.NETPro #34: Copilot Studio on .NET 10 WASM, Agent Framework Workflows, AI-Built VS Extension, Git 2.54 Features, and More...
🌏 Actionable .NET tips, the latest updates, and community insights, all in one place
AI is having a moment in this issue, and not just as a topic. We have Copilot Studio shipping a real production upgrade to its .NET WASM engine, Microsoft’s Agent Framework getting a full workflow programming model, and David McCarter putting GitHub Copilot through its hardest test yet: building an entire Visual Studio extension from scratch. Whether AI held up or fell short is worth finding out for yourself.
Beyond the AI thread, there is plenty of practical .NET to dig into. Andrew Lock breaks down what Git 2.54 quietly shipped for developers, Milan Jovanović makes the case for migrating legacy APIs without the big-bang rewrite, and our hands-on spotlight this week is about something most teams ignore until it hurts: slow CI. If your test runs are blocking pull request feedback, Gérald Barré’s sharding approach is worth five minutes of your time.
Let’s get into it.
Take a look at today’s highlights first:
➡️ Copilot Studio upgrades to .NET 10 WASM
➡️ Durable workflows in the Microsoft Agent Framework
➡️ AI in .NET Part 3: The Microsoft Agent Framework
➡️ Migrating Legacy APIs with the Strangler Fig Pattern
➡️ Letting AI Build a Visual Studio Extension
➡️ Speed Up .NET CI with Test Sharding
Keep reading, and when you’re done, drop us a note about what you enjoyed and how we can make the next edition more helpful.
Cheers!
Adrija Mitra
Editor-in-Chief
📰 What’s Happening in .NET!
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➡️ How Copilot Studio upgraded its .NET WASM engine to .NET 10: Copilot Studio's migration from .NET 8 to .NET 10 WebAssembly is now in production, delivering around 20% faster cold-path execution. Automatic asset fingerprinting also removes the need for custom cache-busting scripts, though WasmStripILAfterAOT does increase package size by roughly 15%. If you're on .NET 8 Blazor or WASM, updating your target framework is mostly all it takes to get there.
➡️ Durable workflows in the Microsoft Agent Framework: The Microsoft Agent Framework now includes a workflow programming model for composing AI agents into multi-step pipelines, with support for sequential, parallel, conditional, and human-in-the-loop patterns. You can start in-process and swap in the durable runtime later without changing your workflow definition, adding checkpointing and observability along the way.
➡️ Building blocks for AI in .NET: The Microsoft Agent Framework: We covered MEAI in Issue #24 and VectorData in Issue #27. Part 3 adds the Microsoft Agent Framework, which builds on both to give you autonomous, tool-using agents in .NET. You get session management for multi-turn conversations, context providers for persistent memory, and a graph-based workflow system for orchestrating multiple agents across sequential, parallel, and conditional patterns.
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⏱️ Time for Some Hands-On .NET
Don’t miss this edition’s spotlight guide!
🧪 Speed Up .NET CI with Test Sharding
If your CI pipeline makes developers wait, every pull request carries a hidden tax. Long test runs slow down feedback, block merges, and quietly kill momentum. Test sharding fixes this by splitting your test suite into deterministic subsets and running them as parallel jobs, so you wait for the slowest shard instead of every test finishing in sequence.
Meziantou.ShardedTest is a .NET global tool by Gérald Barré that handles the splitting for you. It lists your tests, sorts them deterministically, assigns each shard its slice, and runs only those tests using dotnet test. On GitHub Actions, you wire it into a matrix strategy. On GitLab, you use parallel: 3 and the tool picks up CI_NODE_INDEX automatically.
Read on to see how to set it up and whether sharding is the right fix for your pipeline.
Why it’s worth exploring
This approach works best when your test stage is the bottleneck and you can run multiple CI jobs in parallel. Sharding and in-process parallelization are not mutually exclusive either, you can run three shards and let each one execute tests concurrently internally. The article also covers where sharding falls short, particularly for IO-bound test suites, so you can make an informed call before adding complexity.
What you need before diving in
A .NET project with a test suite that’s meaningfully slow in CI.
A CI environment that supports parallel jobs, such as GitHub Actions or GitLab CI.
The .NET global tools support to install Meziantou.ShardedTest.
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➡️ Migrating Legacy APIs with the Strangler Fig Pattern in .NET: Full rewrites are risky, and most teams know it. In this video, Milan Jovanović walks you through a safer approach: drop YARP in as a reverse proxy, and move endpoints from your old API into a new .NET 10 app one at a time. The old system keeps running the whole time, so there's no big-bang cutover to worry about.
➡️ Letting AI Build a Visual Studio Extension: Here's What Really Happened: David McCarter gave GitHub Copilot one job: build a complete Visual Studio extension without him writing a single line of code. No shortcuts, no hand-holding, just requirements and an AI left to figure it out. What followed was equal parts surprising and revealing, and worth reading before you trust Copilot with your next project.
➡️ New Git 2.54 features .NET developers should know about: Rebasing has always been a stumbling block for developers who don't do it regularly. In this post, Andrew Lock walks through Git 2.54's standout additions, including the new git history command that lets you reword or split commits without checking out the branch first. You'll also see how config-based hooks make it easier to enforce things like dotnet format on every commit, and a new git repo structure command for inspecting repository size and layout.
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And That’s a Wrap 🎬
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