The art of simplicity

Good news if you are using Github Copilot Free or Pro! You can now ask Github Copilot to search the web. This feature was already available for Github Business or Enterprise users but now it is in preview for everyone. To start using this feature, you first need to enable it in your Copilot settings: Before if you asked a question about data the model was not trained on, you get a response like this: If we now ask a question in Copilot Chat where the trained model has no information about, it can search on the web. Therefore include  @github in your query. Github Copilot will select an appropriate skill to help answering the question:   If the web search is not triggered automatically, you can explicitly trigger it by adding @github #web at the start of your query. Nice! More information Web search in GitHub Copilot Chat now available for Copilot Individual - GitHub Changelog GitHub Copilot · Your AI pair programmer Managing Copilot policies as an indiv...

Today I was helping a colleague to get an existing application containerized. To run the containerized workload we were using Podman Desktop. When we opened Podman Desktop, we got the question if we wanted to upgrade the podman version. Of course we said yes! Unfortunately after the upgrade was completed, podman failed to start and always returned the following error message: > podman build Cannot connect to Podman. Please verify your connection to the Linux system using `podman system connection list`, or try `podman machine init` and `podman machine start` to manage a new Linux VM Error: unable to connect to Podman socket: open C:\Users\<username>\.ssh\known_hosts: The system cannot find the path specified. We were able to continue by applying a workaround. By manually creating the .ssh folder in the user directory podman was able to run successfully. Problem solved! More information Missing known_hosts file in Windows prevents connection as of 5.3.0 · Issue ...

This one is just a small reminder for myself. Yesterday I talked about how I helped a colleague to get started with Podman through Podman Desktop. Today he contacted me again when trying to build an updated image of the application. Here is what he tried to do: >podman build This failed with the following error message: Error: no context directory and no Containerfile specified Do you notice what is missing? He forgot to specify the context directory. In this case he was running the command at the same location that the Dockerfile could be found. So we added a ‘.’ to specify that the current directory could be used: >podman build . If the dockerfile could be found at another location, just specify the relative or absolute path: >podman build path/to/directory That’s it!

Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) lets developers run a Linux environment directly on Windows, without the overhead of a traditional virtual machine or dual-boot setup. It is a very convenient way for developers to access and use a Linux environment. But although it not that difficult to get started , it can still take some time before you really understand how to use it. If you also had some trouble to get started with WSL2, or even never took a look at it before, I have some good news for you. Starting from WSL 2.4.4(Pre-release), you get a ‘Getting Started’ experience. Let me show… Getting Started experience First we need to make sure that we download and install the latest pre-release version. You can find the correct installer here . Download the msi file and run the installer. After the installation has completed, open the freshly installed WSL Settings app:   The WSL settings app gives you easy access to a lot of the options that can be configured w...

Hello everyone, in case you missed the announcement , today a new deep dive series started about how to combine Azure OpenAI Service and Azure AI Search to build a powerful RAG solution.   This 10 parts series consists of the following parts: The RAG solution for Azure Date: 13 January, 2025 Time: 11:30 PM UTC | 3:30 PM PT Customizing our RAG solution Date: 15 January, 2025 Time: 11:30 PM UTC | 3:30 PM PT Optimal retrieval with Azure AI Search Date: 20 January, 2025 Time: 11:30 PM UTC | 3:30 PM PT Multimedia data ingestion Date: 22 January, 2025 Time: 11:30 PM UTC | 3:30 PM PT User login and data access control Date: 27 January, 2025 Time: 11:30 PM UTC | 3:30 PM PT Storing chat history Date: 29 January, 2025 Time: 11:30 PM UTC | 3:30 PM PT Adding speech input and output Date: 3 February, 2025 Time: 11:30 PM UTC | 3:30 PM PT Private deployment Date: 5 February, 2025 Time: 11:30 PM UTC | 3:30 PM PT Evaluating RAG answer quality Date: 10 February, 2025 Time: 11:30 PM UTC | 3:30 PM...

I'm a big fan of the Central Package Management feature of NuGet. This allows to manage your NuGet package versions centrally instead of at the project level. Why is this important? It helps to avoid that multiple versions of the same packages are used inside your solution. This could lead to strange behavior and unexpected bugs. Central Package Management solves this problem by managing all package versions at the solution level in (one or more) Directory.Packages.props files: Transitive dependencies By default only direct/top level dependencies are managed through Central Package Management. But you also have transitive dependencies . Transitive dependencies refer to the indirect dependencies that a package brings into your project. When you install a NuGet package, it might depend on other packages, which in turn might have their own dependencies. These chains of dependencies create a dependency graph that can go several levels deep. Here's a breakdown of how it w...