Building Better Apps with GitHub Copilot Custom Agents
Custom agents are here to customize and optimize how coding agents work on your code, here is my experiment with the WinForms agent.
James Montemagno
James Montemagno
5 Ways I Use Background Coding Agents Every Day
Coding agents are different from in-editor chat and agent modes for AI assisted programming. They run asynchronously—often in the cloud—tackling tasks while you focus locally. I rely heavily on the GitHub Copilot coding agent and its VS Code integration to spin up multiple parallel workflows. Below are five everyday patterns I use to offload work, speed up development, and keep my repos in top shape. 1. Assign Issues Directly to GitHub Copilot When a new issue or idea lands, I immediately han…
James Montemagno
Announcing Hotkey Typer — type long prompts with a hotkey
When I'm recording demos or making videos I often need to reproduce long prompts or blocks of text on-screen. Manually retyping them every time is slow and error-prone, and pasting from the clipboard can feel jerky and reveal private content. I wanted a tiny, reliable app that would let me press a global hotkey and have the application type a predefined, human-like block of text into whatever app currently has focus — perfect for demos, tutorials, and repeatable workflows. Enter Hotkey Typ…
James Montemagno
Introducing Bingo-o-matic: Your Ultimate Bingo Management App
Introducing Bingo-o-matic a comprehensive bingo management application designed to make hosting and playing bingo games easier and more enjoyable than ever before.
James Montemagno
Developing & Working with .NET Containers on Windows ARM Devices
I am by no means a cloud-native developer, I am a client developer. I have spent some time though to get a general understanding about microservices, images, containers, docker, and all the buzz words that surround the topic. I recently got really into DevContainers and using them on GitHub Codespaces and Visual Studio Code to create an environment to run apps in. From there, I went down a rabbit hole of educating myself more by taking Microsoft Learn training courses, watching the new container…
James Montemagno
Using Java SDK 11 on Xamarin Android Builds on Azure DevOps & GitHub Actions
Everything is building great in your CI/CD pipeline and then BOOM your build fails for no reason. You didn't change anything in your code!?!?! That was me this morning as I was updating my InAppBilling Plugin for .NET. I got hit with this beauty: error XA0031: Java SDK 11.0 or above is required when using $(TargetFrameworkVersion) v13.0 What is going on?!?!? Starting with Visual Studio 2022 17.8, which was just released, the Xamarin.Andriod tooling requires Java SDK 11.... but the default…
James Montemagno
Developing Android Apps on Windows Arm Devices
I have gone all in on Arm devices! My main MAC machine is a Mac Book Air M1 and now my main driver at work is a Windows Dev Kit 2023 (aka Project Volterra). One tricky thing for developers is getting all the software we use to work properly on Arm. Things have come a long way since the original release of Arm devices for Mac and Windows. I have a full setup guide for my M1 for Xamarin and now .NET MAUI development, but what about Windows? Visual Studio 2022 recently released a full native Arm v…
James Montemagno
Automate Posting to Mastodon via Web Requests
One of my favorite applications that I use for automation is If This Then That [https://ifttt.com/join?referral_code=zDOzZRwhLMAQuF36U5nEfTwxbLPyRAdA] aka IFTTT. I have been using it forever and it allows you to automate a plethora of things when something happens. For example, maybe you want ot create a spreadsheet of every favorited tweet you have, or maybe save them to a list somewhere, or maybe automatically turn on your lights at sunset. All of this is possible with IFTTT and is crazy easy…
James Montemagno
