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Welcome back, tech enthusiasts!

To all the new subscribers—welcome aboard! 🚀 You’re now part of a thriving community of 5,231 readers passionate about exploring the latest in tech, development, and innovation.

This week, we’re diving into some practical tools, insightful updates, and game-changing concepts to enhance your tech workflow. From creating 3D skylines of your GitHub contributions to exploring cost-saving FinOps strategies, and even embracing a password-free future, there’s a lot to unpack.

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Now, let’s get to the good stuff! In this edition, you’ll find:

• 🖼️ Create your GitHub skyline with a new CLI extension

• 🤖 Unlock smarter Copilot extensions with contextual awareness

• 💰 Cost estimation for Bicep files in Azure DevOps PRs

• 🔐 The future of Passkeys and Microsoft’s password shift

• 🛠️ Building cloud-native mail servers with Azure Communication Services

• 📚 Exploring the Outbox Pattern and Dapr resiliency policies in .NET

Whether you’re curious about modern tools, improving workflows, or enhancing security, there’s something here for you.

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

GitHub Digest

A tradition started some years ago is the ability to 3D print your skyline, which is a visualization of your contributions. This year, we get a GitHub CLI extension which allows you to create these skylines from the command line.

So grab the extension and create your own skyline!

Normally Copilot can access context, like the current editor, files etc, to give you a better answer. Extensions could not yet do this, but with this preview, you can also give them this access.

Extensions, like Docker, Octopus Deploy, Pagerduty, or even the ones you build yourself, can provide better answers when having access to more context.

Coding Corner

I m a big fan of Infracost, a service that takes shift left in FinOps to the next level. It scans for Pull Requests containing changes to Terraform files and calculates the potential impact on cost and compliance. It adds a comment to the PR, so you can review it.

The feedback I normally get when I show this in my presentations; where is the Bicep support?

Unfortunately, there is none. However, with some other open-source tools, and the help of the below article, you might be able to get similar features.

The end of passwords is nearby; Microsoft plans to delete them all. Well, almost all, because they really would like you to switch to Passkeys. The much safer and easier alternative.

Ever wanted your office document to be in Markdown? Just to be able to process it further (like for AI)?
Then have a look at this Microsoft Python library, which can convert various formats to markdown.

Azure Updates & Insights

Yes, plain old skool email, still being used everywhere. If you want to send emails from a cloud provider like Azure, you cannot simply install a SMTP server. This will be blacklisted within seconds. So you normally resort to a service like SendGrid, Postmark etc.

But Azure also has a service called Azure Communication Services which allows you to build a mail server in the cloud. It can do even more, like SMS, Teams, Voice etc.

.NET Nook

Should you use Events in your web app? And if so, which type of events would be the best choice? Steve describes the issues and alternatives.

Saving something in a database and then putting an event on a queue? Most likely this will work fine; until it does not. The queue is down and you only have an item in your database, or the other way around; you have an event, but not the change in your database.

To solve this issue (distributed transactions), you can use the outbox pattern. There are various frameworks and solutions for this, but here is a dedicated OutboxKit project, worthwhile to investigate.

A collection of Dapr samples, showcasing resiliency policies. Also check out Conductor, which has the ability to visualize Dapr workloads.

Closing Thoughts

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