Microsoft launches .NET Smart Components to give developers AI-powered UI controls
There is just about no field of technology that is not somehow being enhanced by artificial intelligence. Microsoft has already shown its own love of AI by introducing it to various aspects of Windows and other products, and the latest release from the company is .NET Smart Components.
These are described as "AI-powered UI controls" that Microsoft says can be quickly and easily add to .NET apps. Billed, unsurprisingly, as "genuinely useful", the company says the components remove the need to "spend weeks of dev time redesigning your UX or researching machine learning and prompt engineering".
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Microsoft is not describing the introduction of .NET Smart Components as a beta, but as an experiment. To start with, there is support for Blazor, MVC and Razor Pages with .NET 6 and later. Other .NET UI frameworks such as .NET MAUI, WPF and Windows Forms will gain the components at some point, but for now feedback is what the company is looking for.
In a blog post about the new AI tools, Microsoft shares details of three smart features:
Smart Paste
Smart Paste fills out forms automatically using data from the user’s clipboard with the click of a button. You can use this with any existing form in your web app. This helps users add data from external sources without re-typing.
Smart TextArea
An intelligent upgrade to the traditional textarea. You can configure how it should autocomplete whole sentences using your own preferred tone, policies, URLs, and so on. This helps users type faster and not have to remember URLs etc.
Smart ComboBox
Upgrades the traditional combobox by making suggestions based on semantic matching. This helps users find what they’re looking for.
Microsoft has published a video showing off the highlights of .NET Smart Components:
More information, including code samples, can be found here.