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Welcome back, tech enthusiasts!
This week’s edition is packed with updates on GitHub security, AI-powered secret scanning, and cost-effective Azure solutions. From Copilot’s expanding use cases to optimizing serverless functions for cost savings, there’s plenty to explore.

Here’s what’s in store:

• 🔐 GitHub’s new secret risk assessment and AI-driven secret scanning

• 🤖 Copilot for more than just developers—how product and security teams can use it

• 💡 Should all developers learn Infrastructure as Code?

• ⚡ Optimizing Azure Functions for cost-effectiveness

• 🏗️ Connecting JavaScript frontends with .NET using Aspire

• 🚀 Heroku now officially supports .NET—how does it compare?

With so many new tools and insights, let’s dive right in!

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GitHub Digest

GitHub will provide additional tooling and dashboarding soon to highlight any risks based on potential secrets in your organisation. We all know we should not check in secrets, but we also know it will happen. Make sure you are actively scanning, blocking and rotating leaked secrets.

Copilot is mostly targetted at developers, which is not completly fair; also for non development activities, Copilot can help you out; converting text, generating reports, explaining code etc. See the blog post for more examples:

Detecting passwords is not an easy tasks; when is something a potential password and not just a string. Traditionally, regular expressions are used to get matches to some predictable string formats. However, with AI you can improve the detection rate and reduce the noise. Find out how the GitHub team implemented an AI based secret scanner:

Coding Corner

It is not all fun and games with AI solutions. There are serious risks attached to the use of AI. The below risk repository will put you back into reality:

Nowadays, developers need to do a lot; we want DevOps, FinOps, SecOps, T-shaped, Agile etc. Is that fair to expect? Just software engineering is already hard enough? Should we also expect the developer to build a Terraform file?

Azure Updates & Insights

Yet Another Library…would not be the first time I need to switch to another package to do the same thing. However, this time there is a focus on data transfer/movement.

Azure Functions is one of the few services that actually is charged per use. Most other services are based on what you provision, even if there is no usage/traffic. That makes Azure Functions an attractive platform for cost effective operations. Chris updated his guide on how to implement Azure Functions with cost considerations in mind.

.NET Nook

Want to have a Javascript frontend and a dotnet backend? Somehow you need to connect those two together. Aspire is the tool to do so. Learn how to connect a Nuxt frontend to a dotnet backend and enhance your developer experience.

The C# Dev Kit is the solution for building dotnet apps inside Visual Studio Code. And with the February Update, some nice features are introduced like hot reloading, debugging and testing support.

Back in the days, way before Azure was a thing, there was something like Heroku; with a simple git push you made your application available to the world. It was almost a serverless framework before we even knew what it was. But it was for the cool kids, the non MS devs, with all their fancy databases, caches and languages.

Along came AppHarbor, which was a similar service but for .net. You could host your app, with some add-ons by performing that simple git push command. Unfortunately, they stopped in 2022 as there are now many alternatives.

But now, even Heroku has official .NET support! Curious to see how it stands compared to current solutions.

Dotnet 10 comes with C# 14 and of course, they are still adding new features to the language:

Closing Thoughts

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