What's New with GitHub for ISVs: July 2023 Edition

[dhanachavan]

In this new monthly blog series focused on GitHub, we will be sharing product updates, notable reads, and other new resources that can be leveraged by ISVs who are building apps for the commercial marketplace. 

Product Updates:

1. GitHub Copilot Chat beta is now available for every organization, allowing all GitHub Copilot for Business users now have access to a limited GitHub Copilot Chat beta, bringing the power of conversational coding right to the IDE.
2. Public beta support has been added to the GitHub Enterprise Importer to migrate Bitbucket Server and Data Center repos to GitHub.com. You can now easily use GitHub Enterprise Importer to migrate your source code, revision history, pull requests, reviews and comments when moving to GitHub from your self-hosted Bitbucket instance. Check out Migrating repositories from Bitbucket Server to GitHub Enterprise Cloud for more information.
3. GitHub merge queue is generally available! Merge queue is designed for high-performance teams where multiple users regularly commit to a single branch. Watch a quick video about pull request merge queues.
4. Passwordless authentication has been introduced on GitHub.com. Passkeys are now available in public beta. Opting in lets you upgrade security keys to passkeys, and use those in place of both your password and your 2FA method.
5. GitHub-hosted larger runners for Actions are generally available. Customers have been using it in production to run their CI/CD jobs faster and with more flexibility.
6. Auto-scaling self-hosted runners using the Actions runner controller and runner scale sets is now generally available. Learn more about scaling self hosted runners.
7. Level up your use of GitHub Projects on the command line and in GitHub Actions with the new GitHub Project CLI command, made generally available. Read details on how you can conveniently manage and collaborate on GitHub Projects
   from the command line.
8. Anonymous users have access to new code view and navigation. A total redesign of GitHub’s code search and navigation was released to all logged in GitHub users in May. Starting today, the new redesigned code navigation experience, including a file tree and symbols pane, will be available to anyone browsing anonymously on GitHub.com.
9. We announced new capabilities for administrators and many improvements to Chat in our Visual Studio Code and Visual Studio extensions for GitHub Copilot. To get access to the Chat view, inline chat, and slash commands, sign up for the
   GitHub Copilot chat waitlist and install the Pre-Release version of the GitHub Copilot extension. More details are available.
10. Improvements to granular access tokens on npm allow for durations that span multiple years and increased Token limit enables maintainers with a large amount of packages to secure their publishing workflows more efficiently.
11. GitHub Advanced Security Updates - A lot of updates have been announced for GitHub Advanced Security users since our last blogpost. A quick snapshot of the major highlights:
    a. Secret scanning now detects new token types leaked historically in issues. GitHub Advanced Security customers using secret scanning can view any matching secrets exposed historically in an issue's title, description or comments within the UI or the REST API. Learn how to secure your repositories with secret scanning.
    b. Code scanning with CodeQL no longer installs Python dependencies automatically for new users, which should improve scan times for Python projects.
    c. Security risk and coverage pages are now generally available and replace the enterprise-level overview page. The risk page is designed to help you assess security exposure, and the coverage view is intended to help you manage security feature enablement.

Notable Reads:

1. GitHub achieves ISO/IEC 27701:2019, 27018:2019, and CSA STAR certifications. These standards and frameworks are internationally recognized for security and privacy program best practices.
2. Moving from a product to a service mindset covers how you can implement a service-led strategy.
3. What developers need to know about generative AI. Generative AI has been dominating the news lately—but what exactly is it? Here’s what you need to know, and what it means for developers.
4. An inspiring blog on Coding accessibility: Disability as catalyst for creativity - faced with accessibility barriers, developer Paul Chiou turns obstacles into innovative solutions.
5. Accelerate test-driven development with AI. Get faster feedback loops by letting GitHub Copilot augment your Test-driven development (TDD) workflow.

Others:

Read about the GitHub TEI Spotlight for automotive industry to explore the benefits realized by a composite organization after deploying GitHub.

Upcoming Events:
GitHub Universe 2023, our annual developer event is back, better, and bigger than ever at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and online on November 8-9.

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Which of these GitHub updates are you most excited about? Comment below to let us know!