Michael S. Collier

I’m excited to share that I’ve been accepted to the Microsoft MVP program! My award category is Azure Application PaaS. I was in the inaugural Azure MVP group nearly 16 years ago (awarded in October 2010). I “retired” from the MVP program in January 2015 when I joined Microsoft as an employee (employees aren’t eligible). While I no longer work at Microsoft, I remain an avid user and proponent of many Microsoft developer technologies. I’m thrilled to once again join the MVP program and this amazing community.

I’ve been intrigued by the GitHub Copilot App ever since it first shipped at Build a few months ago. It offers a different way of working for me, and I’m getting more comfortable with it every day. One thing that held me back was its lack of support for repositories in WSL. That has now changed.

I had the pleasure of attending Beer City Code for the first time last weekend, August 14-15, 2026. Held in Grand Rapids, Michigan, the conference brings together software developers and technology professionals to learn from one another. I was honored to co-lead a workshop and deliver a session, and I’m already looking forward to coming back next year!

Microsoft Build is always packed with big announcements, but my favorite part is bringing those ideas back home and figuring out what actually helps teams ship better software. On June 20th, we did exactly that at Microsoft Build \\localhost:columbus.

When you build Azure Functions apps with Aspire, the best experience is usually the one where the AppHost reflects intent instead of infrastructure plumbing.

That matters a lot with Durable Task Scheduler. In a local dev loop, I want an emulator. In Azure, I want the real resource. The recent Aspire integration makes that split much cleaner than the older manual approach.

Aspire 13.3 introduced support for Durable Task Scheduler as part of the Azure Functions integration.