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Welcome back, tech enthusiasts!

Every week, I keep an eye out for updates, features, and blog posts that stand out — the kind that make you pause mid-scroll and think, “Oh, that’s actually useful.” This week is no different.

From GitHub’s ever-evolving Copilot features (including a very handy new way to reference issues and files) to insights on AI tooling, JWT testing, Azure updates, and a personal deep-dive into dynamic IIS deployments with GitHub Actions — there’s a lot to unpack.

I’ve gathered the highlights so you don’t have to. Let’s dig in.

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GitHub Digest

Want to target your conversations and reference a certain file, pull request or issue in the chat? Now you can, by using the @ sign to reference different elements in source or GitHub. Giving more context and more directions.

In the previous edition I talked about a feature where you can assign a Copilot agent to an issue and let it start working on it. React to it via comments and get direct feedback. Now also available from GitHub Mobile, so it is even easier to use the agent.

Want to learn more about the Copilot agent, and how to use if effectively, then read the below article. It shows how to write and assign issues to the agent, and let it plan and create code.

Shameless plug for my own blogpost: how to execute jobs using GitHub runners on multiple machines at once. In this case, I needed to deploy a webapplication on all the webservers we had. You can specify a runner, but then it will pick only one available for you, but what if you need to run it on all the webservers?

A matrix is the solution, but how to fill the matrix with all the available machines without specifying them explicitly? Read about a possible solution in my blog post:

Did you know that the Windows Server 2019 runner will be fully unsupported by June 30? There will be some brownout moments (where your actions will fail for a short time when you still use this version).

So do a search for windows-2019 in your organisations and migrate to a newer runner image!

Coding Corner

Leave it to Mark Russinovich, the CTO of Azure, to have a well thought opinion about AI and development. Read what he has to say about AI Vibe coding and the direction it is heading.

I m a fan of Aspire as it helps me setup the developer experience in a fast, and feature rich way. Even recently I needed to have a SQL server for my asp.net website, and that could all be arranged via a couple of lines of code in the Aspire AppHost.

But my knowledge about the testing part was limited, so this series of posts on how to setup integration tests using Aspire was more then welcome.

Azure Updates & Insights

Missed the latest and greatest from MS Build? Get the latest announcements in this article:

.NET Nook

Found this little gem, written by an ex Xebia colleague. It allows you to test the JWT security. And yes, you should use proven third party libraries and not write your own code for JWT validations, but how do you make sure those third party libraries are indeed correct?

Cancellation tokens; pretty useful, even in tests. But I also forget about those easily. So do read on how to use those and why it is good to include them.

Closing Thoughts

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