VS Code GitHub Copilot Agent Lab (.NET Edition)

Summary

An interactive workshop for building a Social Bingo game while mastering GitHub Copilot's Agent Mode. The focus is on AI-first development practices: teaching your AI coding assistant about your codebase through structured instructions rather than fighting against generic suggestions.

Four Core Competencies

The workshop covers four skill areas essential for working effectively with AI coding agents:

1. Context Engineering — Providing project-specific guidance to improve suggestion quality. The more the AI knows about your patterns, the better its output.
2. Agentic Primitives — Using background agents, cloud agents, and custom workflows. These allow autonomous task execution while you maintain oversight.
3. Design-First Development — Iterating on UI components with specialized design agents before writing implementation code.
4. Test-Driven Development — Implementing features with Red-Green-Refactor patterns. AI excels at generating test cases once it understands the expected behavior.

Workshop Flow

flowchart LR
    P1[Part 1: Setup
Context Engineering] --> P2[Part 2: Design-First
Frontend]
    P2 --> P3[Part 3: Custom
Quiz Master]
    P3 --> P4[Part 4: Multi-Agent
Development]

Prerequisites

• VS Code v1.107+
• GitHub Copilot subscription
• .NET 10 SDK
• Git

Key Insight

The workshop emphasizes that effective AI-assisted development isn't about better prompts in the moment — it's about setting up persistent context that guides the AI across all interactions. This aligns with the broader shift from "prompt engineering" to "context engineering."

Connections

• vscode-copilot-workshop - Covers the same core concepts (context engineering, AGENTS.md, subagents, skills) but for a general audience rather than .NET-specific
• context-engineering-guide-vscode - Microsoft's official guide to the custom instructions and planning agents workflow demonstrated in this workshop
• moc-vscode-ai-coding - Entry point for the broader VS Code AI coding ecosystem