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RAG in Practice: Building Real-World Applications
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Sr. Content Developer at Microsoft, working remotely in PA, TechBash conference organizer, former Microsoft MVP, Husband, Dad and Geek.
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Pennsylvania, USA
The excerpt discusses coding standards highlighted in "Rock Your Code: Coding Standards for Microsoft .NET," emphasizing the pitfalls of using numerous public fields in a class. It advocates for strong typing, proper encapsulation, and input validation to enhance object integrity. The author underscores the importance of self-documenting code for maintainability.
Pennsylvania, USA
Hello and Welcome, I’m your Code Monkey!
Unite was an awesome event! Lots of interesting news and it was awesome to meet so many people! Thanks to everyone who came up to me to say hi! Everyone is always super nice, I think I spoke to over a hundred people, I was completely unable to talk by the time the event ended but it was an awesome experience as always! Looking forward to next year already!
I'm still in Barcelona, I decided to stay a few more days to get to see the sights, it's a beautiful city and the weather has been beautifully sunny! (although a bit cold)
But I'm also looking forward to getting back home and back to work on tons of awesome videos. Doing these kinds of events and meeting all kinds of people who tell me how much my videos have helped them definitely gives me a huge motivation boost to make tons of stuff to help all of you on your game dev journeys! Stay tuned!
Game Dev: Unity in Fortnite; News from Unite
Gaming: The Game Awards Nominees
Game Dev
Unity games IN Fortnite!
The biggest surprise of the Game Engine industry has just happened! Unity and Unreal working together!
This week was Unite, Unity's annual conference, and during the keynote the Unity CEO, Matthew Bromberg, introduced the CEO of Epic Games, Tim Sweeney, onto the stage. The reason? Two things.
First, Unity's In-App Purchases system will be available to Unreal Engine developers. This is a system that Unity built which allows you to directly charge your players (using Stripe) which avoids the Google and Apple 30% cut, which is only possible because of Epic's legal wins.
Secondly, Tim announced that soon in 2026 Unity Games will be available directly inside Fortnite. This is MASSIVE news! You probably already know that Fortnite is massive with over 100 million monthly active users. Nowadays discoverability is one of the biggest challenges of any game dev, it's hard to find players for your games, so the fact that soon you will get access to a bonus audience of 100 million people is a MASSIVE deal!
In terms of details there isn’t much right now, there is a blog post on the Unreal Engine blog but no mention on how this will actually work. Perhaps Fortnite will launch an executable? Or maybe Unity will add a new Build Target to build some file that runs directly inside Fortnite?
Regardless of how they implement it this will be massive news. Soon enough there will be stories of a game made with Unity and running inside Fortnite that found massive success!
 | I was totally surprised to see this. I was in the audience and I was told the day before that there would be a surprise guest in the keynote but I never expected Tim Sweeney to show up! This could be a great bonus for Unity devs so I’m really looking forward to it! |
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I made a video talking about my best recommendations from the sale. Lots of awesome stuff that will help you a lot!
The Publisher of the Week this time is Virtual Maker, publisher with a bunch of interesting tools, mainly for positioning objects.
Get the FREE Flexalon Pro: 3D & UI Layouts which is a tool to help you position objects in various ways, like Horizontal Grid, Circular shape, etc.
Get it HERE and use coupon VIRTUALMAKER at checkout to get it for FREE!
There’s a MASSIVE HumbleBundle with thousands of Realistic and Stylized environments at 99% OFF!
Contains both Unity and Unreal assets.
Get it HERE!
Game Dev
The Future of Unity
Other than that very surprising Epic news, there were lots of awesome stuff talked about and announced at Unite.
First is how Unity Next Gen (or Unity 7) is no longer a thing. That might sound bad but it's actually a really great thing. Instead of making a massive version change that would break almost every project, instead of that they are just continuing to build upon the solid base of Unity 6.
Breaking changes always suck but I was willing to accept it considering all the benefits of Unity 7, I thought it would be impossible to implement all their goals without breaking changes (DOTS x GO, CoreCLR, Asset Importing) but apparently it is possible! So I'm definitely very happy to see this. All the benefits previously mentioned for Unity 7 are still coming, just coming in incremental updates without breaking changes which is awesome!
CoreCLR (which has a ton of benefits) will be coming in various stages, starting with an internal prototype in early 2026, and an experimental release by the end of the year with 6.7 LTS.
ECS for All (merging Entities and Game Objects) is on track for 6.6 (H2 next year)
Platform Toolkit is a set of tools to implement a single API once, and easily test and build your games to all consoles. This is a massive change that should make game porting much much easier while also making the process of going through certification much more painless.
Production Verification is what Unity calls their program where they work with select developers to validate new engine versions in a production environment. This leads to more stable versions of both Unity itself and various packages.
UI Toolkit continues improving (tutorials soon!) BUT importantly Unity UI is NOT going away. This is a very welcome change considering how last year they mentioned that Unity UI’s days were numbered, so I'm happy to see them go back on that since I still love working with Unity UI for runtime, and UI Toolkit for Editor tools. This is again another instance of them prioritizing NOT doing breaking changes to the engine which is a very good thing.
