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This week, we're diving into some groundbreaking updates and tools that will supercharge your development game. But first, a quick tip: to ensure you never miss out, please move this email to your primary inbox or mark it as important. Even a quick reply like "got it" helps boost visibility. 📩

Now, onto the good stuff! This edition covers exciting topics such as:

• Leverage GitHub’s new licensing for Azure DevOps users

• Extend Copilot faster with skillsets

• Discover highlights from the Microsoft Ignite Book of News

• Set up Azure Local in minutes

• Explore .NET’s new interactive scaffolding tool

• Test locally with the new Azure Service Bus emulator

Whether you're exploring new tools, building extensions, or curious about the latest advancements, there’s something here for you. Let’s dive in!

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GitHub Digest

For years now, Microsoft has had two very competing products; Azure DevOps and GitHub. Of course, there are differences, and it is totally fine to use one or the other, or even in combination. Eventually feature sets will be more aligned and available on both platforms. We have seen this with Advanced Security which originated in GitHub, but is now also available in Azure DevOps, and the improvements in Issue Tracking in GitHub which is not on the same level as in Azure DevOps.

When you had a Visual Studio Subscription, you also got a GitHub Enterprise License for free. But not yet the other way around…until now; GitHub Enterprise users will also be able to use Azure DevOps (Basic user account).

So you can make better use of the tools and decide what works best.

Do you have an open-source project on GitHub? Then do carefully check your PRs. As it is very easy to impersonate somebody on the internet and GitHub, there have been some attempts to frame a researcher by injecting malicious code into a project.

Read how they did this via a PR and obfuscation of code.

It is possible to extend Copilot by building agents. These are pieces of code that interact with Copilot and the LLM to add additional behaviour to a chat. Although powerful, they are harder to build.

With the newly announced Skillsets, you just need to define an API endpoint. Copilot will figure out how to interact with the endpoints, the data it needs to send, and how to respond.

Creating extension points becomes much easier!

Coding Corner

I m not going to summarize the whole set of announcements made at Microsoft Ignite. But as usual, there is the Book of News, which lists all the new stuff.

It is definitely worth a read to keep up to date.

Thomas Kurtz, the creator of BASIC, recently died at the age of 96. You might not recognize his name, but it could have been your first programming language. At least it was mine, as I started with the ZX Spectrum.

Web development is hard—at least nowadays—with all the things you need to consider and handle. In the past, you could just open a popup, but now you need to set cross-origin security headers, otherwise it won’t show in the browser.

And for all good reasons, as it can pose a security risk. How this all works is something that Andrew Lock wrote down in this excellent and comprehensive blog post.

Azure Updates & Insights

I was impressed while watching this video of Azure Local. They showed two machines, boot them up with a USB disk, and wait for them to stop so you can eject the disk and you are done.

Of course, hook them up to power and network, but then it is fully unattended and you can add these local machines to Azure. So they can actually host workloads like VMs and containers just like Azure!

Copilot is everywhere, so also in the diagnostics of Azure Functions. When you are stuck, you can use conversational diagnostics to get to your issue with natural language.

.NET Nook

Scaffolding in dotnet is not new. It helps you create base implementations of certain code constructs in an easy way.

In the new version of the scaffold tool, there is support for an interactive way to create your applications. By running dotnet scaffold, you will get an interactive guide through the different options. This allows you to create applications in no time.

I’m always a bit jealous of how Ruby on Rails does this, so it is interesting to see this becoming a more advanced option in dotnet.

With C# version 13 you get another set of language constructs that helps you to write easier and better code. Have a look at the different options for params collections and arrays.

Finally, a local Azure Service Bus emulator! This was a missing piece in the local development story. When you developed something that uses the Service Bus, you could not run it locally, but needed an instance in Azure.

Although that works, it did causes issues like less isolation from others, more to maintain, higher cost, hard to create integration tests etc.

With the new local emulator, running in a docker container, you can solve these issues.

Closing Thoughts

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