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Agents can now verify your UI changes without leaving VS Code

Verifying frontend changes always meant a mental context switch: write code, alt-tab to a browser, poke around in DevTools, switch back. Even with a decent dev server, the loop was still manual — and for AI agents, it was essentially broken. Agents could write unit tests for logic, but verifying whether a button actually renders, whether a dialog triggers, or whether a layout holds up? That required a human in the loop. I first tried to tackle this problem by using the Playwright or Chrome Dev-Tools MCP server, but with the February 2026 release of VS Code (1.110) , that changes. Agents can now open, interact with, and inspect your running application directly inside VS Code's integrated browser — closing the development loop without any manual hand-off. How it works When browser agent tools are enabled, Copilot gains access to a set of tools that let it read and interact with pages in the integrated browser. As the agent interacts with the page, it sees updates to page co...
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Awesome GitHub Copilot just got awesommer (if that’s a word)

If you've been following the GitHub Copilot ecosystem, you've probably heard of the Awesome GitHub Copilot repo . It launched back in July 2025 with a straightforward goal: give the community a central place to share custom instructions, prompts, and chat modes for tailoring Copilot's AI responses. A lot of people contributed. As a result, the repo now contains 175+ agents, 208+ skills, 176+ instructions, 48+ plugins, 7 agentic workflows, and 3 hooks. And now the maintainers took it one step further and created an Awesome GitHub Copilot website and Learning hub . A website that actually helps you find things The new site lives at awesome-copilot.github.com and wraps the repo in a browsable interface built on GitHub Pages. The headline feature is full-text search across every resource — agents, skills, instructions, hooks, workflows, and plugins — with category filters to narrow things down. Each resource has its own page with a modal preview, so you can see exac...
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Shining a light on .NET versions across our organisation with OpenTelemetry

At our organisation running a large fleet of .NET services, a deceptively simple question can be surprisingly hard to answer: what versions of .NET are our apps actually running in production? You'd think this would be easy. It isn't. Services get deployed, teams move on, and before long nobody is quite sure whether that one legacy service is still on .NET 6 — or even .NET Core 3.1. Spreadsheets fall out of date. README files lie. The only source of truth is what's actually running. We solved this with three lines of OpenTelemetry configuration. The problem We run dozens of .NET services across multiple teams. We are the middle of a push to .NET 10, but we have no reliable, centralised way to see the current state. We wanted to answer questions like: Which services are still on end-of-life .NET versions? Which teams still have work to do? After a migration wave, how do we confirm everything moved? The solution We already had OpenTelemetry set up ac...
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VS Code Memory Tool: Local Memory meets GitHub Copilot Memory

A few weeks ago I wrote about Copilot Memory in VS Code - the GitHub-hosted system that lets Copilot learn repository-specific insights across agents. Since then, VS Code has shipped a second, complementary memory system: the Memory tool . These two systems solve related but distinct problems, and understanding both helps you get the most out of Copilot in your daily workflow. What is the Memory Tool? The Memory tool is a built-in agent capability that stores notes locally on your machine . Unlike Copilot Memory, which lives on GitHub's servers and requires a GitHub repo to function, the Memory tool writes plain files to your local filesystem and reads them back at the start of each session. You enable or disable it with the github.copilot.chat.tools.memory.enabled setting. It's on by default. Three memory scopes VSCode organizes memories into three scopes: Scope Persists across sessions Persists across workspaces Good for ...
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DeepWiki - Talk to your documentation

I regularly clone repos on Github. I explore other codebases to learn other coding approaches and improve my understanding of specific libraries. Sometimes these repos have good documentation available but most of the time I end up spelunking through source files trying to reverse-engineer what this thing does. Until I discovered DeepWiki DeepWiki is built to fix that. What is DeepWiki? Launched by Cognition AI — the team behind Devin — DeepWiki is the free public version of their internal Devin Wiki and Devin Search tools, designed to help developers quickly understand complex codebases. The idea is simple: whether it's a public repository or a private project, DeepWiki generates Wikipedia-like documentation pages through simple operations. The quickest way to try it? Just replace github.com with deepwiki.com in any public repo URL. If your repo is not indexed yet, you can ask to index it. Enter an email and you are good to go.   That's it. No install, no acc...
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SQL Server silently renames your user when you ALTER with a login

With all this AI features available, you would expect that you no longer loose time on stupid issues. Unfortunately, we are not there yet. I lost a chunk of time today to a behavior in SQL Server that, once you know it, is totally obvious — but until then is absolutely maddening. I'm sharing it here so hopefully you don't lose the same time I did. The setup I had a script meant to be idempotent: create a database user if it doesn't exist, or update it if it does. Standard stuff. Here's a simplified version: Looks fine, right? Run it once — works. Run it a second time and SQL Server throws an error saying it can't find usr_SampleDB_reader . The user you just created. In the same database. With the same script. What's actually happening When you run ALTER USER [...] WITH LOGIN = [...] , SQL Server renames the user to match the login name — by default, silently, without a warning. So after the first run, usr_SampleDB_reader no longer exists. It's...
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Compile-Time options validation with the OptionsValidator source generator

In the previous post, we looked at how to implement IValidateOptions<T> by hand — writing a dedicated validator class, injecting services, and expressing cross-property constraints that Data Annotations can't handle. That approach gives you full control and is the right tool when validation logic is genuinely complex. While researching that post I discovered another feature that's worth knowing about: when your validation can be expressed with Data Annotation attributes, the options validation source generator (available since .NET 8) will write the IValidateOptions<T> implementation for you at compile time. You get the safety of startup validation without the boilerplate, and as a bonus the generated code is reflection-free and AOT-compatible. The problem with runtime data annotations Before the source generator existed, the standard way to add annotation-based validation was ValidateDataAnnotations() : This works, but it uses reflection at runtime to ...
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