The art of simplicity

As developer or architect, you make a lot of design decisions every day.

Microsoft just released The Story of VS Code, an official documentary directed by Stefan Kingham that traces the editor's ten-year journey; from a small team in Zurich building a browser-based editor called Monaco, to the tool most of us now open dozens of

In my previous post, I covered what Copilot Spaces are and how to set one up.

A lot of developers are using GitHub Copilot as their day-to-day agent harness.

If you've built anything with the Microsoft Agent Framework (MAF), you'll notice that your tool calls can fill up the context window quite fast.

There's a version of leadership that looks busy, looks needed, and looks like it's working but turns out to be the least effective version there is.

Note: this is a follow-up to my post on monitoring GitHub Copilot Chat with the Aspire Dashboard.

When talking to developers I get wildly different opinions about how "good" GitHub Copilot actually was for them.

If you search for "GitHub Copilot budget policy", most posts point you to cost centers: assign a budget to a cost center, map the cost center to a team or business unit, done.

Recently I got lost setting up Renovate against an internal NuGet feed.

In my effort to adopt an 'AI first' philosophy, I spend a lot of time automating my day-to-day activities and transforming them to skills.

Note: this post is part of a series.

It didn't take long until skills became a key element in our agentic development workflow.

Yesterday I was talking about git submodule support in Visual Studio and that reminded me of something else: Azure DevOps Server got submodule support too.

Git submodules wasn't a feature I used that often.

After our fix yesterday, we got our Renovate pipeline up-and-running.

Recently I ran into a failing Renovate pipeline right after configuring it against our internal Azure DevOps server: "err": { "code": "UNABLE_TO_VERIFY_LEAF_SIGNATURE", "message": "unable to verify the first certificate; if the root CA is instal…

Recently I ran into a nasty startup error after registering both AddDbContext and AddDbContextFactory for the same DbContext in an ASP.NET Core project: System.AggregateException: 'Some services are not able to be constructed' System.InvalidOperationExcep…

Recently I lost a good chunk of a day chasing an issue in our OWASP Dependency-Track container setup.

There's a moment when you're deep into an agentic coding session and you have to leave your desk (time to catch my train!).

When a pipeline run fails and the regular logs don't tell you enough, Azure DevOps has a built-in way to get more detail: system diagnostics.

There's a moment when a transaction fails halfway through, and you realize rolling back everything is overkill.

In my passthrough authentication post, the login endpoint set a provider value on AuthenticationProperties so the OpenIddict server would know whether to challenge GitHub or ADFS: app.MapGet("login/{provider}", (string provider) => Results.Challenge(n…

In most enterprise applications authentication is externalized to an external identity provider.

At a recent talk I compared AI adoption to the introduction of compilers: a new layer of abstraction that lets us work at a higher level, the same way compilers let us stop writing assembly by hand.