Microsoft has provided a set of .NET Smart Components, described as a set of genuinely useful AI-powered UI components that you can quickly and easily add to .NET apps. The components are prebuilt end-to-end AI features that you can drop into your existing app UIs.

The .NET Smart Components are experimental and are initially available for Blazor, MVC, and Razor Pages with .NET 6 and later. Microsoft expects to provide components for other .NET UI frameworks as well, such as .NET MAUI, WPF, and Windows Forms, once they've received feedback on how useful these components are and what additional capabilities developers would like to see added.

The components start with a Smart Paste that fills out forms automatically using data from the user's clipboard with the click of a button. This can be used with any existing form in a web app, and the aim is to help users add data from external sources without re-typing. Developers don't have to configure or annotate your forms, since the system will infer the meanings of the fields from your HTML. However, you can optionally provide annotations if it helps to produce better results.

There's aslo a Smart TextArea that is an enhancement of the traditional textarea. Developers can use a house style to configure how it should autocomplete whole sentences, and can specify a preferred tone, policies, and URLs. The documentation says the house style can include a set of predefined phrases, rules, policies and URLs that set the tone, level of formality, greetings, etc. that you prefer agents to use, while not forcing them to do so. For example if an HR agent types "Your vacation allowance is", the system might suggest a completion like "28 days as detailed in our policy at https://.../policies/vacation".

The third component is a Smart ComboBox that makes suggestions based on semantic matching. This helps users find what they're looking for.  While traditional combo boxes suggest values based on exact substring matches, the Smart ComboBox upgrades this by suggesting semantic matches, options with the most closely related meanings.

More Information

.NET Smart Components sample apps

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