Browse All Posts (106)

sbaynes explains how Microsoft AI collaborated with poet William Sieghart and Gravity Road to build Ode Poetry, a real-time voice experience that transcribes user speech, responds empathetically, and recommends poems using MAI-Transcribe and MAI-Voice, with a strong focus on safety testing and quality iteration.

Mika Dumont introduces an interactive upgrade canvas in the GitHub Copilot app that lets teams track a .NET modernization end-to-end, from assessment and planning through execution, code changes, build failures, and final results, with the same upgrade workflow available in Visual Studio, VS Code, and the Copilot CLI.

Michael Recachinas explains how GitHub enforced validated repository ownership across a 14,000+ repo organization to unblock security workflows like secret scanning remediation, reduce risk, and make governance and compliance scoping reliable.

Microsoft Developer recaps the 2026 updates shipped across SQL Server, Azure SQL, and SQL database in Fabric, highlighting security, tooling, and developer workflow changes announced around SQLCon/FabCon and Microsoft Build 2026.

Allison announces a public preview update to GitHub Code Quality that lets organization owners enable or disable Code Quality for a targeted subset of repositories, with optional enforcement to prevent repo admins from changing the setting.

GitHub introduces Bring Your Own Key (BYOK) support in the GitHub Copilot app, showing how to connect custom model providers, run local models with Ollama, and switch models from the model picker across all Copilot plans.

Microsoft Threat Intelligence breaks down GigaWiper, a Golang backdoor that bundles disk wiping, ransomware-like encryption, and system sabotage into modular commands, and maps its C2, persistence, and destructive behaviors to concrete Defender detections and hardening steps defenders can apply.

Allison announces a GitHub Copilot Chat feature on github.com that generates a high-level overview of a repository you’re visiting for the first time, summarizing the repo’s purpose, technologies used, and contribution guidelines, with an option to generate a README when one doesn’t exist.

Visual Studio Code shares a short sizzle reel promoting VS Code Learn, a set of free, hands-on courses created by the VS Code team to help developers learn VS Code features and workflows.

Wes Steyn shows how to scale a Microsoft Agent Framework “claw” using the Agent Harness: on-demand skills (including centrally managed Foundry skills via MCP), approval-gated shell access, CodeAct for sandboxed code execution, and concurrent background agents, with runnable samples in both .NET and Python.

Authorised Territory demonstrates how to build a .NET agent harness that lets an AI agent read a local text file, using the .NET Agent Framework and the Microsoft.Agents.AI.Harness NuGet package with a locally running LLM in Ollama.

Allison announces general availability of GitHub Advanced Security innersource advisories, letting enterprises publish internal security advisories with visibility limited to enterprise-owned repositories. The update includes a new REST API for creating, updating, and withdrawing vulnerabilities, and uses Dependabot to notify affected repos and open upgrade pull requests.

David Pine explains how the .NET Aspire team uses GitHub Agentic Workflows to turn merged product pull requests into SME-reviewed documentation pull requests in a separate repo, while keeping security tight through a “safe-outputs” contract and narrowly scoped GitHub App permissions.

Allison announces enterprise-managed OpenTelemetry export controls for GitHub Copilot in VS Code and Copilot CLI, letting organizations centrally mandate OTLP endpoints, protocols, resource attributes, and capture settings without relying on per-developer OTEL_* environment variables.

CollinBrian explains how to design cloud-sovereign applications by keeping both deployment and runtime dependencies portable, using Radius for an application model and Dapr for consistent distributed-systems APIs across environments like Kubernetes and Azure.

Allison announces general availability of device-level deployment for managed GitHub Copilot settings in VS Code and GitHub Copilot CLI, enabling enterprise admins to enforce consistent Copilot governance via MDM, configuration files, or server-managed settings.

GitHub explains how to control GitHub Copilot costs in large organizations by mapping enterprise teams to cost centers, configuring AI credit pools, and applying user-level spending caps with per-user overrides for power users.

Nir Mashkowski shares customer examples of how Azure SRE Agent is being used to reduce incident triage and investigation time by having an AI-powered agent gather evidence, classify issues, and recommend next steps, with an emphasis on governance controls and operational “memory” for teams running production on Azure.

Jakub Oleksy’s June 2026 GitHub availability report summarizes six production incidents (including Copilot outages) and the reliability work behind GitHub’s ongoing Azure migration, with concrete mitigations like dependency pinning, stronger config validation, improved traffic blocking, and tighter production access controls.

