Browse All News (733)

Allison announces a new GitHub Copilot enterprise governance control that lets admins disable bypassing permission prompts (“yolo mode” / auto-approve) in Copilot clients. The update explains where to place the enterprise-managed settings file, how it’s applied to licensed users, and which VS Code versions respect the policy.

Sandeep Deo explains how AI is speeding up identity-based attacks and what Microsoft is changing across Entra and Defender to help teams prevent, detect, and respond faster. The post highlights unified identity risk scoring, improved Entra ID Protection views, least-privilege response roles, and agent-driven recommendations for Conditional Access.

amitch announces a preview ServiceNow connector that can query Microsoft OneLake data in place (zero-copy), aiming to reduce ETL and keep a single governed data foundation across Microsoft Fabric analytics and downstream operational workflows.

Jan Krivanek introduces the Microsoft Binlog MCP Server, an MCP server that lets AI assistants (including GitHub Copilot) query MSBuild .binlog files using 15 purpose-built tools for failure diagnosis, property tracing, performance bottleneck analysis, and build-to-build comparisons across Visual Studio, VS Code, and CLI workflows.

Allison announces general availability of auto model selection in GitHub Copilot Chat on github.com and the GitHub mobile app, explaining how auto routes requests to different AI models based on task complexity and real-time availability, and how it affects transparency, policy controls, and token billing.

Allison announces a GitHub repository setting that lets maintainers cap how many open pull requests a user without write access can have at once, helping reduce review queue noise and CI overhead in busy open source projects.

Allison announces GitHub Copilot’s new agent finder, which discovers and ranks agent capabilities from a registry you choose, with enterprise controls over what resources can be surfaced and used.

jiang_jenny1 introduces the Fabric Spark Operations Skill (preview), an AI-assisted, read-only troubleshooting tool for Spark workloads in Microsoft Fabric. It turns common investigations—failed notebooks, pipeline failures, session triage, and performance issues—into natural-language commands that produce a severity-ranked diagnostic report with fix recommendations and links back to Fabric.

Waldek Mastykarz explains why AI coding agent extensions that perform well alone can degrade results when installed alongside other extensions, and how to measure and reduce these composition effects in real developer workspaces.

Allison announces that GitHub Copilot individual plan sign-ups are reopening (Student, Pro, Pro+, and Max) and outlines immediate changes to how upgrades and continued usage work when you approach included usage and spending limits.

Allison announces the general availability of the GitHub Copilot app for macOS, Windows, and Linux, positioning it as a desktop workflow for agent-driven development. The post highlights starting sessions from issues or pull requests, running parallel sessions per repo, reviewing diffs, and using canvases, cloud automations, and MCP-connected tools.

Ryan Caldwell and Bhavya U explain how the VS Code team is reducing GitHub Copilot’s token usage (and improving latency) in agentic sessions, with concrete changes to prompt caching, tool-definition loading, and transport choices across OpenAI and Anthropic models.

jiang_jenny1 announces a preview update to the Spark History Server in Microsoft Fabric that speeds up loading for large Spark applications by switching to snapshot-based, incremental rendering. The post also covers expanded support for Spark Streaming configurations like event log compression and rolling logs.

Natalie Guevara explains Git worktrees as a practical way to work on multiple branches at once without stashing or constantly switching contexts, and shows the core commands plus the trade-offs to watch for. The article also connects worktrees to parallel workflows used by tools like the GitHub Copilot app.

Allison announces that GitHub Models is being retired and is no longer available to new organizations and enterprises, while existing customers can continue using the playground, API, and models for now.

royr explains how Microsoft Fabric surfaces service issues and incidents, including in-product banners, Teams/email notifications, and the Service Health dashboard in the Fabric admin portal, plus what admins can configure and who can view detailed health messages.

UlrichChrist announces a preview integration in Microsoft Fabric that uses a Microsoft-provided ABAP Add-On to extract SAP data at high throughput via Copy job in Fabric Data Factory, landing it in OneLake for analytics workloads and downstream reporting and AI scenarios.

Allison announces that GitHub Code Quality moves from public preview to general availability on July 20, 2026, including new org-level rollout and reporting features plus a new pricing model that combines per-committer licensing with metered AI usage and GitHub Actions minutes for CodeQL scans.

Allison announces an update to GitHub Code Quality that lets organization admins enable or disable Code Quality across all repositories with a single org-level toggle, making it easier to roll out consistent code quality checks at scale on supported GitHub plans.

Satya Nadella highlights an Azure milestone: a new performance record for a leading LLM training benchmark at extreme scale, achieved through full-stack work across silicon, systems, networking, and software in partnership with NVIDIA.

