The art of simplicity

In the previous post we wrote a configuration document for a single service by hand. That works when you know exactly what you want to manage. But what if you inherit a machine and have no idea what's configured on it? Or you have one server that works fine and you want the others to look the same? Writing the document from scratch is slow and you will forget things. That's what dsc config export is for. Note: this post is part of a bigger series on Microsoft Desired State Configuration. Getting started with DSC 3.0 – Part 1: What is DSC and what changed? Getting started with DSC 3.0 – Part 2: Managing a Windows service end to end Getting started with DSC 3.0 – Part 3: Capturing the current state with dsc config export (this post) What does export do? The export command inspects the system and generates a configuration document that contains every instance of the resources you ask for. The result is a normal configuration document, so you can use it ...

In the previous post we looked at what DSC is and what changed in 3.0. Time to put it to work. A Windows service is a good first example. It's something most teams have, and it's easy to break without anybody noticing. Someone sets the start type to Manual while troubleshooting, forgets to put it back, and a few weeks later the service doesn't come up after a reboot. Let's use DSC to describe the state we want and keep it that way. Note: this post is part of a bigger series on Microsoft Desired State Configuration: Getting started with DSC 3.0 – Part 1: What is DSC and what changed? Getting started with DSC 3.0 – Part 2: Managing a Windows service end to end (this post) What you need DSC v3.3 or later, because Microsoft.Windows/Service was added in that release A Windows machine An elevated terminal for the set operation Check your version first: dsc --version Remark: the resource can only manage services that are already regis...

If you've worked with PowerShell DSC before, you probably remember writing a Configuration block, generating a MOF file and hoping the Local Configuration Manager did what you expected.  DSC 3.0 throws most of that away and provides a more modern incarnation of infrastructure-as-code.  Let me explain what it is, and what makes 3.0 different. What is DSC? Desired State Configuration is a declarative way to manage a system. You describe what the system should look like, not how to get there. DSC figures out the rest. It is kind of the first incarnation of Infrastructure as Code. Three concepts are enough to understand DSC: Configuration document: a file that describes the desired state Resource: the piece that knows how to read and change one specific thing (a registry key, a service, a package, ...) Operations: what you can do with a resource: get , test , set and export So the question becomes: if the concepts stays the same, what changed in 3.0?...

Agents write most of my code these days. That leaves me with this question: what do I do with all this free time? I considered learning a new framework, but that sounds suspiciously like work. Luckily, the VS Code team has a better idea. They gave me something to take care of. What is the VS Code pet? The pet is an interactive character that sits above the chat input box. It reacts to chat activity and to whatever you do to it. So while the agent works, the pet watches. Before, I was the only one staring at the progress indicator while pretending to supervise. Now I have company. Remark: The pet is marked as experimental, so it might change or be removed. Don't get too attached. (I got attached within five minutes.) Adopting your pet Type /vscode-pet in the chat input to show or hide it. In the new-session view of the Agents window, you can also right-click outside the input box and select Pet (/vscode-pet) . Show or hide. That's the entire commitment. As fa...

Dependency Track is an open source component analysis platform from OWASP. You upload the SBOM of your application, and Dependency Track keeps track of the components inside it. It checks those components against vulnerability sources like the National Vulnerability Database, GitHub Advisories and OSV. It also lets you define policies and send notifications when something new shows up. In short: it tells you which of your applications are affected when the next vulnerable library hits the news. Recently Dependency Track got an upgrade and version 5 was released. So, time to upgrade! However, that turned out not to be as easy as expected. It took us 2 attempts. Our first attempt failed completely, so we took a different route. Here is what we tried and the two things that cost us the most time. Big shout out to Jef, who looked over my shoulder during the upgrade and helped tackling the issues when we got stuck. Two approaches in the documentation The Dependency Track documenta...

Recently I tried to spin up a new container and Docker refused with this error: OSError: [Errno 28] No space left on device: Not the most helpful message, but the root cause was simple: the disk used by the Docker engine was full. As you can see in the screenshot below, I was eating up almost the full 250GB available for Docker: Where did my disk space go? Before deleting anything, let's find out what is actually using the space. Docker has a built-in command for this: docker system df This gives you a summary of the space used by images, containers, local volumes and build cache. Want more detail per item? Add the verbose flag: docker system df -v In my case, the usual suspects were to blame: old images, stopped containers and build cache that had been piling up for months. Cleaning up Start with the safest options and work your way up. Remove all stopped containers: docker container prune Remove dangling images (untagged layers that are no longer refer...

When you let Copilot edit your code in agent mode, every change waits for a decision: Keep or Undo. For a small change that's fine. After ten prompts in a row, you're clicking Keep more than you're reading code. VS Code has a setting to take that click away. Why do we need this? By default, edits from chat are pending until you accept or discard them. The pending state survives closing VS Code, so you can come back later and still decide. That's a good default. But if you already review everything in a diff before you commit, the extra step per edit adds little. Accept edits after a delay Add this to your settings.json : "chat.editing.autoAcceptDelay": 5 Edits are now accepted automatically after the delay. The default is 0 , which means auto-accept is disabled. You are not locked out. While the countdown runs, hover over the editor overlay controls to cancel it, and you can still Undo afterwards. Keep approval for sensitive files Auto-...

