#Announcements

AI Toolkit for VS Code March Update | Microsoft Community Hub - VS Code AI Toolkit extension adds new tutorials, model comparison in Playground, the introduction of Think Mode, and access to new popular AI models like Claude 3.7 Sonnet and GPT-4.5.
Announcing Babylon.js 8.0 - Windows Developer Blog - Babylon.js, an open web rendering engine, has better shading and lighting.
Announcing Dapr AI Agents | CNCF - Dapr Agents are released to simplifying the creation of AI agents which is framework-based to create many agents and allow them to collab and much more.
Docker Desktop 4.39 Brings Docker Smart AI Agent, CLI in GA, and Enhanced Multi-Platform Support - Docker introduce a smart AI agent named Gordon, which can create dockerfiles, docker compose, kubernetes manifest and run them.
Ember 6.3 Released - Not too much with this one except prettier is an added default new projects.
Emerging Technology Trends - 2025 - JP Morgan’s report on next gen technology trends, highlighting the evolving AI world we’ll live in.

#.NET

Coding Azure 8: Securing a Web Service in Azure App Service - A good article setting up authorization around APIs with configured scopes and permissions using Azure Entra.
Microservices Pushback - Discussion aroundbenefits and challenges of microservices, and making it easier with technologies like Dapr and Aspire, using examples frtom .NET eShop as a guide.
Records and Collections | Jon Skeet - Using reference equality comparisons within data models and extension methods for creating immutable reference dictionaries.
Understanding Azure Functions for Microservice Architecture - MSSQLTips.com - Setting up a function app with touch points on timer trigger, blob and even sending slack notifications with logging, mostly from VS Code.

How .NET Aspire Simplifies Service Discovery - Explains how .NET Aspire service discovery works and how to use it with YARP (Yet Another Reverse Proxy) to setup an API gateway.
Service Discovery in Microservices With .NET and Consul - A follow-on from the above article but goes into how to use .NET service discovery with Hashicorp’s Consul to create a UI based platform to discover services and show metrics, deployments, etc.

Databricks Vs Apache Spark: Key Differences And When To Use Each | Build5Nines - Compares Apache Spark, an open-source distributed computing engine, with Databricks, a fully managed cloud service built on Spark. It outlines their key features, differences in setup, deployment, ease of use, cost, and features.
Enhancing observability with the power of Azure Event Grid – fhessen - Explains how Azure Event Grid, a pub/sub service in Azure, can be used to subscribe to events happening within Azure and feeding it into an observability platform such as Application Insights to extract deployments and key vault changes just as an example.

Adaptive Video Streaming With Dash.js In React — Smashing Magazine - Explains the pitfalls of using the HTML <video> tag for low powered or slow networked devices, and instead using adaptive bitrate (ABR) streaming to render low resolution media for those aforementioned devices, whilst allowing high res for fast and high powered devices
Mastering Advanced JavaScript Set Operations - Telerik Blogs - The article goes into JavaScript es6’s new Set() objects and their efficent set theory operations, such as union(), difference(), intersection() and more.

Mastering GitHub Copilot: When to use AI agent mode - The GitHub Blog - VS Code’s GitHub Copilot new agent mode can now make edits/fixes, review PRs, create files + code and more. Although it’s not perfect yet. Windsurf, Cursor and zed editors still reign supreme in this space.