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• GitHub Universe announcements

• Actions Performance Metrics

• Visual Studio Code updates including AI Code reviews

• The troubles with whitespace in HTML

• When To Result or Not To Result?

• Can you finally use SQL Server on ARM?

• And much more

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GitHub Digest

GitHub Universe took place last week. I had the privilege of attending last year, but unfortunately, I had to miss this edition. However, there was some great news—Xebia, the company I work for, was named GitHub Partner of the Year!

The event was packed with exciting announcements:

1. Copilot's Multi-Model Support: GitHub Copilot now offers developers the flexibility to choose from multiple AI models, including Anthropic's Claude 3.5 Sonnet, Google's Gemini 1.5 Pro, and OpenAI's o1-preview and o1-mini. This enhancement allows developers to select the model that best fits their specific tasks.

2. Introduction of GitHub Spark: GitHub introduced Spark, an AI-powered tool designed to simplify the creation of web applications using natural language prompts. Spark enables users to generate live previews and make iterative changes, making web app development more accessible.

3. Expansion of Copilot Chat: The Copilot Chat feature has been expanded to include multi-file editing capabilities in Visual Studio Code, allowing developers to make simultaneous changes across multiple files. Additionally, Copilot for Xcode has entered public preview, extending AI assistance to iOS and macOS developers.

4. GitHub Copilot Extensions: Set to be available in early 2025, Copilot Extensions will allow developers to create and share custom extensions, enhancing the functionality of Copilot to better suit individual workflows.

5. Data Residency in the EU: GitHub announced the general availability of data residency in the European Union, enabling organizations to store their data within the EU to meet compliance and regulatory requirements.

Read more about the announcements and sign up for any previews:

Copilot is everywhere nowadays, so also in your terminal. Available for all Copilot subscriptions, although your admin might need to enable it.

Some while back I reported that we now have actions performance metrics, but that it was only available for GitHub Enterprise Cloud users. From now on, everybody can access this overview.

There is also an Action Usage Metrics overview, but the Performance overview provides details about failures, long-running jobs etc. Interesting to find issues with your jobs.

Coding Corner

A whole bunch of new Copilot stuff also means a lot of interesting Visual Studio Code changes. Such as coding with Copilot over multiple files, or using the code review capabilities with the AI model.

So do read the release notes and upgrade to the latest version.

As an occasional web developer I ran into this so many times; when is a whitespace really a whitespace? There appear to be so many edge cases when a browser actually renders whitespace or just ignores them. Adding   would be a trick, but won’t be needed always.

The article gives some insightful examples and explanations.

FinOps is another subject I m passionate about. I even have a dedicated newsletter about this topic. However Lee Wagner wrote a nice piece about FinOps that gives some good insight what it is about.

A very relatable problem; I m using a macbook pro with an ARM processor, which I absolutly love. It is fast, efficient, long lasting and I like the MacOs software. Drawback; it does not run .NET Framework and old skool applications and of course I needed this for a client.

So I tried UTM with a virtual machine and you can get pretty far with Windows ARM, Rider, VS Code etc. They all nicely support ARM. But my biggest hurdle was SQL Server.

I could not get it to work, so I switched to an Azure DevBox (which also works great BTW and allowed me to get a dev machine fast).

Rick Stahl has the same SQL Server problem on his ARM PC and even found a solution. Too late for me and it still looks pretty complex.

.NET Nook

There is some buzz going around about the Result pattern. It has some nice benefits to control the flow of data and errors. Andrew Lock wrote a couple of nice blog posts about it and in his latest one he also wonders if it is really a good pattern to use?

It does add complexity and noise to the code, mixing some functional concepts. And it does not always produce more readable code with all those LINQ constructs.

Worth a read to get the pros and cons.

Using commands and queries in combination with a mediator pattern is an interesting way to decouple functionality in your code base. But binding incoming data directly to a command/query might not be the best idea…

Closing Thoughts

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