In partnership with

Welcome back, and for all the new subscribers, welcome aboard!

To ensure you keep getting these updates seamlessly, please move this email to your primary inbox or mark it as important. A quick reply like "got it" also helps boost visibility. This edition covers exciting topics such as:

• The Octoverse report is available; Python and AI are on the rise

• Check your GitHub actions as we get some breaking updates

• How to use GH Copilot in the Windows Terminal

• Use custom instructions for Copilot

• Understand CosmosDB partition keys to save cost and improve performance

• Hyperlight; run VMs so fast that they can act as event-driven functions

• What is new in .NET 9 LINQ

• And much more

New here? Subscribe here to stay updated. Let's dive in.

GitHub Digest

A new report was recently released detailing public and open source activity on GitHub. AI and Python are on the rise, and a growing number of developers are joining the platform.

Read the full report to see where developers come from, the largest repositories, the most popular programming languages and much more.

Heads up if you are using GitHub Actions. The ubuntu-latest runner will move from Ubuntu version 22 to 24, which has other packages installed. Also artifacts version 3 will fail soon, forcing you to upgrade.

Read about these and more upcoming changes below and make sure to update soon:

Are you using Windows Terminal (and the canary release), then you can use Terminal Chat with an AI model. Of course, this will also work with Copilot. See the instructions on how to get started.

The Copilot Chat interface on the GitHub website starts to look more and more like the official OpenAI chatgpt interface. You can navigate between your previous conversations, select another model and add or remove context. Check out the changes on https://github.com/copilot/

Coding Corner

MS released a new framework called Hyperlight, a library that executes functions as fast as possible while isolating those functions within a VM. This removes the cold start timing problem, while still providing the security you get when you use VMs.

It can spin up VMs so fast, that it can be used to run functions to simply respond to events.

For more background on what features it provides, how it does this magic, and a sample in Rust, visit the below article or look directly at the GitHub repo.

When you chat with Copilot, it will use the default prompt to help you out, but it does not know a lot about you. Maybe you want your answers always in a certain format, have it take into account certain localities, or use a form of language.

For that purpose, you can use custom instructions and Luke explains how to set them up.

Azure Updates & Insights

Getting the right partition key for CosmosDB is very important as it helps in accessing the right records, but also do it at a cost-effective way.

Did you know you can even use a hierarchical partition key?

.NET Nook

OpenAPI documentation is a neat way to share your API spec with the world.

Generating this automatically using a framework called Swashbuckle was an easy way to do so.

From .NET 9, this framework is replaced by a Microsoft solution, so how can you use this and also provide a UI for the specification?

Some more interesting methods for LINQ will be included in .NET 9. Like an Index method, count by, or aggregate. See how to use those in the below article.

Closing Thoughts

Thank you for reading this week’s edition!

Your feedback is invaluable, so if you have any thoughts, questions, or suggestions, please don't hesitate to reach out by simply replying to this mail.

If you enjoyed this update and want to continue receiving more, make sure to subscribe here.

I appreciate your time and look forward to hearing from you!

Why struggle with file uploads? Pinata’s File API is your fix

Simplify your development workflow with Pinata’s File API. Add file uploads and retrieval to your app in minutes, without the need for complicated configurations. Pinata provides simple file management so you can focus on creating great features.

Build now!