCore.Blazor.Templates
• Install Visual Studio 2019 or higher, enabling the component bundles related to ASP.NET & Web Development and the Blazor extension from the Visual Studio Marketplace

Introduction

Microsoft released the stable release (3.0.0) of the dotnet core 3 framework on September 2019. This version of the framework brought amazing features including support for C# 8 and Blazor framework. For the full list of features released, please visit this Microsoft’s announcement.

Blazor is a programming framework that allows you to build web applications using client-side or server-side paradigms.
You can build your Blazor app using client-side template and running it as WebAssembly code. WebAssembly allows it to access the full functionality of the browser via Javascript interop. The code is compiled and encoded in a size and load-time-efficient binary format.

Context

First of all, in case you are planning to do this configuration process, or if you want to be aware of it, I would invite you to read this tutorial, so you can understand the rest of this article.

As the tutorial says, when you request to enable HTTPS to a given custom domain on your Azure CDN endpoint, there is a validation process that will be performed to ensure the ownership of that custom domain.

If the custom domain is a new domain, then you can create a CNAME record, in your DNS provider, that maps the custom domain to the CDN endpoint’s hostname. Then the validation will be performed automatically by DigitCert.

If the custom domain is being used in a Live application, then you need to use a different approach, creating a CNAME record that maps your custom domain and the CDN endpoint, but with the inclusion of the keyword cdnverify. And in this scenario, DigitCert will query WHOIS the registrant information of the custom domain, to send an email asking to approve the validation request. If the registrant information is private, it sends an email to one of the following emails:

Context

Recently i decided to create this personal site, so i could share with the community some lessons learned and relevant technical topics, and at same time keep notes of important information to myself for future reference.

So, since multiple times i had people coming to me asking which options they should use to create their personal site or blog or even a business site, i just decided to share what was the experience to create this site, and how easy and cheap it was to create and provision it.