Coding agents are becoming part of everyday development, but quality of responses and usefulness still depends on the best context as input. That context comes in different forms starting from your environment, the code in the workspace, the model training knowledge, previous memory, agent instructions, and of course your own starting prompt. On the .NET team we’ve really adopted coding agents as a part of our regular workflow and have, like you, learned the ways to improve our productivity by providing great context. Across our repos we’ve adopted our agent instructions and have also started to use agent skills to improve our workflows. We’re introducing dotnet/skills, a repository that hosts a set of agent skills for .NET developers from the team who is building the platform itself.

What is an agent skill?

If you’re new to the concept, an agent skill is a lightweight package with specialized knowledge an agent can discover and use while solving a task. A skill bundles intent, task-specific context, and supporting artifacts so the agent can choose better actions with less trial and error. This work follows the Agent Skills specification, which defines a common model for authoring and sharing these capabilities with coding agents. GitHub Copilot CLI, VS Code, Claude Code and other coding agents support this specification.

What we are doing with dotnet/skills

With dotnet/skills, we’re publishing skills from the team that ships the platform. These are the same workflows we’ve used ourselves, with first-party teams, and in engineering scenarios we’ve seen in working with developers like yourself.

So what does that look like in practice? You’re not starting from generic prompts. You’re starting from patterns we’ve already tested while shipping .NET.

Our goal is practical: ship skills that help agents complete common .NET tasks more reliably, with better context and fewer dead ends.

Does it help?

While we’ve learned that context is essential, we also have learned not to assume more is always better. The AI models are getting remarkably better each release and what was thought to be needed even 3 months ago, may no longer be required with newer models. In producing skills we want to measure the validity if an added skill actually improves the result. For each of our skills merged, we run a lightweight validator (also available in the repo) to score it. We’re also learning the best graders/evals for this type…and so is the ecosystem as well.

Think of this as a unit test for a skill, not an integration test for the whole system. We measure (using a specific model each run) against a baseline (no skill present) and try to score if the specific skill improved the intended behavior, and by how much. Some of this is taste as well so we’re careful not to draw too many hard lines on a specific number, but look at the result, adjust and re-score.

Each skill’s evaluation lives in the repository as well, so you can inspect and run them. This gives us a practical signal on usefulness without waiting for large end-to-end benchmark cycles. We will continue to learn in this space and adjust. We have a lot of partner teams trying different evaluation techniques as well at this level. The real test is you telling us if they have improved.

A developer posted this just recently on Discord sharing what we want to see:

The skill just worked with the log that I’ve with me, thankfully it was smartter[sic] than me and found the correct debug symbol. At the end it says the crash is caused by a heap corruption and the stack-trace points to GC code, by any chance does it ring a bell for you?

This is a great example of how a skill accelerated to the next step rapidly in this particular investigation for this developer. This is the true definition of success in unblocking and accelerating productivity.

Discovery, installation, and using skills

Popular agent tools have adopted the concept of plugin marketplaces which simply put are a registry of agent artifacts, like skills. The plugin definition serves as an organizational unit and defines what skills, agents, hooks, etc. exist for that plugin in a single installable package. The dotnet/skills repo is organized in the same manner, with the repo serving as the marketplace and we have organized a set of plugins by functional areas. We’ll continue to define more plugins as they get merged and based on your feedback.

While you can simply copy the SKILL.md files directly to your environment, the plugin concept in coding agents like GitHub Copilot aim to make that process simpler. As noted in the README, you can register the repo as a marketplace and browse/install the plugins.

/plugin marketplace add dotnet/skills

Once the marketplace is added, then you can browse any marketplace for a set of plugins to install and install the named plugin:

/plugin marketplace browse dotnet-agent-skills
/plugin install <plugin>@dotnet-agent-skills

They are now available in your environment automatically by your coding agent, or you can also invoke them explicitly.

/dotnet:analyzing-dotnet-performance

And in VS Code you can add the marketplace URL into the Copilot extension settings for Insiders, adding https://github.com/dotnet/skills as the location and then you can browse in the extensions explorer to install, and then directly execute in Copilot Chat using the slash command:

We acknowledge that discovery of even marketplaces can be a challenge and are working with our own Copilot partners and ecosystem to better understand ways to improve this discovery flow — it’s hard to use great skills if you don’t know where to look! We’ll be sure to post more on any changes and possible .NET specific tools to help identify skills that will make your project and developer productivity better.