The Render Pipeline merging goal is moving according to plan, with URP and HDRP sharing more and more in 6.3 until in the future URP reaches feature parity with HDRP and only one render pipeline remains.
Two multiplayer templates will be coming soon, one on a third person action adventure platformer, built on Netcode for Game Objects; and one on a First Person Shooter using a netcode that merges NGO with Entities, just like Unity's own game, Survival Kids, used.
Unity Version Control is also getting updates as did the Unity Hub, Unity Core Standards is a way to securely validate packages, the Editor is improving in various ways, Graph Toolkit becoming a core module, Graphics improvements, etc.
So yup a lot of stuff coming in the future, and most importantly is the change in the way that Unity themselves see the future. More incremental updates and fewer breaking changes, I think that's an extremely good thing!
There is a video of the Keynote and another one for the Roadmap.
| I will be making a video myself with my recap of everything announced at Unite. I'm still in Barcelona and my microphone here isn't very good so I'll record it when I get back home. |
Gaming
The Game Awards Nominees!
The Game Awards has unveiled their nominees for all the categories! As always they are all absolutely excellent games.
Here are the ones for the big award, Game Of The Year:
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
Death Stranding 2: On the Beach
Donkey Kong Bananza
Hades II
Hollow Knight: Silksong
Kingdom Come: Deliverance II
There are 29 categories total with hundreds of games nominated. You can vote for your favorites on the website.
And there's also some interesting controversy around one nominee for Best Debut Indie Game. There were five nominees and one was Megabonk, however after being nominated the developer went on Twitter to say:
"I'm withdrawing from The Game Awards.
It's an honor and a dream for Megabonk to be nominated for TGA, but unfortunately i don't think it qualifies for the category "Debut Indie Game"
I've made games in the past under different studio names, so Megabonk is not my debut game 🥸"
John Megabonk
Which of course just adds more fuel to the fire of speculation that the dev behind it is actually Dani. I wonder if this is just a clever marketing plan.
| I always enjoy watching this event, it's a great celebration of the year and a great reminder of all the awesome stuff that is constantly coming out! I wonder if anyone has time to play ALL of these games. |
This is Why You Should Play RDR 2 Twice
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BkhNucZrmPY
One of the games that definitely deserves the title, "Masterpiece".
The Nostalgic Business of Arcades
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFaxqJJLOZc
Fascinating overview of the current state of arcades, I quite like the 1000 Boxes idea.
Get Rewards by Sending the Game Dev Report to a friend!
(please don’t try to cheat the system with temp emails, it won’t work, just makes it annoying for me to validate)
Thanks for reading!
Code Monkey
Pennsylvania, USA
It's the Microsoft Ignite Special! There's *SO* much content this week. A good 50% of it is announcements from the Azure Updates Team. As ever, The Ignite Book of News 2025 is worth a browse - they've added AI summaries this year, which can help you wade through the content. There are a number of other high-level posts that might be a good entry point: Making Sense of Microsoft Ignite 2025 for Azure and AI Architects - Comprehensive overview of Ignite 2025 announcements tailored for Azure and AI architects, highlighting key architectural patterns and implementation strategies. Azure at Microsoft Ignite 2025: All the intelligent cloud news explained - Executive summary covering all major Azure announcements at Ignite 2025, including AI agents, data platform enhancements, and infrastructure innovations for building intelligent applications. Reflections from Microsoft Ignite 2025 - Podcast episode discussing key takeaways and industry implications from Microsoft Ignite 2025 announcements across Azure, AI, and enterprise platforms.
First up, AI: Azure Copilot agents and AI infrastructure innovations - Azure introduces agentic cloud operations with Azure Copilot, featuring specialized agents for migration, deployment, optimization, and troubleshooting, transforming how teams manage cloud infrastructure. Deployment capabilities preview in Azure Copilot - The Deployment Agent for Azure Copilot leverages the Azure Well-Architected Framework to help deploy production-ready workloads through natural language conversations and automated Terraform template generation. Agent mitigations and guardrail customization - New capabilities for customizing agent guardrails and implementing safety mitigations to ensure responsible AI agent deployment across Azure services. Built-in memory in Foundry Agent Service (Public Preview) - Foundry Agent Service now includes built-in memory capabilities allowing agents to maintain context across interactions for more intelligent conversational experiences. Public Preview of Agent Loop in Azure Logic Apps Consumption - Agent Loop democratizes AI-powered business process automation by bringing advanced AI agent capabilities to Logic Apps Consumption with a pay-as-you-go model and no infrastructure management. Claude in Microsoft Foundry (Public Preview) - Anthropic's Claude models (Sonnet 4.5, Opus 4.1, and Haiku 4.5) join Microsoft Foundry, making Azure the only cloud offering both OpenAI and Anthropic models. GPT-5.1 Now Available in Microsoft Copilot Studio as Experimental Model - Microsoft Copilot Studio introduces experimental access to GPT-5.1, offering developers early access to next-generation language model capabilities. Azure Databricks Genie in Copilot Studio (Public Preview) - Databricks Genie integrates with Copilot Studio, enabling natural language queries against Databricks data warehouses and lakehouses directly from agents.
