The .vs hidden directory

Visual Studio creates a .vs directory at the root of your solution. It is used to store solution specific settings and temporary data to help manage the state of your development environment. Fine to .gitignore.

However one interesting directory you may find inside is a slnx file. 

A slnx file is the XML version of the traditional sln file. However what is in .vs are supporting files for the slnx file format rather than the file itself.

Service Status Pages

The MSVS Service Status page is powerd by Atlassian Statuspage. It is free for up to 10 users.

Visual Studio 2026 August Release Notes

Among the changes in MSVS August release are thinking levels for GitHub Copilot - low, medium or high - with the highest obviously burning most tokens.

Low is for simple code suggestion; high for hard-to-debug issues.

There is also Git Agent that can be used to review your code prior to a pull request.

MSVS runs on monthly feature updates.

EC2 instances have different specializations

Instance types are grouped under instance families. These include general purpose, compute optimized. memory optimized and others.

General purpose are a good starting point.

Compute optimized are good for machine learning (a compute intensive task). Gaming servers also would benefit from compute optimized EC2 instances, as would high performance computing and scientific applications.

AWS Compute uses Multi-Tenancy

EC2 instances are virtual machines (VMs). VMs share an underlying physical machine with other instances (this is called multi-tenancy).  This is enabled by software called a hypervisor. VMs are isolated but share resources.

When you provision an EC2 instance, you can choose the operating system as Windows or Linux. You can provision thousands of EC2 instances on demand. They are resizable so you can start small and then give your instance(s) more memory and CPU.  This is the "elastic" nature of EC2 and is known as vertically scaling an instance. You can also control networking in EC2. Essentially you can choose what requests get to your server.

Virtualization is not a new concept; but AWS makes it more convenient to acquire servers via its Compute-as-a-Service model.

Compute Conceptualized in Terms of Power

Compute can be conceptualized in terms of power - in that it can be defined as the processing power needed to run applications, process data and and do calculations - and in the cloud, this is power "on demand". 

Thus power, and it's availability, is strategically important for cloud providers' expansion. 

Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (called EC2 for the double-use of the C) is the epitome of this definition of compute, and represents a powerful compute service from AWS.

iPhone Low Data Mode Explained

Some Windows users also have iPhones and need to understand iPhone settings and usage. In this spirit we deep dive Low Data Mode on the iPhone.  This can be a good option when travelling.

Low Data Mode is a Data Roaming setting. 

Settings -> Mobile Service -> Mobile Data Options -> Data Mode -> Low Data Mode

Other options in this category are Allow More Data on 5G and Standard.  Standard allows automatic updates and background tasks on mobile data, but limits video and FaceTime quality.