Allison summarizes the June/early July 2026 Visual Studio Code releases (v1.123–v1.127) focused on GitHub Copilot: integrated browser upgrades for agent-driven web validation, better organization for parallel agent sessions, clearer cost and token visibility, easier model-provider discovery via Marketplace, and more hands-off Autopilot behavior.

Katie Savage announces a free, instructor-led virtual training series starting July 16 that introduces the GitHub Copilot app and its agent-driven workflow, including setup, custom instructions, MCPs, and features like Agent Merge and Canvases for tracking work.

Allison summarizes what’s new in actions/setup-java v5.5.0 for GitHub Actions workflows, including optional GPG signature verification for JDK downloads, a new Kona JDK distribution, and several Maven-focused improvements around toolchains, caching, and quieter CI logs.

Salim Chawro explains how Microsoft’s Secure Future Initiative (SFI) is being enforced with a multi-agent AI system that continuously evaluates live cloud services, looking for cross-domain weaknesses across code, identity, network, and runtime configuration to drive faster, higher-quality hardening.

Efrat Ben Porat announces public preview support for autonomous operations in the Azure Copilot Observability Agent, which can listen to Azure Monitor alerts, correlate them into issues, and run deep investigations automatically. The post explains what’s new, how correlation is guided by custom instructions, and how this changes on-call triage workflows.

Arvind Shyamsundar explains how an AI-assisted real-world build ran into an unexpected challenge, and how pairing GitHub Copilot with hands-on developer judgment helped reach a secure solution.

Rochak Mittal, Amit Ganguli, Surya Sripathi Raju and Molina Sharma explain how Azure’s resiliency approach has evolved beyond uptime into a lifecycle that covers infrastructure resiliency, data resiliency, and cyber recovery, with practical guidance for zone-first and multi-region designs in regulated and sovereign environments.

Bruno Borges walks through using GitHub Copilot CLI plus a community Namecheap skill to publish a GitHub Pages site on a custom domain with HTTPS, without manually editing DNS records. The post shows the end-to-end flow: create the repo and site, enable registrar API access, apply the required A/CNAME records, and verify resolution and HTTP health.

Allison announces npm v12 GA, focusing on new install-time security defaults for npm install and a phased deprecation of 2FA-bypass granular access tokens, with timelines and migration guidance for safer publishing workflows.

John Savill explains the Azure Health Model, why “resource health” is hard in cloud environments, and how to reason about service and dependency health. The video includes a walkthrough-style demo and closes with practical takeaways for understanding and communicating Azure service health.

Visual Studio Code highlights the CodeSnap extension for VS Code, showing how it helps developers create cleaner, more shareable screenshots of code quickly.

Waldek Mastykarz explains why AI coding agent eval scores can drift between machines even when you think you’ve pinned the inputs. He breaks down the “hidden variables” that leak into the agent’s context—OS, shells, file paths, LSP diagnostics, and tool updates—and how to control and document them.

anandgmenon walks through deploying Azure Logic Apps (Standard) in Hybrid mode on Red Hat OpenShift using Azure Arc and the Container Apps extension, calling out the OpenShift-specific gotchas around SCC permissions and DNS, plus concrete CLI/Helm commands and troubleshooting tips.

Evan Mattson announces the 1.0 release of Microsoft Agent Framework’s orchestration patterns across both Python and .NET, explaining what’s now stable (sequential, concurrent, group chat, handoff, and magentic) and why higher-level orchestration builders matter for multi-agent apps.

Allison announces a GitHub Mobile update that lets developers kick off Copilot cloud agent from a pull request to resolve merge conflicts, helping unblock PRs while away from a desktop workflow.

Allison announces an update to GitHub Mobile that adds live notifications for remote GitHub Copilot CLI sessions, so developers can monitor coding agent progress, see when input is needed, and jump back into session logs from their phone.

The Visual Studio Code Team shares the early release notes for VS Code 1.129 (Insiders), including links to the commit log and closed issues so developers can track what’s landing as the milestone evolves.

Allison announces new GitHub Copilot usage metrics API fields that let enterprises and organizations compare pull request review speed and review-cycle counts across AI adoption phases, helping teams measure how Copilot adoption correlates with code review throughput.

Allison announces updates to GitHub Copilot for JetBrains IDEs, including Codex as a new agent provider (public preview), expanded agent customization features (Hooks and MCP server management), and new controls for approvals, permissions, and debugging across agentic sessions.

Allison announces that Kimi K2.7 Code is now available to GitHub Copilot Business and Copilot Enterprise customers, including how admins can enable it and what to consider before turning on an open-weight model.

Visual Studio Code shows how VS Code Tasks can help you quickly rerun common project commands by defining them once and triggering them from the editor.