AI-Assisted Development with GitHub Copilot - hands on!

Level up your GenAI development skills in this immersive, fast‑paced workshop. You’ll build, test, and deploy a GenAI summarizer web app while learning how to use GitHub Copilot across its most powerful workflows—Chat, Completions, Ask, Edit, Agent, and Plan.

Across this hands-on session, you’ll:

• Scaffold an AI‑enabled Azure web app using Copilot Agent
• Integrate Azure OpenAI and validate your app locally
• Refactor and harden your code with Agent‑driven planning, error handling, and unit tests
• Automate CI/CD to Azure Web Apps with GitHub Actions
• Create contextual prompts, custom instructions, and feature‑enhancing agents
• Add real‑time UI improvements and performance upgrades
• Streamline issue‑to‑PR workflows using Copilot Agent inside VS Code

You’ll walk away with a deployed GenAI app, practical Copilot skills, and a toolkit of AI‑driven development patterns you can apply to any project.

### Pre‑requisites

To get the most out of this hands‑on lab, participants should be comfortable with:

• Visual Studio Code — Using VS Code for coding, debugging, extensions, and GitHub Copilot.
• GitHub basics — Working with repos, cloning, commits, branches, issues, and pull requests.
• Programming fundamentals — Python for backend logic and basic web tech (HTML, CSS, JavaScript) for UI work.
• Azure concepts — Familiarity with Azure OpenAI, App Service, and managing cloud resources and credentials.
• AI & prompt engineering — Understanding how natural‑language prompts drive AI workflows and how Copilot Agent/contextual chat modes fit into development.
• DevOps essentials — Comfort with virtual environments, dependency management, and GitHub Actions for CI/CD and cloud deployment.

Your leaders for this session will be Microsoft Azure Cloud & AI Applications Solution Engineers Mike Felder and Kim Vaddi along with AI Developer Shawn Vaddi. Mike, Kim and Shawn are all based in Houston and will be here in person!

Food and soft drinks will be served at ~5pm on the 10th floor - we will kick off the discussion there @5:30pm after everyone has had a chance to eat, meet anyone else you'd like to and have a chat :-). Feel free to start arriving from 4:30pm on if you are nearby. PLEASE RSVP so we have an accurate food count and in order to get you a link to the lab.

PARKING: For free parking please park across the street on the third and fourth floors of the parking garage at 12711 Queensbury; parking in the Microsoft building is not free.

In-person: 750 Town and Country Blvd #1000 · Houston, TX
Recording: https://www.youtube.com/@HoustonAzureUserGroup