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Modern versioning for .NET desktop apps and how to produce idempotent artifacts
30 Jun 2026

Modern versioning for .NET desktop apps and how to produce idempotent artifacts

By BEN ABT CSharp .NET Desktop Devops 8 min reading time

Desktop software makes versioning visible in a way that web systems often do not. A backend can hide a surprising amount of release machinery behind its platform. A Windows executable cannot. Explorer exposes file …

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Modern versioning for .NET apps and libraries and how to produce idempotent artifacts
26 Jun 2026

Modern versioning for .NET apps and libraries and how to produce idempotent artifacts

By BEN ABT CSharp .NET NuGet Devops 9 min reading time

Versioning stays invisible right up to the point when it fails. A package has to be reissued, a support case depends on one exact binary, or staging and production turn out to run artifacts from the same commit that do …

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Local Aspire Development with Azure Cosmos DB and the Preview Emulator
24 Jun 2026

Local Aspire Development with Azure Cosmos DB and the Preview Emulator

By BEN ABT .NET Aspire Azure Cosmos DB ASP.NET Core Azure 14 min reading time

Distributed applications tend to feel straightforward until a real cloud dependency enters the picture. Azure Cosmos DB is a good example. In Azure, the preferred model is usually clear: the application should connect …

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Using MiMo V2.5 with GitHub Copilot BYOK and OpenCode Zen (Promo)
27 May 2026

Using MiMo V2.5 with GitHub Copilot BYOK and OpenCode Zen (Promo)

By BEN ABT VS Code GitHub Copilot BYOK OpenCode AI MiMo 9 min reading time

MiMo V2.5 is the latest reasoning and coding model from Xiaomi’s AI lab. Xiaomi positions MiMo as a general-purpose reasoning model with particular strength in code generation, structured output and tool calling. In May …

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Using OpenAI Models in VS Code with GitHub Copilot BYOK
24 May 2026

Using OpenAI Models in VS Code with GitHub Copilot BYOK

By BEN ABT VS Code GitHub Copilot BYOK Openai AI 8 min reading time

GitHub Copilot’s pricing shift from flat premium request units to token-based GitHub AI Credits, scheduled for June 1, 2026, changes the economics of heavy AI usage in VS Code meaningfully. Models with large context …

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Using Kimi K2.5 and DeepSeek V4 in VS Code with GitHub Copilot BYOK and OpenCode
23 May 2026

Using Kimi K2.5 and DeepSeek V4 in VS Code with GitHub Copilot BYOK and OpenCode

By BEN ABT VS Code GitHub Copilot BYOK OpenCode AI DeepSeek Kimi 10 min reading time

GitHub Copilot is moving into a different cost model. GitHub announced that Copilot plans will transition from premium request units to GitHub AI Credits on June 1, 2026. Usage will be calculated from token consumption, …

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Zero-Code REST API Mocking with json-server for Angular and React
21 May 2026

Zero-Code REST API Mocking with json-server for Angular and React

By BEN ABT Angular React Frontend Tooling Mock Rest 10 min reading time

Frontend development often hits a practical wall early: the backend API does not exist yet, is unreachable in local environments, or is shared between multiple teams and cannot be safely modified during development. The …

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Cloudflare Workers with wrangler.toml: Preview URLs, production routes and SEO-safe SPA handling
10 May 2026

Cloudflare Workers with wrangler.toml: Preview URLs, production routes and SEO-safe SPA handling

By BEN ABT Cloudflare Workers Seo Devops Spa GitHub Actions 9 min reading time

Cloudflare Workers can separate production and preview traffic cleanly without sacrificing canonical URL control. For search visibility, that detail matters more than the mere existence of preview links. The production …

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Azure Static Web Apps with GitHub Actions: Pull Request Preview Environments, automatic teardown and stable production URLs
06 May 2026

Azure Static Web Apps with GitHub Actions: Pull Request Preview Environments, automatic teardown and stable production URLs

By BEN ABT Azure GitHub 13 min reading time

Azure Static Web Apps has one feature that is easy to underestimate until a team starts using it seriously: pull requests can behave like first-class deployment units.

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Backing Up GitHub Repositories on Synology NAS with gickup
23 Apr 2026

Backing Up GitHub Repositories on Synology NAS with gickup

By BEN ABT GitHub Synology Docker Git 10 min reading time

GitHub is an operational platform, not a backup strategy. For a long time, that distinction often felt theoretical because GitHub is - usually - highly available and because Git itself already distributes history well. …

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The new Microsoft Testing Platform for .NET: An introduction with practical samples and migration guidance
25 Mar 2026

The new Microsoft Testing Platform for .NET: An introduction with practical samples and migration guidance

By BEN ABT .NET Testing 14 min reading time

Testing in .NET has historically been associated with VSTest. That choice was reasonable for a long time because VSTest offered broad tooling support, deep IDE integration and a familiar execution model for MSTest, xUnit …

