Browse All News (723)

Microsoft Threat Intelligence details CaptiveCrunch, a Storm-2945 (Midnight Blizzard) campaign abusing captive portals to manipulate traffic, deliver malware, and steal credentials and tokens. The post breaks down the CornFlake and ChocoShell toolchain, device code phishing against Microsoft Entra ID, and provides Defender/Sentinel hunting queries plus practical mitigations for travelers and enterprises.

Allison announces the deprecation of the Gemini 2.5 Pro and Gemini 3 Flash models across GitHub Copilot experiences, and explains what Copilot Enterprise admins may need to change in model policies so users can select supported alternatives in VS Code and on github.com.

Allison announces a public preview for GitHub Enterprise that lets Copilot admins target AI model policies to enterprise teams, so different groups can be granted additional models beyond an enterprise-wide baseline.

Allison announces a security change for npm: granular access tokens configured to bypass 2FA can no longer perform sensitive account, org, and package-management actions without an interactive 2FA challenge, and automated publishing should move to trusted or staged publishing.

Samantha Kubota introduces Echoverse, a set of high-fidelity synthetic “worlds” for training computer-use agents, and explains why depth (stateful workflows and database-grounded grading) matters more than sheer environment count. The post shares results from supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning, plus links to released code and datasets.

Alexander Neubeck explains how GitHub sped up Unicode case folding for code search by removing early-exit branches, enabling SIMD vectorization, and using byte-space arithmetic to avoid UTF-8 decode/encode work. The post also covers allocation-avoidance techniques and a compact lookup-table design for fast “does this fold?” checks.

Amaury Levé introduces an open-source polyglot unit-test generation agent that learns a repo’s conventions, writes tests, and validates they build and run in the project’s normal test workflow. The post explains the agent’s research/plan/execute/check loop, shows benchmark results versus stock Copilot, and includes setup commands for Copilot CLI and VS Code.

Kristen Womack’s July 2026 roundup for Azure Developer CLI (azd) summarizes releases 1.27.0 through 1.29.0, including new extension install options, a full tool uninstall workflow, Azure AI Foundry resource modeling in azure.yaml, container deployments to Azure App Service, and CI-friendly non-interactive behavior plus a breaking flag rename.

diptiborkar summarizes why Microsoft Fabric and OneLake were recognized as a Leader in Forrester’s 2026 Data Lakehouses report, focusing on a unified lakehouse foundation for analytics and AI, open table formats, cross-cloud interoperability, and built-in governance and security across engines like Spark, SQL, KQL, and Power BI.

Allison announces the retirement of GitHub Models as of July 30, 2026, including the shutdown of the playground, model catalog, inference API, and BYOK support. The post also points teams to Microsoft Foundry for model access and GitHub Copilot for building AI-powered workflows on GitHub.

arindamc explains how Workspace Outbound Access Protection (OAP) in Microsoft Fabric controls outbound connectivity for Eventstream, so streaming pipelines can only read from approved sources and write to approved destinations (including cross-workspace routes) using data connection rules.

Samantha Kubota explains how Microsoft is pushing better AI performance per token and per dollar by co-optimizing models with evaluation harnesses and RL environments, sharing recent “Flash” model releases and benchmark results that reduce GPU costs while maintaining quality across products.

Allison announces a GitHub Actions update that lets workflows reference actions and reusable workflows in the same repository using a new $/ prefix, avoiding an explicit checkout and keeping internal references aligned with the exact commit being executed.

Cassidy Williams shows how she used the GitHub Copilot app to modernize an old React codebase by splitting work into stacked sessions and stacked pull requests, keeping changes reviewable while iterating on plans, branching strategy, and dependency upgrades.

Shawn Henry and Tamir Dresher show how to run a multi-agent “Squad” team on top of the GitHub Copilot CLI/SDK and expose it as a first-class Microsoft Agent Framework (MAF) AIAgent in a .NET app, including DI wiring, session configuration, and OpenTelemetry-based observability.

MattH_OneLake announces two Microsoft Fabric preview features that mirror Azure Monitor (Log Analytics) tables and AWS Glue Data Catalog-managed Apache Iceberg tables into OneLake. The post explains the zero-copy, metadata-based approach and outlines how to set up each mirroring source for analysis across Fabric workloads.

Allison announces GitHub stacked pull requests in public preview, a workflow for breaking large changes into an ordered series of smaller PRs that can be reviewed independently and merged together, while still respecting existing checks, reviews, and branch protections.

Alym Rayani rounds up July 2026 updates across Microsoft Security, focusing on securing AI and agent environments. The post highlights Project Perception’s agentic SecOps approach, new Microsoft Defender protections (including prompt-injection defenses and cloud agent runtime coverage), Entra identity updates like passkeys-by-default, and Purview controls for data protection and investigations.

robece-msft outlines how to build event-driven applications in Microsoft Fabric using Business Events and User Data Functions, with code samples, architecture patterns, and practical scenarios aimed at teams building real-time, data-centric solutions.

