Soon after .NET 7 was released, I upgraded the static site generator I use as well as the GitHub Actions that build and publish my website. Having upgraded last year from .NET 6, the process was as smooth as I had expected with no code refactoring required.

When it comes to development environments, for quick status updates like the ones on my feed or minor edits, I've been using github.dev. However, there's been times where I've needed to run and debug code to confirm that my changes work. This is where I hit some of the limitation of github.dev which means unless I set up a Codespace, I have to save my work and move offline to my PC. Codespaces are great, but given that Codespaces are nice to haves not a requirement for my workflow at this time, it didn't make sense for me to pay for them. That's why I was excited to learn that GitHub is providing up to 60 hours per month of free Codespace usage to all developers. That's more than enough for me.

By default, Codespace images come preinstalled with the .NET 6 SDK which makes sense considering it's the latest LTS. However, since my static site generator targets .NET 7, I had to configure my Codespace to use .NET 7. This was just as easy as upgrading to .NET 7. All I had to do was provide the .NET 7 SDK Docker image as part of my devcontainer.json configuration file. From there, Codespaces takes care of the rest. As a result, I can now run and debug my code all in one place without interrupting my workflow.

PS: This post was authored in GitHub Codespaces 🙂