This week’s collection highlights practical ways to improve developer workflows, from faster test runs and more manageable pull requests to intuitive new AI integrations. I have gathered a few standout articles on Blazor components, Azure Functions updates, and the nuances of training coding agents for your specific stack.
Suggestion of the week
- Stop overloading your skills - Microsoft for Developers (Waldek Mastykarz) - The post ends with: "In many cases, models don’t need a textbook. They needed a cheat sheet." It's so true! And this post explains why and how to validate it.
Programming
I built a little Claude that dances when it needs me (Jim Bennett) - I've been thinking about one of those notifications, and I really like what Jim did here. Have a look, it's way more useful than you think
How to Filter a Blazor Table Control using .NET | ComponentOne (Ashwin Saxena) - Another Blazor component: ComponentOne. It's nice to have options.
Open Source
- How pull request limits are cutting down the noise (Camilla Moraes & Ashley Wolf) - This will help control the flow for many OSS projects. Hopefully, it will be seen positively by the communities.
DevOps
- Distributed Test Runs in the Aspire Community Toolkit | LINQ to Fail (Aaron Powell) - I didn't know all that was possible. This is a great post that shares the optimization iterations to make unit test runs take less time.
AI
Azure Functions MCP Extension: What's New at Build 2026 (Lily Ma) - An easy win. Simple to write, fast and straightforward to deploy, and serverless.
Intelligent Terminal 0.1.1 is here: bash support, new slash commands, and more customization (Hamza Usmani) - Finally! I know someone who has wanted this terminal for a very long time. It looks nice, I saw the demo at Build.
When the model has never seen your code - Microsoft for Developers (Waldek Mastykarz) - A very interesting post, part of a series about how to make AI coding agents work correctly with your technology.