The art of simplicity

After pulling some NuGet packages into my .NET Aspire project, I ran into this cryptic startup failure: Aspire.Hosting.DistributedApplicationException: Newer version of the Aspire.Hosting.AppHost package is required to run the application. Ensure you are referencing at least version '13.2.2'. at Aspire.Hosting.Dcp.DcpDependencyCheck.EnsureDcpVersion(DcpInfo dcpInfo) at Aspire.Hosting.Dcp.DcpDependencyCheck.GetDcpInfoAsync(...) at Aspire.Hosting.Dcp.DcpHost.StartAsync(...) The app host refuses to start, and the logs point you toward a version check deep inside DCP internals. The error message tells me that a minimum version of the hosting package is required,but no matter how many times I ran dotnet restore or update NuGet packages through Visual Studio, the error persists. That's because there are two places that pin the Aspire version. Why updating NuGet packages isn't enough Aspire AppHost projects use a special SDK reference at the very...

Yesterday, I created a minimal .NET project with DevUI and registered a couple of standalone agents. That gets you surprisingly far for interactive testing. But real business scenarios quickly outgrow a single agent: you need data flowing through multiple specialized steps, decisions being made along the way, and a clear picture of the whole pipeline. That's what workflows are for. In this post, we'll build a content review pipeline as a concrete example — a Writer agent drafts a response, a Reviewer agent critiques it, and a deterministic formatting step finalizes the output. All of it visualized in DevUI. Agents vs Workflows — the key distinction The Agent Framework docs put it cleanly: an agent is LLM-driven and dynamic — it decides which tools to call and in what order, based on the conversation. A workflow is a predefined graph of operations, some of which may be AI agents, but the topology is explicit and deterministic . You decide exactly what runs after what. ...

If you've been exploring the Microsoft Agent Framework , you've probably seen the Python DevUI example showcased prominently in the docs. DevUI is a fantastic inner-loop tool — it lets you visually inspect your agents: their messages, reasoning steps, tool calls, and conversation state, all in a browser dashboard while you develop locally. Think of it as Swagger UI, but for AI agents. The problem? When I went looking for a .NET / C# equivalent , I couldn't find one. The official Microsoft Learn page for DevUI samples simply said: "DevUI samples for C# are coming soon." — Not great when you're trying to ship. So I built one. This post walks through a complete, working .NET Core example using Microsoft Agent Framework 1.0, with DevUI wired up and ready to go. What is DevUI? DevUI is a lightweight developer dashboard shipped as part of the Microsoft Agent Framework. It is not intended for production — it's a local dev tool, similar in spirit to what...

While preparing our MFA rollout at ADFS level, we started making the switch from classic authorization rules to custom access control policies in ADFS. This post explains the difference and the rationale behind this switch. A tale of two mechanisms When you work with Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS), there are two ways to control what happens when a user tries to authenticate: authorization rules and access control policies . On the surface, they feel similar; both let you define conditions around user access. But under the hood, they represent two distinct generations of the same capability. Understanding the difference matters especially when implementing MFA, because the mechanism you choose affects flexibility, maintainability, and how cleanly your logic can scale. Authorization rules: the classic approach Authorization rules are the original ADFS mechanism, introduced back when claims-based identity was first baked into the platform. They use a proprietary la...

In my earlier posts about the GitHub Copilot CLI , I already introduced the /compact command, a slash command that summarizes your conversation history to free up context space, letting you keep working in the same session without losing momentum. Well, good news! It's no longer CLI-only. The February 2026 release of VS Code brings /compact directly into the editor, and it's part of a much broader story about making agents actually usable for the kind of long, messy, real-world tasks developers deal with every day. The Context Window problem Here's what happens without context compaction: you start an agent session, ask it to dig into a complex feature, go back and forth a few times, and eventually the conversation grows so large that the model starts losing the thread, or the session simply stops. You're forced to start over, re-explain everything, and lose all the accumulated understanding the agent had built up. Context compaction solves this by summarizing...

After a routine Visual Studio update silently upgraded Git for Windows to version 2.49.0, pushes to Azure DevOps started failing with a cryptic NTLM authentication error — even though our setup was supposed to use Kerberos. Here's what happened and how to fix it in 30 seconds. The symptoms You update Visual Studio (or Git for Windows directly), and suddenly any push to your Azure DevOps remote fails. The error mentions NTLM even though your network is configured for Kerberos. Typical signs: Git push fails immediately after a Visual Studio or Git for Windows update Error references NTLM authentication failure Clones and fetches from the same remote may still work The remote URL is an internal TFS/Azure DevOps server (e.g. https://tfs.yourcompany.com ) What changed Git for Windows 2.49.0 (shipped as MinGit 2.49.0) changed how it negotiates authentication for HTTPS remotes. The new default behaviour causes Git to attempt NTLM where it previously fell through ...