Deep Dive: Boosting Developer Productivity with AI

Deep dive into Artificial Intelligence to improve developer productivity

About This Course

AI holds tremendous potential and moves ahead at breakneck speed. One of the areas in which it shines is helping you increase your productivity as a developer, in and out of Visual Studio. In this deep dive course, which starts where the related getting started course stopped, you�ll learn how to do that. The course is focused on GitHub Copilot, but other assistants and approaches are also covered. You�ll learn how to use it in a variety of IDEs. You�ll learn how it can help write tests, optimise code, commit code, review PRs, and even iteratively help you implement a user story with Copilot Edits. After that, a substantial part of the course is dedicated to evaluating LLMs: you�ll get a taste of Mistral Large, Claude Sonnet, GPT4o and others. A variety of LLMs is then used to teach you advanced prompt engineering techniques to improve the results you�ll get. The final section of the course is about extension and AI agents: you�ll learn how to write your own agent that integrates with GitHub Copilot.

Course Curriculum

4h 55m 8 sections
Welcome
01:21 Free preview
What will you learn in this course?
02:27 Free preview
Who is the course for and prerequisites
01:14 Free preview
Introduction
00:40
Positioning GitHub Copilot
04:12
Setting Up GitHub Copilot in VS Code
01:45
Working With GitHub Copilot in VS Code
09:46
Setting Up GitHub Copilot in JetBrains Rider
02:13
Working With GitHub Copilot in JetBrains Rider
04:10
Working With GitHub Copilot in the GitHub CLI
07:20
Working With GitHub Copilot in Other IDEs
01:32
Section Recap
02:20
Introduction
01:13
Getting to Know the Demo Codebase
04:15
Unit Tests, Integration Tests and End-to-End Tests
03:24
Generating Dummy Data
13:58
Generating and Running Unit Tests
10:52
Generating and Running Integration Tests
15:43
WebApplicationFactory: Integration Tests or End-to-End Tests?
03:51
Generating and Running End-to-End Tests
08:03
Generating Test Requests
01:27
Section Recap
00:49
Introduction
00:46
Improving Your Codebase
09:23
Working With Copilot Edits
07:58
Section Recap
01:01
Introduction
00:32
Committing Code and Creating Pull Requests in Visual Studio
05:11
Creating Pull Requests on GitHub
06:54
Section Recap
01:04
Introduction
00:42
LLMs, From Generic to Specific
08:14
How LLMs Are Rated
10:16
Should You Be Running Benchmarks Yourself?
01:15
Comparing Popular LLMs
05:45
Evaluating ChatGPT (GPT4o) for Development
06:46
Evaluating Mistral (Mistral Large) for Development
06:04
Evaluating Claude (Sonnet) for Development
06:25
Integrating Claude in Your IDE
06:41
Evaluating Amazon Q Developer for Development
09:54
Integrating With LLMs From Code
02:05
Section Recap
02:37
Introduction
00:37
Prompts, Prompt Engineering and the Lingo Problem
04:41
Manipulating LLM System Prompts
04:46
Zero-, One-, and Few-shot Prompting
06:23
Weighted Prompting
03:08
Chain-of-Thought (CoT) Prompting
04:03
Reasoning and Acting (ReAct) Prompting
04:39
Retrieval-augmented Generation (RAG) Prompting
02:03
Section Recap
03:23
Introduction
01:18
About AI Agents and Extensions
01:58
Discovering Extensions
02:37
Installing and Using an Extension
02:39
Creating an AI Agent with Retrieval-augmented Generation (RAG) Prompting Support
04:28
Creating a Custom AI Agent: Plumbing
15:26
Creating a Custom AI Agent: Implementation
19:08
Creating a Custom AI Agent: Tightening the Implementation
10:02
Section Recap
01:41

Meet Your Instructor

Kevin Dockx

Kevin Dockx

Kevin is a freelance solution architect, author & consultant, living in Antwerp (Belgium). He started working in the IT sector over 20 years ago, and is an 11-time Microsoft MVP. He's focused on architecture & security for web applications & integration components, using .NET and Azure. He's a keen proponent of open-source software. Also: wine.

View all courses by Kevin Dockx

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