Best of Build - Copilot Agents & App Modernisation

It might be cold, but the GitHub AI robots are heating up. Join us for the July Aotearoa New Zealand GitHub Meetup at the Microsoft offices in Auckland (or online if you can't make it). The plan is to have two talks on the night, with some pizza and networking beforehand.

Agenda
5:30 - Start of pizza and networking
6:00 - Talk 1
6:30 - Break
6:35 - Talk 2
7:05 - Finish

Please make sure to register for the event as we need to provide contact details to Microsoft for security purposes.

If you have a topic you'd like to present (or hear about) please reach out, or create an idea in our GitHub Ideas discussion board. And yes, we are working on getting another event in Wellington.

Talk 1: Copilot Coding Agents — Daniel Scott-Raynsford, Partner Technology Strategist @ Microsoft
Is tech debt getting you down and preventing you from building all those cool features that the PMs are on your back to get onto? GitHub Copilot Coding Agents have got you covered! In this session we'll show you how you can reimagine your engineering process to get AI to take care of the toil, reducing your cognitive load and allowing you to focus on the cool stuff. We'll step through an AI driven development (AIDD) workflow, putting GitHub Copilot Agent mode, MCP servers and the all-new Coding Agents to work (even while we sleep). You'll walk away with more tools in your engineering toolbox and more ideas on how to optimize your workflow.

Talk 2: Copilot App Modernisation — Jerome Brown, Principal Consultant @ Mantel Group
What is one of the largest challenges in enterprise software development? Keeping everything up-to-date. .NET versions are only supported for a maximum of three years, and Java for five. And then there are the existing codebases, created before Azure was a twinkle in Satya's eyes. At Build 2025, Microsoft announce the preview of Copilot App Modernisation to help uplift your code to the latest versions and help refactor for the cloud. How does it work? Will the robots really take over? Join us as we kick the tyres and see how it can help you.