I think that is the clearest blog title I used in years. Why do I mention this? Let me explain... Some time ago we stumbled over a performance issue in our applications. The root cause was a fragmented index, caused by the usage of a standard guid instead of a sequential guid. While looking for the right fix, I had to revisit one of my own posts: Sequential GUIDs with .NET 9 . In that post I mentioned that you can use Guid.CreateVersion7() to create a sequential guid. That is technically correct, but it is NOTa solution for SQL Server. Why does a random guid hurt? A clustered index in SQL Server is a sorted B-tree. When the key is random, every insert lands on a random page. If that page is full, SQL Server has to split it, which leaves you with half-empty pages, a fragmented index and more I/O. A sequential key always appends at the end, so pages fill up and stay put. Why is a version 7 guid not sequential for SQL Server? A UUID version 7 (RFC 9562) starts with a 48-bit U...

An architect in one of our teams selected auto mode in GitHub Copilot and ended up on a high-cost model. Nothing was broken, auto did what it is designed to do. But it was the trigger for a broader discussion: Should we disable some (of the more expensive) models? What does auto actually do? Auto looks at every prompt and selects the model that is best suited for it. The choice is based on task complexity and model availability. Usage is charged based on the model auto selects, so a heavy reasoning model means a heavy bill. The models auto can choose from are limited by your plan and by policy. Organization owners can enable or disable a model under Settings > Copilot > Models . However, be aware that by default every model that becomes generally available is on by default for GitHub Copilot Business and Enterprise. If you want to approve every model yourself, disable the "Default availability for released models" policy. Disable a model here and auto will...

Hot Exit. It sounds like what you do when the fire alarm goes off. Or like Visual Studio leaving the room in a hurry. It's neither. Hot Exit means you can close Visual Studio with unsaved changes and find everything still there when you start it again. That solves a problem you probably know. You close Visual Studio at the end of the day with a few files half-edited, and it asks what to do with them. Save them and you end up with code that doesn't compile. Discard them and the work is gone. So you click Save All, tell yourself you'll fix it tomorrow, and hope you remember what you were doing. VS Code users stopped worrying about this a long time ago. Hot exit arrived in VS Code 1.8. Visual Studio finally has its own version. What is Hot Exit? When you close Visual Studio, Hot Exit stores the state of your session. The next time you start it, your open documents, edits and unsaved changes are restored, so you don't have to save anything manually. Hot Exit p...

After my posts about automations, I got some questions about other examples where I use this feature. One I like to share is a weekly check that validates my current list of installed skills. Why do we need this? Skills are easy to add and easy to forget. Over time you collect skills that overlap, skills that point to tools that changed, and skills you no longer use. I wanted a recurring check that tells me how to cleanup my skills list. Starting from an existing skill I didn't start from scratch. The ECC repository contains a skill-stocktake skill for Claude Code. It's a /skill-stocktake slash command that audits the skills in ~/.claude/skills/ and the project-level .claude/skills/ , and it has two modes: Quick Scan: re-evaluates only the skills that changed since the last run. Full Stocktake: a complete review. Under the hood it uses shell scripts, a results.json cache, and subagents that evaluate the skills in batches of about 20. That's a ...

Last week I talked about Continuous AI and how the VSCode Automation feature is one example of this vision My blog posts were just written when a new VS Code update landed on my machine with some Automation improvements included. First the automation feature is no longer in preview but enabled by default. But the feature I want to talk about is that you can start sharing automations; either by shipping automation templates through an agent plugin, or by exporting and importing automations as a file. Let's look at both. What gets shared? An automation is a saved prompt, a session configuration and a schedule. Not all of that travels well between machines, so VS Code only shares the portable part: Name and prompt Schedule (manual, hourly, daily or weekly) File format version and an identifier What is not shared: workspace, provider, model, permissions, enabled state and run history. The person who receives the automation makes those choices locally. Thi...

Yesterday I wrote about Automations in the GitHub Copilot app as a hands-on example of Continuous AI — recurring, event-triggered AI tasks running in the background instead of you kicking them off by hand every time. The inkt is not evey dry, or the same concept landed in the latest VSCode release: the VS Code Agents window now has its own Automations feature (still in preview at the moment of writing this post). Let's take it for a spin. Turning it on Automations live in the Agents window sidebar. Two prerequisites: Have the Agents window set up with an available agent. Enable the chat.automations.enabled setting. Creating one In the Agents window sidebar, select Automations , then Create Automation — or start from one of the templates under Start with a template , which pre-fills a prompt and schedule for you. Give it a Name and write the Prompt . Be specific about scope and expected output. Straight from the docs, a solid example: Review all...

In my experience as a software architect, most of what makes CI/CD valuable isn't the "integration" or the "deployment" part. It's the "continuous" part. Things happen in the background, on their own schedule, without someone needing to remember to trigger them. GitHub Next has been pushing a term for what happens when you apply that same idea to AI: Continuous AI , the use of automated AI to support software collaboration on any platform. Not a single tool, not something GitHub owns, just a category. The claim is that this will become as standard a part of software development as CI/CD is today. What Continuous AI actually covers The GitHub Next team lists a handful of recurring patterns: Continuous Triage (labeling and responding to issues), Continuous Documentation (keeping docs in sync with code), Continuous Fault Analysis (explaining failed CI runs), Continuous Summarization, Continuous Code Improvement. Different tasks, same shape. Th...