Starting principles

Like evolving standards in the AI extensibility space, skills is fast moving. We are starting with the principle of simplicity first. We’ve seen in our own uses that a huge set of new tools may not be needed with well scoped skills themselves. Where we need more, we’ll leverage things like MCP or scripts, or SDK tools that already exist and rely on them to enhance the particular skill workflow. We want our skills to be proven, practical, and task-oriented.

We also know there are great community-provided agent skills that have evolved, like github/awesome-copilot which provide a lot of value for specific libraries and architectural patterns for .NET developers. We support all these efforts as well and don’t think there is a ‘one winner’ skills marketplace for .NET developers. We want our team to keep focused closest to the core runtime, concepts, tools, and frameworks we deliver as a team and support and learn from the community as the broader set of agentic skills help all .NET developers in many more ways. Our skills are meant to complement, not replace any other marketplace of skills.

What’s next

The AI ecosystem is moving fast, and this repository will too. We’ll iterate and learn in the open with the developer community.

Expect frequent updates, new skills, and continued collaboration as we improve how coding agents work across .NET development scenarios.

Explore dotnet/skills, try the skills in your own workflows, and share feedback on things that can improve or new ideas we should consider.

The post Extend your coding agent with .NET Skills appeared first on .NET Blog.

I'm excited to announce that we've released the NanaZip 6.5 Preview, now available for download.

Starting with NanaZip 6.0 Update 1 (6.0.1638.0) and 6.5 Preview (6.5.1638.0), we have fixed some security vulnerabilities reported by HO-9:

• CVE-2026-27709
• CVE-2026-27710
• CVE-2026-27711

Release Notes

This release includes all the improvements from NanaZip 6.0 Update 1 (6.0.1638.0).

Download

• MSIX Package: NanaZipPreview_6.5.1638.0.msixbundle

  • SHA-256: d7371d8632568125e8dc0c4cb5a6f2ee7b8bac16046cfb16f2c0f2f6507205eb

• License XML: NanaZipPreview_6.5.1638.0.xml

  • SHA-256: 2f6f59175dd05f9660c9b74e364a4fa5558d0948adfe3ba121e47f2ecf51e1ad

• Portable package: NanaZipPreview_6.5.1638.0_Binaries.zip

  • SHA-256: ea8092b0f7038b0666773654f705c80688206d28b4582613aac227bddcf567da

• Debug Symbols: NanaZipPreview_6.5.1638.0_DebugSymbols.zip

  • SHA-256: 6ff5a8f8daf37b09a319bb61c6d6f1a0608197b32b650a99f7a473b0749588ad

Kenji Mouri

I'm excited to announce that we've released the NanaZip 6.0 Update 2, now available for download.

Release Notes

• Add NanaZip official website link to the XAML About Dialog.
• Fix some crash issues caused by dark mode support.
• Fix some crash issues caused by the XAML information dialog.
• Fix the issue that we cannot use NanaZip.Universal.Windows.exe without NanaZip.Modern.dll.
• Fix the issue that we cannot set the initial folder for the copy location dialog browse button.
• Fix the buffer overflow issue introduced since 7-Zip mainline 26.00 when using NanaZip.Core.Setup.sfx which you need to compiled manually to get. (Backported from #850 and mcmilk/7-Zip-zstd@f4efd0f.)

Download

• MSIX Package: NanaZip_6.0.1650.0.msixbundle

  • SHA-256: 6c4857fd901c412f0e73a98f2195e50d7b17e133a496690bbe6e2f62262dc08a

• License XML: NanaZip_6.0.1650.0.xml

  • SHA-256: e724a1ac69724d3bcf1c172368b236adb1745a0e68524d0eac36071c2edf2164

• Portable package: NanaZip_6.0.1650.0_Binaries.zip

  • SHA-256: 9f6a708a86eeef6928e4891a30ac684971da99dca82a0fa704c3b26967dae0ec

• Debug Symbols: NanaZip_6.0.1650.0_DebugSymbols.zip

  • SHA-256: b6aca771390d6ba1dbb8216e3f71b9e99771a10cd9069b6302f4ce4dbce2bce5

Kenji Mouri

The US economy lost 92,000 jobs in February, the unemployment rate rose to 4.4%, and the information sector extended its run of payroll declines.

The post Tech Employment Falls Again as US Economy Loses 92,000 Jobs appeared first on TechRepublic.