Waldek Mastykarz explains why AI coding agents often keep using deprecated tooling (like legacy CLIs) even after teams ship replacements, and outlines practical ways to measure and correct agent behavior using extensions, explicit deprecation signals, and better naming.

Chris Welsch reports on İmeceMobil, an agriculture platform built on Microsoft Azure that helps Turkish farmers use AI-driven satellite imagery analysis, hyperlocal weather alerts, and expert guidance to improve crop decisions. The piece also highlights the Azure services and security tooling used to run the app at scale.

diptiborkar announces new Microsoft Fabric and Azure Databricks interoperability that lets teams use Microsoft OneLake as a shared, native storage layer, including GA read access and beta support for writing Unity Catalog managed tables. The post also frames OneLake as a governed data and context foundation for analytics and AI agent workloads.

preshah announces new interoperability features between Azure Databricks and Microsoft Fabric: storing Unity Catalog managed tables directly in OneLake (beta) and a “Publish to Fabric” workflow (preview) that creates mirrored catalog items from Databricks so the same tables can be queried across Fabric workloads without copying data.

Allison explains an update to GitHub Copilot enterprise usage reporting: usage metrics now combine server-side telemetry with client-side IDE signals, so more active (billed) users appear in single-day and 28-day reports, even when client telemetry doesn’t reach GitHub.

Natalie Guevara introduces the most useful slash commands in GitHub Copilot CLI, showing how to control the terminal agent by switching models, checking token/context usage, resuming sessions, reviewing diffs, changing directories, and resetting tool permissions.

Natalie Guevara announces the GitHub Multilingual Repositories Dataset, a CC0-licensed metadata dataset that helps researchers find public repositories with non-English text in READMEs, issues, and pull requests, and explains what’s included, how to use it for evaluation, and where the caveats are.

Jeff Pinkston summarizes a year of real-world email security benchmarking data comparing Microsoft Defender with SEG and ICES vendors, highlighting where layered defenses help most and where Defender’s detection and remediation have improved over four quarters.

Mads Kristensen introduces the new Theme colors options page in Visual Studio 2026, which lets you tweak Fluent color tokens directly in the IDE and have changes apply live. He also shows how to share per-theme customizations via JSON overrides and points to updated token documentation.

Dylan Birtolo explains a Copilot CLI rollout that makes subagent delegation more selective, reducing unnecessary handoffs and improving reliability and wait times. The post breaks down the delegation failure modes they observed, the orchestration policy changes they shipped, and how they validated the impact with offline tests and production A/B experiments.

Allison announces new controls for GitHub Copilot code review, including organization-level runner configuration (GitHub-hosted, self-hosted, or large runners), support for Copilot content exclusions at repo/org/enterprise scope, and removal of the 4,000-character limit for repository custom instruction files.

Allison outlines when GitHub Actions will start enforcing minimum versions for self-hosted runners, including the registration baseline, the ongoing 30-day update requirement, and the brownout schedule leading up to full enforcement for GitHub Enterprise Cloud and Data Residency tenants.

Allison announces GitHub Enterprise Server (GHES) 3.21 general availability, highlighting updates for enterprise admins including organization custom properties for targeting rulesets, GitHub Projects hierarchy view, a new REST API version with breaking changes, GitHub Actions workflow page performance improvements, secret scanning governance updates, and multi-disk storage configuration.

Gloridel Morales announces the June 2026 patch releases for Azure DevOps Server, with direct download links, release notes references, and a quick command you can run on the server to verify whether the patch is installed.

Natalie Guevara summarizes GitHub’s May 2026 availability incidents and the reliability work underway, including moving parts of the monolith to Azure, isolating database domains, and hardening GitHub Actions and Copilot services against cascading failures.

Allison announces an update to GitHub Actions where pull requests opened by github-actions[bot] can run CI/CD workflows after a user with write access approves them, reducing the risk of merging untested bot changes while keeping a security gate for workflows that can access sensitive data.

MichalBar introduces a preview redesign of Microsoft Fabric Real-Time Dashboards tile editing, adding Copilot-assisted visual authoring alongside a more code-friendly KQL workflow. The post walks through creating a visual from a prompt or query, iterating with history, and testing parameterized queries directly in the editor.

Allison explains an update to GitHub AI usage reports so GitHub AI Credits usage is reflected in the standard report fields, including what to use going forward and what changed for data since June 1.

Waldek Mastykarz explains how AI coding agents can silently scaffold outdated Node.js projects when they run npx without pinning versions, due to npm’s engine-aware manifest selection. The post breaks down why this happens and gives practical steps to make agent-driven scaffolding more predictable.

MichalBar introduces the Time Series Visualization (Preview) for Microsoft Fabric Real-Time Dashboards, focusing on how to explore multivariate time series data with series search and grouping, synchronized time-range navigation, and visual customization options like adaptive scaling and linear/log axis modes.