ProgrammingPro #6: How to Create C# ChatGPT Bot, Prompt Engineering for Developers, Dart 3, Google Bard New Features
Hi,
Hello and welcome to today’s issue of the ProgrammingPro! In this edition, we detail how to create a C# ChatGPT Bot, a Prompt Engineering Beginner’s Guide for Developers, and our tutorial on Algorithm Design Techniques. the most relevant industry insights, actionable tutorials, and useful tools and resources for developers and software engineers.
In today’s issue:
News and Analysis
Community Resources and Secret Knowledge
Prompt Engineering: Beginner’s Guide for Developers
Tutorial: Algorithm Design Techniques and Strategies
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News and Analysis
Google Bard Announces New Features Including Support for New Languages: Google is boosting the abilities of its AI chatbot Bard with added features such as multi-language support, Google Docs and Gmail integration, and visual search, while also making it globally available. Bard, now upgraded to Google's new PaLM 2 language model, will offer improved responses, better coding assistance including debugging, and the ability to generate visuals using AI in the future, posing strong competition to Microsoft’s Bing chatbot and OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
Dart 3 Announced: Dart 3 is the largest Dart release to date. Dart is used widely for developing cross-platform mobile and web applications in Flutter. New features in Dart 3 include 100% sound null safety, new language features like new data structures, more native interoperability, compilation to WebAssembly, and more.
Midjourney 5.1 Released: Midjourney - the world’s most advanced AI image generation tool - released version 5.1 with improvements to coherence, accuracy, image sharpness, and natural lighting. At the moment, it is the most popular AI image model in terms of user interest, surpassing Dall-e and Stable Diffusion.
Bing AI Chatbot Free for Everyone: Microsoft's Bing AI chatbot is now available to everyone for free. You can now get access to a ChatGPT-like chatbot without paying the $20 subscription fee that OpenAI charges.
Dolt 1.0 - It's Like Git.. for Data: Dolt is an SQL database that introduces git-like forking, cloning, branching and merging features: “It’s like Git and MySQL had a baby,” they claim.
Go 1.20.4 and Go 1.19.9 Released: These are Minor releases that include three security fixes for html/template, all (1, 2, 3) oriented around sanitization and improper handling of Web content.
Community Resources & Secret Knowledge
How to Create a C# ChatGPT Bot: This tutorial dives into the process of building a chatbot using ChatGPT and C#. It covers everything from setting up ChatGPT API access to deploying your chatbot. You will learn how to set up ChatGPT API access, creating a C# project, integrating the API, testing, enhancing, and deploying your chatbot.
SOLID Principles: Improve Object-Oriented Design in Python: In this tutorial, you’ll learn about the SOLID principles, which are five well-established standards for improving your object-oriented design in Python. By applying these principles, you can create object-oriented code that is more maintainable, extensible, scalable, and testable.
Native AOT - The Future of .NET App Development: The .NET framework has consistently provided developers with powerful tools to create robust, high-performance applications. One of the recent advancements in .NET technology is Native AOT (Ahead-of-Time) compilation. This article explores Native AOT .NET, its benefits, key components, how it works, and its various use cases.
go-callvis: Visualize the Call Graph of Go Programs: The purpose of this tool is to provide developers with a visual overview of a Go program using data from call graph and its relations with packages and types. This is especially useful in larger projects where the complexity of the code much higher or when you are just simply trying to understand code of somebody else.
Prompt Engineering: Beginner’s Guide for Developers
This tutorial explores how you can get started with Prompt Engineering using GitHub Copilot and practice writing and iterating on prompts yourself.
First, let's start with the basics for folks who are unfamiliar with GitHub Copilot or prompt engineering.
What is GitHub Copilot?
