Blog articles

🌟 Community Spotlight – Nicola Delfino

lukemurraynz — Wed, 23 Jul 2025 02:14:03 GMT

In this edition of Community Spotlight, we're highlighting some outstanding contributions from the Microsoft communities. This time, we’re featuring Nicola Delfino, Senior Cloud Solution Architect at Microsoft.

Getting hands-on with Azure networking can be difficult - the network may not behave in the way you anticipate! Nicola has created and been maintaining a Hub and Spoke playground repository. https://github.com/nicolgit/hub-and-spoke-playground over the past few years.

The Hub and Spoke playground is a well-documented, easy-to-deploy network topology for testing, studying, and inventing network configurations.

nicolgit/hub-and-spoke-playground

A collection of BICEP/ARM templates that deploys on Azure a hub & spoke net topology aligned with Microsoft Enterprise scale landing zone ref architecture to use as a playground for testing and studying. As bonus, many scenarios with step-by-step solutions for studying and learning are also available

If you need to learn, get hands-on and see potential relevant architecture patterns when it comes to Azure networking, this repository is worth a look!

Microsoft Learn Contributor Chatmode

lukemurraynz — Sun, 13 Jul 2025 06:57:43 GMT

Chat Modes are predefined configurations that enable you to tailor the AI chat behavior in Visual Studio Code for specific tasks, such as asking questions, making code edits, or performing autonomous coding tasks. You can switch between chat modes at any time in the Chat view, depending on the task you want to accomplish. Chat Modes enable us to customise the response from GitHub Copilot, providing more specific tools and commands.

Very much like custom Copilot Instructions, which can work alongside the custom chatmodes, the chatmodes allow more specific structure, in this example, we will create a custom chat mode, that can assist us with writing and editing documentation for Microsoft Learn, aligned to the Microsoft Writing Style.

Microsoft Learn Contributor Chatmode

🌟 Community Spotlight – Daniel Scott-Raynsford

lukemurraynz — Thu, 10 Jul 2025 06:30:15 GMT

In this edition of Community Spotlight, we're highlighting some outstanding contributions from the Microsoft and GitHub communities. This time, we’re featuring Daniel Scott-Raynsford, Partner Technology Strategist at Microsoft New Zealand.

GitHub Copilot has revolutionised the way we interact with code, introducing a multi-modal experience that spans voice, chat, and multiple programming languages. But it’s not just about answering questions. With the proper context and well-defined constraints, Copilot becomes a creative and strategic partner, helping developers shape outcomes more intentionally.

At the forefront of this innovation, Daniel has been exploring powerful new use cases for Copilot, including:

Custom Chat Modes
MCP integration with GitHub Copilot
A growing Asset Library of personas and structured prompts

Daniel’s latest videos highlight these capabilities in action:

"Copilot Custom Chat Modes": youtube.com/watch?v=klKXZsB7FSw
"Infrastructure as Code with GitHub Copilot": youtube.com/watch?v=32N9GvIndg8

Make sure to check out his content and see how you can learn, co-create, and make the most out of GitHub Copilot.

Model Context Protocol (MCP) in VS Code with Microsoft Learn

lukemurraynz — Wed, 02 Jul 2025 19:19:03 GMT

The Model Context Protocol is an open standard that enables developers to build secure, two-way connections between their data sources and AI-powered tools. The architecture is straightforward: Developers can expose their data through MCP servers or build AI applications (MCP clients) that connect to these servers.

For the Docs MCP server itself:

High-Quality Content Retrieval: Search and retrieve relevant content from Microsoft Learn, Azure documentation, Microsoft 365 documentation, and other official Microsoft sources.
Semantic Understanding: Uses advanced vector search to find the most contextually relevant documentation for any query.
Optimized Chunking: Returns up to 10 high-quality content chunks (each max 500 tokens), with article titles, URLs, and self-contained content excerpts.
Real-time Updates: Access the latest Microsoft documentation as it's published.

Model Context Protocol (MCP) in VS Code with Microsoft Learn

Automate Azure Bastion with Drasi Realtime RBAC Monitoring

lukemurraynz — Mon, 30 Jun 2025 19:46:23 GMT

Drasi (named after the Greek word for 'Action') is a change data processing platform that automates real-time detection, evaluation, and meaningful reaction to events in complex, event-driven systems, created as part of the Azure Incubation Teams, Drasi was accepted in to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, at the Sandbox Maturity level in January of 2025.

Automate Azure Bastion with Drasi Realtime RBAC Monitoring

Deploy & Test KAITO on AKS with Visual Studio Code

lukemurraynz — Mon, 26 May 2025 00:52:37 GMT

Today, we will look at deploying Kubernetes AI Toolchain Operator (KAITO) straight from Visual Studio Code.

Deploy & Test KAITO on AKS with Visual Studio Code