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Welcome back, tech enthusiasts! 🚀

After a short break for the Microsoft MVP Summit, I’m back with a fresh edition—and there’s no shortage of updates! This one is heavy on GitHub Copilot news, with features like Agent Mode, Pro+ plans, and image support rolling out, alongside broader improvements across GitHub Actions, JetBrains IDEs, and workflow automation.

Beyond GitHub, I’ve included insights on MCP integrations, .NET caching strategies, and the evolution of Azure’s Service Fabric—plus a handy C# to TypeScript cheatsheet if you’re switching between stacks.

Here’s what’s in store this week:

• 🧠 GitHub Copilot goes full Agent Mode with new plans & model support

• ⚙️ Breaking changes in GitHub Actions & enhanced workflow tooling

• 🖼️ Image input in Copilot Chat and multi-IDE support

• 🌐 Azure Functions + MCP = powerful AI agent integrations

• 🧩 Redis caching, dynamic queries in EF, and cross-language cheatsheets

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

GitHub Digest

Have you ever heard about Nix? It is an alternative to GitHub Actions, trying to solve some of the shortcomings of GH:

If you still use the old cache service, then you will be out of luck on the 15th of April, as GitHub will shut down the old service. Read about the upcoming changes and the migration plan below:

Did you know that there is a full-screen GitHub Copilot mode on the GH website? It has many nice features, which got even better with the latest release, like previewing files, editing GH Issues, etc.

Not only Visual Studio Code get the nice new improvements of Copilot Edit, but it is also available in the JetBrains IDEs.

Yeah, you can now also upload pictures to the Copilot chat on the github.com website and use them as input for your queries.

Using GitHub Actions Runner Controller? Then read up on what is new in this article by Ken Muse:

Vibe Coding, where two engineers can now create the tech debt of at least 50 engineers.

And yes, it is now possible in GH Copilot with the new Agent mode and MCP support. Plus a bunch more announcements like new models, and the Pro plan.

You already have some different plans for GH Copilot, but this is the new Pro+ plan. This gives you access to the latest models and has higher usage tiers. Looks like AI compute is expensive :-)

Coding Corner

You most likely are using some sort of AI tool in your dev work, so read up on how to make the best use of these.

Hard to miss all the news around MCP, the connector for AI and sources. This site collects them all:

Azure Updates & Insights

Did you know that Service Fabric is powering a large part of the distributed logic in Azure since 2015? It is a pretty capable system but is rarely used outside Azure internals. And now we have yet another Fabric. So what is the difference and should you still use Service Fabric:

Continuing on the MCP hype; the Azure Functions team created a cool integration so you can create MCP connections directly with Functions:

.NET Nook

Caching; it most of the time solves one issue, but introduces another one. You can get performance improvements, but you are stuck with the invalidation of data when it is no longer fresh.

But regardless of this; Redis provides an excellent cache solution, so read how you can include this in your projects.

Are you a C# developer who needs to do front-end dev as well in a language like TypeScript? This guide can help you by showing common constructions side by side.

A not to unknown problem; you need to select one or more columns dynamically from a database using Entity Framework. But how to specify at runtime which columns you actually need to fetch?

Closing Thoughts

Thank you for reading this week’s edition!

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