Over the past two years, generative AI has helped accelerate what programmers can do. Now, GitHub is giving them even more tools.

On Monday, the company launched a technical preview of GitHub Copilot Workspace, an AI-powered developer environment. The release builds on GitHub's existing productivity tools, including GitHub Copilot, launched in 2022, and Copilot Chat, which lets programmers use natural language to test and debug their code.

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"Within Copilot Workspace, developers can now brainstorm, plan, build, test, and run code in natural language," the announcement explains. "This new task-centric experience leverages different Copilot-powered agents from start to finish, while giving developers full control over every step of the process."

Copilot Workspace gives developers end-to-end AI support on whatever they're building, aiming to assist where many programmers get blocked: the beginning of a project. Starting with a GitHub repository or issue, engineers can work with AI-powered agents to address bugs and test possible solutions.

Because Copilot Workspace is familiar with the codebase and previous issue replies, the tool can then suggest and take steps to try to resolve the problem, all written in natural language. 

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All of Copilot Workspace's steps and code suggestions are editable, meaning developers maintain control over what's deployed, but don't have to build every component to get there. Developers can run their final code in Workspace, make tweaks in GitHub Codespace, and share a link to their workspace with other team members, who can see how they used Copilot agents to realize the final product.

According to the announcement, GitHub hopes to reimagine the entire developer experience: "Copilot Workspace represents a radically new way of building software with natural language, and is expressly designed to deliver -- not replace -- developer creativity, faster and easier than ever before."

By making software simpler and easier to build, the tool lets professional developers focus on bigger-picture systems instead of being mired in lines of code, GitHub explained. The company also wants Copilot Workspace to help beginner and hobbyist coders. 

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GitHub aims to democratize coding for programmers of all levels by "quantifiably reducing boilerplate work," as noted in the release. "We are accelerating to a future where 1 billion people on GitHub will control a machine just as easily as they ride a bicycle," the company added.

Copilot Workspace can be used on desktop and mobile, and is now available for technical preview -- sign up here. 

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Having in-house development is a massive advantage for many businesses. And having software on hand to help streamline workflows, amplify productivity, and keep projects on track is a must -- especially when you can get it at a discount.

Right now, Microsoft Visual Studio Professional 2022 for Windows is on sale for only $40 (reg. $499), saving you 91%. Described as a "fully featured development environment," Visual Studio 2022 is Microsoft's first 64-bit IDE, and it became its best to date at working with complicated workloads and large-scale projects. 

Microsoft Visual Studio Professional users can build across different languages and platforms, which greatly opens up the range of potential projects they can take on. 

Visual Studio also comes with automated support systems like IntelliCode, which can understand the context of the code you're writing, and help add variable names, functions, and more to enable users to code more while typing less. Similar to AI-driven writing assistants, IntellliCode can complete a line or block of code for you, and it can offer lists of potential next-best options for you to move forward and discover solutions more easily. 

Get Microsoft Visual Studio Professional 2022 for Windows on sale for $40 now.

It's no joke. Microsoft and IBM have joined forces to open-source the 1988 operating system MS-DOS 4.0 under the MIT License. Why? Well, why not?

As Scott Hanselman, Microsoft's VP of the developer community, and Jeff Wilcox, head of Microsoft's Open Source Programs Office, recount in Microsoft's Open Source Blog, "a young English researcher named Connor 'Starfrost' Hyde corresponded recently with former Microsoft Chief Technical Officer Ray Ozzie" about the relationship between DOS 4, Multitasking DOS (MT-DOS), and what would become IBM and Microsoft's OS/2. 

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That got Hanselman and Wilcox digging into the Microsoft archives. The blog post continues: "While they were unable to find the full source code for MT-DOS, they did find MS-DOS 4.00, which we're releasing today, alongside these additional beta binaries, PDFs of the documentation, and disk images."

This isn't the first time Microsoft has released MS-DOS source code. Back in 2014, Microsoft open-sourced the MS-DOS source code for versions 1.25 and 2.0 via the Computer History Museum.

Other DOS versions have also been open-sourced over the years. PC-MOS/386, a multi-user MS-DOS clone by Norcross, GA-based The Software Link, was open-sourced in 2017.  It ran most standard DOS and 386's protected mode applications. 

Indeed, it was a better DOS operating system than MS-DOS 4.0. For those of you who weren't running it in 1988 -- when The Cosby Show and Roseanne were the most popular TV shows in the States and Joe Montana was leading the San Francisco 49ers to their third Super Bowl win -- MS-DOS 4.0 was an awful operating system.

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How awful? Popular programs of the day -- such as WordPerfect 5.1, Lotus 1-2-3, and Doom -- always broke on it. You'd be in the middle of a task, and, bang, your program would freeze completely. Long before we got to know and hate Windows' Blue Screen of Death, MS-DOS 4.0 horrified PC users.

That was mainly because MS-DOS 4.0 used an enormous 92KB of RAM. Today, you wouldn't notice that much RAM being used on your watch. But back in the day, when 640K was what you got on a high-end PC, it was a big deal. It used more memory than any other version of DOS before or since. 

PC users either returned to MS-DOS 3.3, which I recommended at the time, or moved to Digital Research's DR-DOS 3.41. 

How bad was MS-DOS 4? DR-DOS version numbers had started off mimicking MS-DOS version numbers to show that the former would work just like the latter. But there was no DR-DOS 4.0. Instead, Digital Research named its new 1989 version DR-DOS 5.0 to prevent anyone from thinking that it had any connection with MS-DOS 4.0.

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Indeed, perhaps one reason so many people were ready to try a new Unix-like operating system, Linux, in 1991 was that MS-DOS 4.0 had annoyed so many users.

Today, you can download the MS-DOS 4.0 source code and run it for yourself on an original IBM PC XT (surely someone has one still running somewhere), a newer Pentium, and with the open-source PCem and 86box emulators. It might also work with Oracle VirtualBox or the old Linux MS-DOS virtual machine  DOSEMU, but I haven't had a chance to check it.