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Welcome back, tech enthusiasts! 🚀

This week’s edition is packed with updates on GitHub Copilot, secure authentication, and Azure networking costs. From expanding Copilot to any editor to new testing strategies with Test Containers, there’s a lot to explore.

Before we dive in, a quick heads-up: I’ll be skipping next week’s edition due to a holiday, but I’ll be back in two weeks!

Here’s what’s in store this week:

• 🤖 GitHub Copilot expands with Workspace updates and a Language Server SDK

• 🛠️ Improve your integration testing with Test Containers

• 🔐 Strengthen authentication in Azure with best practices and API security

• 📡 A deep dive into Azure data transfer pricing and cost optimization

• ⚡ .NET 9 networking improvements and Aspire’s AWS integration

Plenty of insights to keep you busy—let’s dive in!

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GitHub Digest

Static code analysis using CodeQL is the easiest way to get your code scanned and analysed directly from within GitHub. It can help you find security vulnerabilities. There has been some recent releases with some interesting changes:

This is such a cool feature; GitHub Copilot Workspace. From describing your task, to generating code, tests, workflows etc, Workspace can do it all. In the below blog, you can find what kind of new features are introduced.

You can already use Copilot in many IDEs and editors, but if that is not enough? With the language server SDK, you can integrate Copilot into any editor.

Coding Corner

There is almost no excuse anymore for not building integration tests nowadays. You can use test containers to build up local databases, queues etc. Allowing you to test your application with all the dependencies needed. Read more to see how you can use docker to run a SQL server container for testing purposes.

Using DefaultAzureCredential in your code in production? Then you might need to tweak this a bit to be more secure. This and more tips can be found at the below link.

Azure Updates & Insights

Want to secure your API using API Management? API keys alone might not be sufficient enough, so what about leveraging Entra to add an additional layer.

An extensive list of data transfer pricing between different Azure services and regions. I wrote about network cost in one of my Azure FinOps Essentials editions as well.

.NET Nook

The latest .net 9 version contains a lot of improvements, also on the network side. Performance improvements, QUIC, connection pooling etc. See the full list:

Of course, Aspire works closely with Azure, but now also with AWS. It can provision resource for development time and generate cloud formation files. Read more to see how to use a local dynamodb setup.

Closing Thoughts

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