Step-by-Step: How to Setup Copilot Chat in VS Code
Copilot Chat is an AI-powered chatbot leveraging OpenAI's GPT-4, designed to enhance your coding workflow. Learn how to set up Copilot Chat step by step in Visual Studio Code (VS Code). Benefit from personalized and flexible coding environments, code analysis, automated unit test generation, and bug fixes. Prerequisites include an active GitHub account and the latest version of VS Code. Elevate your coding efficiency to new heights with Copilot Chat.AI Agents: Mastering the Tool Use Design Pattern - Part 4
This blog post, Part 4 of a series on AI agents, delves into the Tool Use Design Pattern, a key concept in enabling agents to interact with external systems and perform a wider range of tasks. The post explains how tools, ranging from simple functions to complex API calls, are invoked by AI agents through model-generated function calls. Several use cases are presented, highlighting the versatility of this pattern, from dynamic information retrieval and code execution to workflow automation and customer support. The post further details the implementation of function/tool calling, including choosing a suitable LLM, defining a function schema, and writing the function code. Examples using Semantic Kernel and Azure AI Agent Service illustrate how agentic frameworks simplify tool integration. Finally, the post addresses security considerations and provides links to valuable resources, including the "AI Agents for Beginners" GitHub repository and related workshops, for further learning.Introducing Remote Desktop Connection Manager (RDCMan) 2.2
Inside Microsoft, we maintain a repository of tools written by our engineers and technical staff. Many of the tools that are posted are very specific to Microsoft engineering— tools to help developers and testers better manage their project in our internal source control system, provide better visibility into our internal bug/issue tracking system, etc. Since these tools are very specific to the Microsoft environment, most of them don't get released externally. About eight months ago, I came across a tool in the repository called Remote Desktop Connection Manager ("RDCMan" for short) written by Julian Burger, one of our principal developers on the Windows Live Experiences team. RDCMan is a central place where you can organize, group, and manage your various Remote Desktop connections. This is particularly useful for system administrators, developers, testers, and lab managers who maintain groups of computers and connect to them frequently. As an example - my customer manages over 200 Exchange servers worldwide. Today, they maintain a configuration file for the Remote Desktops MMC with many of their servers. Of course, with 200 servers, it becomes difficult to maintain and navigate, as seen in the following screenshot. Figure 1: Managing RDP connections in the Remote Desktops MMC After I installed RDCMan, it was very clear that our customers and partners would benefit greatly from it, as it fills the gap nicely that the standalone Remote Desktop Connection application and the Remote Desktops MMC snap-in leave behind. Here's a screen shot of an organized RDCMan configuration with the servers organized by version (Exchange 2007, Exchange 2010), region (Chicago, Redmond) and then finally by Exchange role (Client Access, Hub Transport, Mailbox, etc.) Figure 2: An organized RDCMan configuratoin You'll also notice that there's a grid on the right side that has a thumbnail of each of the servers. Yes, RDCMan supports a live thumbnail view of your connected servers, as seen in the following screenshot. Figure 3: RDCMan displays live thumbnails of your connected servers I'll leave the other features for you to discover. With Julian's blessing, I worked with our legal department, trademark group, engineering compliance, release support, and others to get RDCMan licensed for external distribution... and while it's been months in the works - today, I'm excited to announce that Remote Desktop Connection Manager is now available externally on the Microsoft Download Center - get it from http://go.microsoft.com/?LinkID=9733636. David ZazzoM365 Management
Hi all, Cards on the table—I’m a Product Manager for a solution focused on Microsoft 365 management as well as driving optimisation into innovation. My background is sysadmin-heavy, which led me to building the solution before moving into product. I’m not here to pitch anything but genuinely keen to hear from the community: What are your biggest pain points in managing M365, Azure, Copilot? What challenges do you face with user optimisation, processes etc? Are you using any tools today to help, or is it mostly manual? What is one thing that would make your life so much easier? Would love to hear what’s working (or not working) for you, as it would help me massively! Thanks!