Allison summarizes the July 2026 updates for GitHub Copilot in Visual Studio, including a new preview agent built on the Copilot SDK, built-in .NET and Azure skills, selected-code review actions, and organization-wide custom instructions for consistent Copilot behavior across teams.

Allison announces a new GitHub Copilot enterprise managed setting that lets organizations restrict which managed devices can host remotely controlled Copilot sessions, including options to require SSO, disable remote control, or allow it without restrictions.

Tzvia introduces Real-Time Dashboard in Microsoft Fabric, focusing on using streaming data to build live operational views that update in seconds so teams can spot spikes, slowdowns, and stalled processes quickly and respond while events are still unfolding.

Allison summarizes the July 2026 GitHub Copilot updates in Visual Studio Code (v1.127–v1.131), focusing on the Agents window workflow, multi-chat sessions, model and chat controls (including Copilot Vision and BYOK), plus editor, terminal, browser, and accessibility improvements.

Allison announces general availability for Copilot code review support for agent skills and MCP server connections, enabling teams to bring internal standards and external context into reviews. The update includes attribution on generated comments and outlines where to configure MCP servers and store tokens in repository settings.

ealroybrin introduces Microsoft Fabric Embed (Preview), which lets developers embed Fabric Real-Time Dashboards into JavaScript/TypeScript web apps using delegated Microsoft Entra ID authentication. The post outlines what the preview supports, key limitations (like no service principal auth), and how Fabric governance and permissions carry over to embedded experiences.

Santhosh_Ravin1 announces general availability of job concurrency and queue monitoring for Apache Spark in Microsoft Fabric, adding a capacity-level view to help diagnose why Spark jobs are queued or throttled and to understand how individual workspaces consume shared capacity over time.

Ilana Waitser introduces a preview capability that brings Azure Monitor telemetry into Microsoft Fabric so teams can connect operational signals (logs and metrics) with analytics workflows and understand business impact faster.

Justin Bettencourt rounds up the July 2026 Azure SDK releases, highlighting new and GA libraries across Rust and Python, plus a full set of release notes for all supported languages.

murray-kp rounds up the July 2026 Microsoft Fabric updates across CI/CD and Git integration, OneLake governance, Spark runtime and diagnostics, lakehouse and warehouse features, and Real-Time Intelligence improvements including Eventstream security and new connectors.

Santhosh_Ravin1 announces that Microsoft Fabric now extends customer-managed key (CMK) encryption to the Spark processing layer, covering data that Spark jobs read, write, and temporarily stage on compute clusters—aimed at meeting stricter security and compliance expectations for key control during active processing.

Bruno Borges explains how to reduce Dependabot pull request noise without slowing down vulnerability fixes, using Microsoft’s GCToolkit repo as an example. The post shows how to group version updates, move to a monthly cadence, cover all ecosystems you use, and tune the new default “cooldown” window for safer upgrades.

Rachel Kang introduces a new “thinking effort” control in Visual Studio 18.9 Insiders 2 that lets developers tune how much reasoning supported AI models use per request. The post explains the available levels, where to configure them in the model management UI, and how higher reasoning settings affect usage credits and response depth.

Allison announces a new GitHub Copilot policy that automatically enables newly generally available models by default for Copilot Business and Copilot Enterprise, with a single opt-out control for organizations that need stricter governance.

The Visual Studio Code Team shares the evolving release notes for VS Code 1.132 (Insiders), with links to the commit log and closed issues so developers can track what’s landing as features are added throughout the iteration.

Allison summarizes what’s new in CodeQL 2.26.1 for GitHub code scanning, including expanded framework modeling across Go, Java/Kotlin, and JavaScript/TypeScript, plus query updates that reduce false positives and improve detection for issues like SSRF, path injection, and hard-coded cryptographic values.

Faith Xu shares early production results for MAI-Code-1-Flash in GitHub Copilot Chat in VS Code, focusing on the trade-off between coding quality and token efficiency. The post explains the metrics used (acceptance, code/commit survival, tokens per turn, turns per commit) and what the team learned from aggregate usage data and A/B “Auto” flights.

Allison announces expanded GitHub Copilot app reporting in the Copilot usage metrics API, adding user attribution and rollups across features, models, and languages, plus token and code activity breakdowns to help enterprises compare Copilot surfaces consistently.

Allison announces npm publish-time malware scanning and explains how it can delay package availability, when publishes may be held or blocked, and how maintainers can declare dual-use security functionality using new package metadata and a required DISCLOSURE file.

Jeff Handley announces MCP C# SDK v2.0, which implements the 2026-07-28 MCP specification revision. The post explains the new stateless-first HTTP transport, standardized routing headers, and Multi Round-Trip Requests (MRTR) for interactive tools, plus what stays backward compatible and what changes for Tasks and other extensions.

fredguis outlines upcoming OneLake Security changes for Microsoft Fabric SQL analytics endpoints, focusing on enterprise-friendly access control. The update improves nested group resolution, shortcut-backed table behavior in hub-and-spoke lakehouse setups, more consistent column-level security with group-based access, and broader service principal support for automated and app-owned data products.