Nathan Nellans

The Azure Developer CLI, aka AZD, is a tool that can assist you with easily building an app and deploying it to Azure, all with simple-to-use CLI commands. AZD Templates AZD uses templates, which contain all of the files & folders required to build and deploy an app. A Template is nothing more than a folder, or GitHub repo, that contains a few key items. Above you will see a picture showing an example template highlighting the most common components. One, it contains the s

I recently started down the rabbit hole of running bots and agents in Microsoft Teams. There are many tools, SDKs, and frameworks that can help you get the job done.  But which ones should you use?  And which ones are outdated or deprecated?  That’s what I hope to clear up in this blog post. Agent Framework, Semantic Kernel, AutoGen First, you need to build your agent’s code. There are a multitude of frameworks out there which you can choose from. Some popular examples incl

Please check out all parts of this series: Part 1: The physical hardware (you're reading it now) Part 2: Coming Soon! Lab 1.0 versus Lab 2.0 I've previously written a whole series of articles on the 1.0 version of my Azure Local home lab (formerly known as Azure Stack HCI). You can find that series here . Initially, I had no plans to upgrade my lab. But, then Minisforum announced their MS-02 Ultra line of mini PCs. After seeing how cool they were, it didn't take me long to

Overview A GitHub Codespace acts as your own personal development environment hosted in the cloud. Each Codespace runs inside a special Docker dev container, which in turn runs on an Azure virtual machine. The infrastructure (virtual machine, docker container, etc.) is automatically created and managed for you by GitHub. Once created, you are able to connect to the dev container using a few different methods. Once connected, you can do your standard development work using

GitHub Copilot can be used in many different ways (copilot chat, copilot coding agent, copilot code review, etc.). It can also be used in many different applications (GitHub.com, VS Code, Visual Studio, etc.). Finally, there are many ways to customize how Copilot works (repository instructions, path instructions, custom agents, etc.). The goal of this post will be to break down the various different methods of customizing Copilot's behavior and explaining when and where eac