Next, there were a lot of Data and Analytics announcements (especially around Microsoft Fabric): Microsoft and Databricks: Advancing Openness and Interoperability with OneLake - Microsoft and Databricks partnership enhances data interoperability with OneLake, enabling seamless data sharing and integration across platforms. What's new in OneLake and the Fabric platform: more sources, security, and capacity tooling - OneLake expands with new data sources, enhanced security features, and improved capacity management tools for better data governance and scalability. Data Clustering in Fabric Data Warehouse (Preview) - Fabric Data Warehouse introduces data clustering capabilities to optimize query performance and reduce storage costs through intelligent data organization. Igniting Your Pipelines: New Data Factory Features Announced at Ignite - Data Factory in Fabric gains new features including enhanced pipeline orchestration, improved monitoring capabilities, and advanced transformation options. Mirroring for SQL Server in Microsoft Fabric (GA) - SQL Server mirroring in Fabric enables real-time data replication from on-premises SQL Server databases to Fabric, providing near-zero ETL data integration. Fabric Capacity Events in Real-Time Hub (Preview) - Real-Time Hub now streams Fabric capacity events, enabling proactive monitoring and management of compute resources and workload performance. First look at Microsoft Fabric Graph - Initial exploration of Microsoft Fabric Graph, showcasing new capabilities for graph data processing and visualization within the Fabric ecosystem. Cosmos DB in Microsoft Fabric (GA) - Cosmos DB integrates natively with Microsoft Fabric, enabling seamless NoSQL workloads alongside analytics and AI within a unified data platform. Azure Monitor to Fabric Eventhouse (Preview) - New integration streams Azure Monitor logs and metrics directly to Fabric Eventhouse for real-time analytics and observability insights. What's New for Fabric Data Agents at Ignite 2025 - Fabric Data Agents gain enhanced reasoning capabilities and improved AI interoperability, enabling more sophisticated data analysis and automated insights. From Data Platform to Intelligence Platform: Introducing Microsoft Fabric IQ - Fabric IQ transforms Fabric into an intelligence platform by organizing enterprise data around business concepts rather than tables, enabling AI agents to act on unified intelligence.
Finally, in Developer Tools: Azure MCP Server is Now Built-In with Visual Studio 2026 - Visual Studio 2026 includes built-in Azure MCP Server tools, enabling developers to manage Azure resources through natural language directly in their IDE. Visual Studio 2026 (GA) - Visual Studio 2026 reaches general availability as an AI-native IDE with integrated cloud development capabilities and enhanced productivity features. Azure CLI and Azure PowerShell (Ignite 2025 Announcement) - Azure CLI and PowerShell receive major updates including MFA enforcement, Python 3.13 compatibility, What-If parameters, and Export Bicep capabilities for enhanced security and productivity.
Pennsylvania, USA
"PHP 8.5 landed on Thursday with a long-awaited pipe operator and a new standards-compliant URI parser," reports the Register, "marking one of the scripting language's more substantial updates... "
The pipe operator allows function calls to be chained together, which avoids the
extraneous variables and nested statements that might otherwise be
involved. Pipes tend to make code more readable than other ways to
implement serial operations. Anyone familiar with the Unix/Linux
command line or programming languages like R,
F#,
Clojure, or
Elixir
may have used the pipe operator. In JavaScript, aka ECMAScript, a
pipe operator has been proposed, though there are alternatives
like method chaining.
Another significant addition is the URI
extension, which allows developers to parse and modify URIs and
URLs based on both the RFC 3986 and the WHATWG URL standards. Parsing
with URIs and URLs â" reading them and breaking them down into their
different parts â" is a rather common task for web-oriented
applications. Yet prior versions of PHP didn't include a
standards-compliant parser in the standard library. As noted
by software developer Tim Düsterhus, the parse_url()
function that dates back to PHP 4 doesn't follow any standard and
comes with a warning that it should not be used with untrusted or
malformed URLs.
Other noteworthy additions to the language include: Clone
With, for updating properties more efficiently; the #[\NoDiscard] attribute, for warning when a return value goes unused; the
ability to use static closures and first-class callables in constant expressions; and persistent cURL handles that can be shared across multiple PHP requests.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Pennsylvania, USA
This is a recording of our AI Book Club discussion of Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI by Yuval Noah Harari, held Nov 16, 2025. Our discussion touches upon a variety of topics, including self-correcting mechanisms, alien intelligence, corporate surveillance, algorithms, doomerism, stories and lists, democracy, printing press, alignment, dictator's dilemma, and more. This post also provides discussion questions, a transcript, and terms and definitions from the book.
Pennsylvania, USA
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