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Welcome back!

Each week, I search for the most practical, curious, and forward-looking updates across GitHub, Azure, .NET, and cloud development. If it catches my eye—or solves a problem I’ve run into—I’ll share it here. This week is no exception.

You’ll find insights on Copilot customization, GitHub’s MCP server magic, async error handling in C#, and even some thoughtful takes on building modern microservices.

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And of course, if you’re new here—welcome! You can subscribe anytime to stay in the loop.

Now, let’s get into it.

GitHub Digest

As you will see in another article linked below, it is easier to customise the copilot instructions by providing some guidance at the right place. The Code Review functionality now also respect these instruction files so it can work in the same consistent style across multiple Copilot features.

MCP servers are hot, and for a reason; it is the glue that allows exposing other services to AI tools. In this case, when you configure the MCP server in VS Code, use the Copilot Agent mode to ask GitHub related questions and it can, on your behalf, talk to GitHub and perform tasks.

Coding Corner

Burke Holland provides a collection of custom prompts to make working with Copilot more productive. And unsure which model to pick; the O1, Gemini, Claude or GPT4? Read what works best for you:

MCP all over the place; also in the new Visual Studio Code update. So if you are not yet playing or using MCP servers, now is the time to get started.

You could ask why; but maybe the correct answer needs to be; just because you can. As Azure has larger and larger machines, you can get more CPUs and what is better then playing Tetris using the CPU view in the Task Manager on a larger set of processors?

Starting a new front-end project, know that you want to use some React but have no clue where to actually start? Join the club; my front-end experience is jQuery, which is not the choice of today anymore. The below article can guide you in the right direction:

I m a big FinOps fan, so let me also share some FinOps related stuff once in a while (I do have a dedicated newsletter as well); there is a free webinar about cost insights coming up soon.

.NET Nook

Using async calls have a lot of advantages, certainly when you need to kick off a bunch of tasks using the WaitAll or WhenAll functions; but what if an exception occurs, how to you capture this error and what you can do about it?

I always like to look at other code to be inspired and learn how to do stuff, and this is no exception; a very extensive and well written article on how to build microservices. It is opionated for sure and you can disagree with parts of it, but it has some good points and practices.

Closing Thoughts

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