Developer onboarding experience with CodeSpaces

Introduction

The project needs to increase velocity and a new developer arrives in the team. Now is typically the time where all chaos begins, as this person needs to be onboarded with the full toolchain linked to the project. Sound familiar? It does to me at least. Which is one of the reasons why I love CodeSpaces! Here you can have a development environment for VS Code full configured, which can then be leveraged in a cloud hosted manner. Even with having a secure connection to your locally installed VS Code. Sounds too good to be true? Let us take a look at the step-by-step experience of onboarding a new developer!

 

Resources

In today’s post, we’ll be using some resources to get us started…

• Template repository with a starter .NET Core development environment for Codespaces, including basic system tools / extensions (like Functions, Copilot, etc)
• GitHub CodeSpaces
• GitHub Co-Pilot

 

Step-by-Step Experience

Improving the security & compatibility aspects of package management with native GitHub features

Introduction

Did you know almost every piece of software depends on OpenSource? Not sure… What libraries is your software using? Bingo! 😉

Now we all know that package management can be a true hell. Tracking everything and ensure you are up-to-date to achieve the needed security level is hard. Next to that, there is always the risk that your build will break to moving to a library version.

What if we could enhance that flow a bit? You guessed it… Today’s post will be around how we can leverage native GitHub features to help us in this area!

 

Let’s hit the slopes!

For this walk-through, we’ll use the following ;

• an existing code repository, where we’ve forked CoreUI’s VueJS repo
• GitHub’s actions to run a workflow on every pull request
• GitHub’s automated security feature that will send pull requests to us when it detects security issues

Want to test this one out or follow along? Browse to the following sample repository ; https://github.com/beluxappdev/CoreUI-VueJS-GitHubSecurityDemo

So let’s fork this sample repository!

Taking a look at Github Enterprise Server & Github Connect

Introduction

For today’s post we’re going to take a look at GitHub Connect … It’s the link between the On-Premises installation of GitHub Enterprise Server and the popular SaaS offering (as we all have come to love it) called GitHub. 😉

 

Installing GitHub Enterprise Server (on Azure)

So my journey for today started with registering for the GitHub Enterprise Trial, where I decided to install it on Azure… as my “On Premises” location.

Generating a docs website powered by Git & Markdown

Introduction

Did you know I’m a huge fan of the Microsoft / Azure docs? Did you also know that the docs websites are powered by GitHub repositories? Let that one sink in… So you can leverage the same way you collaborate on code, work on publishing documentation?!? How awesome is that!

After a bit of looking around, it appears DocFX is actually powered to do this. I don’t know if this is the tool used behind the docs website. Though there seem to be a lot of similarities. Anyhow, today’s post will be a quick walkthrough on how to setup DocFX with VSTS to publish your GitHub driven repo to an Azure Web App.

 

So what will we be needing?

Ingredients

• GitHub repository
• VSTS Account
• Azure App Service
• A tool to do the conversion : DocFX
• Chocolatey to install DocFX

 

Initialize the repository

Be sure to install DocFX on your dev station to initialize the repository. This is done by running “docfx init -q” inside of your repository.

 

Afterwards do your typical Git magic to sync your local version with GitHub (or equivalent). Now you’ll have a dummy skeleton ready for usage, and you can now structure it to your liking! My effort is going into making docs for VMchooser.