GitHub Copilot is an AI pair programmer developed by GitHub and GitHub Copilot is powered by OpenAI Codex, a generative pre-trained language model created by OpenAI.that provides contextualized code suggestions based on context from comments and code. To use it, you can install the GitHub Copilot extension available to you in the following Integrated Development Environments (IDEs):
Visual Studio
Visual Studio Code
Neovim
JetBrains IDEs (IntelliJ, PyCharm, WebStorm, etc)
Read the full tutorial here ->
Tutorial: Algorithm Design Techniques and Strategies
In the field of computing, algorithm design is very important for IT professionals for improving their skills and enabling growth in the industry. The algorithm design process starts with a substantial number of real-world computing problems, which must be clearly formulated for efficiently building the solution using one of the possible techniques from the range of algorithm design techniques available. Algorithm designs are important in computer science, in general, to efficiently design the solution for a precisely formulated problem since a very sophisticated and complex problem can easily be solved with an appropriate algorithm design technique.
In this tutorial, we will discuss the ways in which different kinds of algorithms can be categorized. Design techniques will be described and illustrated, and we will further discuss the analysis of algorithms. Finally, we will provide detailed implementations for a few very important algorithms.
Algorithm Design Techniques
Algorithm design is a powerful tool for viewing and clearly understanding well-posed, real-world problems. A straightforward, or brute-force, approach is available that is very simple, yet effective, for many problems. The brute-force approach is trying all possible combinations of solutions in order to solve any problem. For example, suppose a salesperson has to visit 10 cities across the country. In which order should the cities be visited in order to minimize the total distance traveled? The brute-force approach to this problem will be to calculate the total distance for all possible combinations of routes, and then select the route that provides the smallest distance.
As you might guess, the brute-force algorithm is not efficient.
It can provide useful solutions for limited input sizes, but it becomes very inefficient when the input size becomes large. Therefore, we will break the process down into two fundamental components for finding the optimal solution for a computing problem:
Formulate the problem clearly
Identify the appropriate algorithm design technique based on the structure of the problem for an efficient solution
That is why the study of algorithm design becomes very important when developing scalable and robust systems. Design and analysis are important in the first instance because they assist in developing algorithms that are organized and easy to understand. Design technique guidelines also help in developing new algorithms easily for complex problems. Moreover, design techniques can also be used to categorize the algorithms and this also helps to understand them better. There are several algorithm paradigms as follows:
Recursion
Divide and conquer
Dynamic programming
Greedy algorithms
Since we will be using recursion many times while discussing different algorithm design techniques, let us first understand the concept of recursion, and thereafter, we will discuss different algorithm design techniques.
Recursion
A recursive algorithm calls itself repeatedly in order to solve the problem until a certain condition is fulfilled. Each recursive call itself spins off other recursive calls. A recursive function can be in an infinite loop; therefore, it is required that each recursive function adheres to certain properties. At the core of a recursive function are two types of cases:
Base cases: These tell the recursion when to terminate, meaning the recursion will be stopped once the base condition is met
Recursive cases: The function calls itself recursively, and we progress toward achieving the base criteria
A simple problem that naturally lends itself to a recursive solution is calculating factorials. The recursive factorial algorithm defines two cases: the base case when n is zero (the terminating condition) and the recursive case when n is greater than zero (the call of the function itself).
def factorial(n):
# test for a base case
if n == 0:
return 1
else:
# make a calculation and a recursive call
return n*factorial(n-1)
print(factorial(4))
This produces the following output: 24
To calculate the factorial of 4, we require four recursive calls, plus the initial parent call, as can be seen in figure below. The details of how these recursive calls work is as follows. Initially, the number 4 is passed to the factorial function, which will return the value 4 multiplied by the factorial of (4-1=3). For this, the number 3 is again passed to the factorial function, which will return the value 3 multiplied by the factorial of (3-1=2). Similarly, in the next iteration, the value 2 is multiplied by the factorial of (2-1 =1).
This continues until we reach the factorial of 0, which returns 1. Now, each function returns the value to finally compute 1*1*2*3*4=24, which is the final output of the function.
This tutorial is a content extract from the book Hands-On Data Structures and Algorithms with Python, Third Edition written by Dr Basant Agarwal and published by Packt Publishing.