AMster & the Brit's Code Corner
Tags: aws, dotnet
Published: 2022-07-19 20:06:07

AWS on Air is a livestream show, broadcast from AWS events in North America as well as regular Friday shows when the team isn't at an event. You can find [past episodes on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL2yQDdvlhXf8cfiry7ngFIK7hprDWGJp0). The show features guests from AWS teams, talking about service launches, updates, and other news. We also occasionally feature special guests from outside AWS to discuss industry topics.

During the broadcast from the recent [Amazon re:MARS conference](https://remars.amazonevents.com/) I teamed up with fellow AWS on Air host AM Grobelny, a Solutions Architect at AWS (Twitter: @amsxbg), to start a new series of informal, developer-oriented segments we're calling **_AMster & the Brit's Code Corner_**. We were hoping to do more at the AWS Summit in New York but sadly I had to skip the event. We'll be back with more in the future so in this post, I thought I'd highlight the three initial videos from re:MARS that have now been uploaded to YouTube.
 
## Using AI Services from your Code - Amazon Rekognition

When we think of AWS services, we tend to focus on using them from code we've deployed to the cloud. However, they can equally well be used from code running locally on our machines. In this segment, we look at how I use [Amazon Rekognition](https://aws.amazon.com/rekognition/) to support tagging images in my photography hobby, so that I can upload them to stock galleries. I'm somewhat lazy, so leaning on a service to do the basic tagging for me is an ideal scenario! The segment also takes a look at how using the various language SDKs that AWS provides (in this case for .NET) makes calling services super-easy.

{% embed https://youtu.be/SHf2ue2pmek %}

##  Tour of the AWS IDE Toolkits

Did you know that AWS provides a number of freely available integrations with common Integrated Development Environments (IDEs)? In our second segment, we take a quick look at three integration, called toolkits, for Visual Studio, Visual Studio Code, and JetBrains Rider. While Visual Studio and Rider are focused on .NET development, the VS Code toolkit can also be used by developers working in other languages such as Typescript. By the way, you can find details on the full collection of free tools from AWS, for .NET development, [here](https://aws.amazon.com/developer/language/net/tools/).

{% embed https://youtu.be/P_Ojw_NlJyw %}

## Using AI Services from your Code - Amazon Polly and Amazon Transcribe

In this final segment from the show, AM takes the demo hot seat to showcase a text-to-audio, audio-to-text sample he created, using [Amazon Polly](https://aws.amazon.com/polly/) and [Amazon Transcribe](https://aws.amazon.com/transcribe/), that again uses the AWS SDKs to handle the work of calling services from your code (secretly, he loves C# and PowerShell...don't tell anyone).

{% embed https://youtu.be/yGvEhVcfPGk %}

We had a lot of fun recording these sessions, and are looking forward to more AMster & the Brit Code Corner sessions in future shows. If you've ideas on things you'd like to see covered, let us know on Twitter or in comments!