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GitHub Copilot - Custom Agents for Full-Stack Teams: A Practical Operating Model for .NET, React and Azure
17 Mar 2026

GitHub Copilot - Custom Agents for Full-Stack Teams: A Practical Operating Model for .NET, React and Azure

By BEN ABT GitHub Copilot Custom Agents AI Agents .NET React Azure Testing Documentation 15 min reading time

GitHub Copilot custom agents allow teams to define specialized AI assistants, each with its own role, tool access and behavioral boundaries. Instead of relying on one general-purpose assistant for everything, a team can …

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.NET NuGet Trusted Publishing with GitHub Actions
10 Mar 2026

.NET NuGet Trusted Publishing with GitHub Actions

By BEN ABT .NET NuGet GitHub Actions CI/CD Security 15 min reading time

Publishing NuGet packages has traditionally required one uncomfortable compromise: a long-lived API key had to exist somewhere in the delivery pipeline. Even when that secret was stored in a secure CI system, the model …

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C# 15 Unions: Unions are finally in .NET
09 Mar 2026

C# 15 Unions: Unions are finally in .NET

By BEN ABT .NET C# .NET 11 Language Design Open Source 7 min reading time

After many years of workarounds, design discussions and library-level substitutes, unions are finally becoming a first-class part of C#. The proposal in the C# language repository is no longer a distant idea. With the …

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Unio: High-Performance Discriminated Unions for C#
02 Mar 2026

Unio: High-Performance Discriminated Unions for C#

By BEN ABT .NET C# Open Source Performance Design Patterns 19 min reading time

C# is a powerful language, but there is one road it has not yet fully paved: native discriminated union types. Developers have been working around this absence for years, typically choosing between throwing exceptions …

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Run Azure Cosmos DB locally with .NET Aspire and make emulator endpoints visible in the dashboard
26 Feb 2026

Run Azure Cosmos DB locally with .NET Aspire and make emulator endpoints visible in the dashboard

By BEN ABT .NET Aspire Azure Cosmos DB Docker 6 min reading time

When building cloud-native .NET applications, two goals often matter at the same time: a fast local development loop and a clean path to real Azure resources for publish mode. .NET Aspire with Azure Cosmos DB supports …

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.NET 11 Preview 1 Is Here: What's New and What to Expect
20 Feb 2026

.NET 11 Preview 1 Is Here: What's New and What to Expect

By BEN ABT .NET ASP.NET Core Blazor C# 9 min reading time

The .NET team just released the first preview of .NET 11 and there is already a lot to talk about. While this is an early preview - not a release candidate - the breadth of changes touching the runtime, libraries, …

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Agent Skills Standard: The Quality Contract Behind Reliable AI Agents
12 Feb 2026

Agent Skills Standard: The Quality Contract Behind Reliable AI Agents

By BEN ABT GitHub Copilot AI Agents Prompt Engineering GitHub 8 min reading time

Large language model agents can appear intelligent while still producing unstable output across runs, contexts and tasks. In practice, this instability is rarely caused by model quality alone. The dominant factor is …

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Create a Local SQL Server Database File with .NET
09 Feb 2026

Create a Local SQL Server Database File with .NET

By BEN ABT .NET C# SQL Server LocalDB Testing 4 min reading time

Local SQL Server database files provide a pragmatic way to keep a real SQL Server engine close to the application without provisioning a full server. A LocalDB database lives in a single .mdf file (plus a log file), runs …

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Building Custom AI Tooling with the GitHub Copilot SDK for .NET
03 Feb 2026

Building Custom AI Tooling with the GitHub Copilot SDK for .NET

By BEN ABT GitHub Copilot .NET AI SDK C# 5 min reading time

The landscape of AI development is shifting rapidly from simple chat interfaces to fully integrated, agentic workflows like the Ralph Loop . GitHub has recently introduced the GitHub Copilot SDK , a powerful toolkit that …

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Modern versioning for .NET desktop apps and how to produce idempotent artifacts
Modern versioning for .NET desktop apps and how to produce …
Jun 30, 2026
Modern versioning for .NET apps and libraries and how to produce idempotent artifacts
Modern versioning for .NET apps and libraries and how to …
Jun 26, 2026
Local Aspire Development with Azure Cosmos DB and the Preview Emulator
Local Aspire Development with Azure Cosmos DB and the …
Jun 24, 2026
Using MiMo V2.5 with GitHub Copilot BYOK and OpenCode Zen (Promo)
Using MiMo V2.5 with GitHub Copilot BYOK and OpenCode Zen …
May 27, 2026
Using OpenAI Models in VS Code with GitHub Copilot BYOK
Using OpenAI Models in VS Code with GitHub Copilot BYOK
May 24, 2026
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About BEN

Benjamin Abt is a Software Engineer, Platform Architect and Microsoft MVP specializing in .NET, Azure, cloud architecture, performance optimization and sustainable software development.

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