as a.net Maui developer building mobile and desktop applications I'm often adding a lot of new features and at the same time I'm also diving into a lot of new code bases so I want to be able to iterate quickly on my applications but I also want to be able to jump into existing code bases and really understand what the code is doing and that's where GitHub co-pilot and GitHub copilot chat can be really exciting and awesome to use you can only add new features but also learn more about how the code works and then spice it up with some new functionality so let's take a look here I am inside of my application and I have a typical method here that says get monkeys async this is going to go off to the internet pull down the data and then deserialize it and return it into my list I can see here that it's not doing any checking at all to connect and look at the internet so let's maybe see if there's a way that GitHub co-pilot could help me create a method to check the internet uh before we make this call so I'm just going to write a little comment here that says method to check for internet connection and when I hit enter here it's going to give me a full completion recommendation that says connectivity.network access if it equals internet now this is really cool because GitHub copilot has the context of my code we can see that this is an eye connectivity instance a private uh property somewhere in my code let's take a look oh sure enough here it is this is being directly injected into my Constructor right here of icon activity so this is nice because like I said GitHub co-pilot knows about my code so it's using that automatically here well let's go ahead and actually use it so I can now come in and say Let's uh check for internet connection and display a pop-up alert uh if no internet exists in there now again GitHub uh copilot will check that brand new method that it calls that is connected property there and then it will go ahead and display an alert using shell because I'm using shell in my application insurance office says error no internet connection and returns automatically for me so that's really nice GitHub copilot not only knows the contacts but it's adding new methods it's helping me write better code and is using everything it knows about my application to make sure that code is really great now of course I can edit this add more contacts maybe add in some different translations as well if I have those in my application let's see what else GitHub copilot and GitHub copilot chat can do inside my application I'm going to take a look at the main page here and this is a fairly complex page it has a refreshed view it has a collection view it has different item templates and we can see here that there's a tap gesture recognizer inside of this Frame that will navigate to a new page now this is a pretty complex data binding there's a relative source with an ancestor type and has a path and if I'm brand new to xaml and mbvm this might look pretty complex to me especially if I'm coming into a project for the first time this is where GitHub co-pilot chat can really help me out here I'm just going to go ahead and say ask copilot I'm going to say uh what does this relative Source binding do and how does it work so again GitHub co-pilot chat is now going to kick in and this is really great it's giving me information not only on what a relative Source binding is but what the ancestor type is how it's going to go find the monkey's view model class and then in this case use the go to details command which is found in that view model so that's really nice and it asked me uh if I have any other follow-up questions here but I'm interested in this command parameter so let's continue the conversation so I'm going to say how does the command parameter work work here so again GitHub co-pilot chat is going to go off and analyze my code and this is really great it's going to say that this command parameter is bound to the dot which means it's going to pass in the current item context in this case a monkey inside of this tab gesture recognizer so that's really really great so if we take a look at the running application over here we can note that I have some monkeys in here we can see that that's how that data binding is working so that monkey in that class but we can see that um in this case the the labels are not necessarily aligned correctly so let's go ahead and tap on that and take a look here while we have this vertical stack layout and some labels in here and I might be wondering how could I maybe align that vertically in here again let me just go ahead and ask GitHub co-pilot how could I align the content of the vertical stack layout so they are centered all right again GitHub copilot chat over here is going to analyze this code and recommend some brand new code for me so it has the exact same code but it's it's adding this vertical Center and a line option so let's go ahead and just copy that so I could copy the whole thing I'm just going to add this in here there we go and now let's go ahead and see a look up and sure enough now our labels are vertically aligned so that's really great so it's giving me that context that understands it more so GitHub co-pilot not only giving me some great recommendations of learning about the code but also how to enhance the code well you know if I am coming in I'm adding new features to this app I might want to go ahead and create a new page to navigate to the details of those monkeys and again this is where GitHub co-pilot chat and GitHub copile can really help me out by creating and giving me some some sort of templates here for this type of page and even the code behind so let's go ahead and ask GitHub co-pilot chat I'll say how would I create a net Maui xaml page for the details of the monkey win selected all right so let's see what a GitHub co-pilot chat has to say here so again it's going to analyze uh the application and wow just like this it gives me a full reference here that is going to go ahead and give me context of my large labels my medium labels it's going to go ahead and bind here to the name image location automatically and even give me a go back command which is nice now I could take this I could copy this into a new page but I could also ask it what type of view model code could be generated for the code behind here so let's go ahead and ask it what would a view model code behind look like for this new page all right so now GitHub copilot is kind of using that reference there and here we go it is generated the monkey detail view model for me and it's passing in a monkey it has some information about getting that different detail information back for me and it's even generated a command a go back command to navigate backwards what I do like about this is that it's also implemented my base view model up here which is really really cool because it knows about the context of my code so if I look at this monkey's view model again the main one that I was working in we can also see that it has the base view model there too so that's really really nice now this is great because this is giving me some of that inside knowledge of what my code looks like and giving me a good starting place so I can take it put it into my code and then start from there to not only have a page but also the code behind for it as well well that's how easy it is to get started using GitHub copilot and GitHub copilot chat in your.net Maui applications today I hope that you really enjoyed this leave comments below if you have any questions at all thanks for watching
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