Browse All Blogs (84)

Rick Strahl shows how to use .NET Native AOT to publish a Windows-native WinAPI-style (StdCall) DLL from a .NET class library, including how to export functions with UnmanagedCallersOnly, build with dotnet publish, and handle interop constraints like strings and structs when calling from FoxPro.

Hidde de Smet's Blog breaks down the difference between AGENTS.md (repo-wide, always-on instructions for coding agents) and .agent.md (custom agent profiles for GitHub Copilot), including where to place each file, what fields matter, and how to use roles, tool restrictions, and handoffs safely.

Rick Strahl shows how to host and integrate the Westwind.Scripting ScriptParser in a real app, using Documentation Monster as an example. He covers template hosting, runtime compilation setup, layout/content templates, path and base URL fixups for preview vs generated sites, and practical error handling.

John Edward explains why event-driven architecture is a strong fit for agentic AI systems, and breaks down the core patterns (pub/sub, event sourcing, sagas) plus practical concerns like ordering, observability, and infrastructure overhead.

Hidde de Smet's Blog explains how GitHub Copilot “skills” work via SKILL.md folders, why the YAML description is the key to discovery, and how this approach keeps context lightweight compared to a giant copilot-instructions.md. It includes a practical Azure Monitor/Application Insights KQL skill you can copy into a repo.

Andrew Lock explains how to avoid some static byte[] allocations—even on .NET Framework—by returning ReadOnlySpan backed by embedded assembly data, and validates the behavior by inspecting generated IL, with a clear rundown of the sharp edges that can accidentally reintroduce allocations.

Rick Strahl walks through Westwind.Scripting’s ScriptParser: a C# (raw .NET) templating engine that parses Handlebars-like templates into generated C# code, compiles them with Roslyn at runtime, caches the results, and (new in this update) supports file-based layout pages and sections.

John Edward explains how to use GitHub as a “living” architecture repository—capturing Architecture Decision Records (ADRs), diagrams, standards, and roadmaps—and how pull requests and versioning can turn architecture work into a collaborative, auditable part of delivery.

DevClass.com reports on Visual Studio 18.5 (Visual Studio 2026), covering new Copilot-driven “agentic” debugging, changes to how IntelliSense/Copilot suggestions are prioritized, and ongoing developer complaints about theme contrast and forced auto-updates.

Hidde de Smet compares three AI coding setups—single-agent, agent-with-tools, and multi-agent—using a realistic .NET Aspire + ASP.NET Core rate-limiting task to show trade-offs in fit, cost, latency, and common failure modes.

John Edward explains when to use single-agent vs multi-agent AI architectures in a Microsoft context, mapping common designs to Semantic Kernel, AutoGen, and Azure services like Azure OpenAI, Azure AI Search, Functions, Service Bus, and AKS.

DevClass.com reports on GitHub’s private preview of Stacked PRs, a workflow for breaking large changes into smaller, independently reviewable pull requests that can still depend on each other, with an optional gh stack CLI that’s also intended to work well with AI agents.

Jesse Houwing summarizes GitHub’s update that GitHub Copilot can now keep inference processing and associated data within US or EU data residency regions, and shows the enterprise/org policy you must enable to restrict Copilot to data-resident models.

Emanuele Bartolesi explains why Remote Desktop is a poor fit for day-to-day development on customer VMs, and shows how VS Code Remote Tunnels restores a normal local-editor workflow while keeping code and execution on the remote machine.

Andrew Lock explains how to build and publish custom Docker Sandbox templates so AI-agent sandboxes start with the tooling you need, including an example that installs the .NET SDK and a more advanced approach that swaps the base image while reapplying the sandbox layering.

DevClass.com reports that Microsoft will end support for ASP.NET Core 2.3 on April 7, 2027, leaving it without security patches or fixes and pushing teams running on .NET Framework toward migrating to modern ASP.NET on .NET 10.

Rob Bos walks through running GitHub Copilot CLI against local OpenAI-compatible inference servers (Ollama, LM Studio, Foundry Local, vLLM/TGI), focusing on the practical constraints (32k context, tool calling, VRAM/KV-cache) and sharing concrete Windows/PowerShell setup and throughput numbers.

Emanuele Bartolesi shows how to point GitHub Copilot CLI at an Azure AI Foundry (Azure OpenAI) deployment using a BYOK-style setup, including how to deploy a model, build the correct endpoint URL, set the required environment variables, and validate the connection.

Emanuele Bartolesi explains how to run GitHub Copilot CLI against a local LLM via LM Studio’s OpenAI-compatible API, including the exact PowerShell environment variables needed to avoid cloud fallback and when this offline setup is (and isn’t) worth using.

Hidde de Smet explains how Spec-Kit’s extension system works, highlights useful community extensions, and walks through the Ralph Loop extension, which runs a GitHub Copilot agent in iterations to implement tasks from `tasks.md`, commit changes, and track context in `progress.md`.