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Welcome back, tech enthusiasts! 🚀

This week’s edition dives into the world of open source, coding tools, and Azure insights. From getting started with contributing to open source, to managing sensitive data in your Git history, and exploring the latest in .NET frameworks and testing tools, there’s a lot to discover.

Here’s what’s in store:

• 🛠️ How to get started with open source and make meaningful contributions

• 📱 New GitHub Mobile features: Fork, PRs, and branch comparisons on the go

• 🔒 How to clean secrets from your Git history with ease

• 🤖 Meet Junie: JetBrains’ coding agent to simplify your workflow

• ⚡ Explore SpecFlow for behavior-driven development and testing

• 💰 Azure App Configuration: Features, pricing, and cost considerations

Whether you’re refining your workflow, securing your projects, or optimizing your cloud costs, this edition has something for you. Let’s dive in!

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GitHub Digest

Working on open source software can be really awarding. I have some projects myself, such as the Azure Cost CLI, but also contributed to other projects. It is an excellent way to learn and share.

Wondering how to get started with open source? Have a look at the guide below. Dont forget; even helping out by writing or correcting some docs, responding to an issue or saying thanks to the maintainer is already so much appriciated.

Some love for GitHub Mobile as it gets support for forking a repository, but also the ability to create a Pull Request. Useful to compare a branch on the go, providing feedback and merge them. No editing, for that you need to use the web.

Yes, the best way is to make sure you never include a secret in your commits. And with tools like secret scanning you can limit those mistakes from reaching GitHub. But accidents can happen and the first thing to do is to rotate the leaked secret.

Even so, it can make sense to remove this sensitive data as it can be used to extract logic or be analysed. The below article describes how to remove these tokens from the history like it never happened.

Coding Corner

If you are familair with GitHub Copilot Workspaces (you can join the public beta now when you have a paid license for Copilot), then Junie would be interesting to you as well.

More than just doing code completions using a LLM, it is targetted to be your little helper; picking up tasks and combining different activities together.

Join the waitlist, but be aware that it is not yet available for Rider. No doubt this will come at some point.

Couple of nice improvements for Wolverine; a .NET Mediator and Message Bus implementation. I m always impressed with the feature set and direction the project goes into. Yes, it is an opiniated framework, but it tries to tackle a couple of patterns in a modern and optimized manner.

Testing your software is a hard job and even if you write a large amount of unit tests, you are never fully sure if you are complete enough. How do you know that your software does what the business actually wants? What if you can create a description in human friendly form that translates to a test suite?

Enter SpecFlow: a framework for Behavior Driven Development that provides a mechanism to turn specifications into executable code that can be used to create automated tests.

Some tumult in open source land; a commonly used library for testing changed its licensing structure. Of course; the author has the right to do so, but he also turned it into a license model where each developer needs to pay 130 dollar per year.

Up to you if that is worth the price, but upgrading to version 8 means you will need to adhere to the new license. So either stick with the previous version or switch to another framework. In the meantime you can do a search and replace to FreeAssertions, which has just a simple dependency on anything before version 8.

Azure Updates & Insights

Not likely that you are involved with these kinds of contracts directly, but there is some movement by Microsoft to get rid of the Enterprise Agreements contracts in favor of the new MCA. Read more to get some clarity.

By yours truly; I wrote a piece about Azure App Configuration. Mostly about the cost aspect of it, but it also shows the feature set and capabilities.

Closing Thoughts

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