Browse All Posts (102)

Andrea Griffiths breaks down what GitHub Copilot subscriptions pay for beyond raw model API calls, including the developer workflow surfaces Copilot connects, how GitHub AI Credits are metered, and when direct API access (or BYOK) makes more sense for teams building their own agent systems.

avinandac introduces the generally available Lakehouse Query Explorer in Microsoft Fabric, an in-context Spark SQL editor inside the Lakehouse explorer for quick data exploration, validation, and iteration, with guidance on when to switch to notebooks or the SQL analytics endpoint for more advanced workflows.

The Visual Studio Code Team shares the ongoing release notes for VS Code 1.131 (Insiders), including links to the commit log and closed issues so developers can track what’s landing in the build as features are added.

Allison announces a new GitHub Copilot metrics impact dashboard for enterprise admins and org owners, turning Copilot usage metrics API cohort data into a visual view of adoption depth, developer impact, and recommended next steps to move users into deeper adoption phases.

Catherine Cassell outlines changes to GitHub’s bug bounty program, including a permanent invite-only VIP track, new static payout tables for both VIP and public researchers, and a HackerOne signal requirement aimed at reducing low-effort and AI-generated submissions.

Aarti Borkar explains how Microsoft and AXA XL are partnering to make Microsoft Defender Experts Cybersecurity Incident Response available to AXA XL cyber insurance policyholders, with an emphasis on coordinating technical containment and recovery work alongside legal, executive, and insurance decision-making during high-stakes incidents.

Allison announces a GitHub Enterprise Server security change that will reject command-line support bundle uploads from unpatched GHES versions starting August 18, 2026, and lists the minimum patch releases required to avoid disruption.

Linda Li and Maria Naggaga explain how Azure AI Foundry Toolboxes let agents call MCP tools using the signed-in user’s identity, without embedding OAuth/token plumbing in agent code. The post covers per-user token isolation, consent handling, and governance features like RAI guardrails and gateway fronting.

GitHub demonstrates how to kick off GitHub Copilot work directly from Jira to produce a draft pull request, including three ways to trigger Copilot and what the review-ready output looks like in GitHub.

Wes Steyn announces the release of the Microsoft Agent Framework Harness, a batteries-included runtime that turns a chat model into a production-ready agent with planning, tool-calling, memory, approvals, web search, and OpenTelemetry built in for both .NET and Python.

Ricardo Duncan describes how CDK Global migrated a business-critical automotive CRM platform to Azure SQL Managed Instance, including the architecture choices, migration approach, and operational practices used to move more than 1,000 databases with minimal downtime.

Brady Gaster joins GitHub’s Open Source Friday to introduce Squad, an open source project aimed at building teams of AI agents that can collaborate on work for any kind of project.

Gloridel Morales announces July 2026 patch releases for Azure DevOps Server, including download links for Patch 6 and Azure DevOps Server 2022.2 Patch 11, plus a quick command to verify whether the patch is installed on your server.

GitHub shows how the GitHub Copilot app can run multiple AI coding agent sessions in parallel, so different parts of a codebase can be worked on at the same time. The example highlights splitting work across agents for bug fixes, test writing, and feature development without clobbering each other’s changes.

Visual Studio Code shows how to use Oh My Posh to customize and improve the terminal prompt inside VS Code, with a link to the Oh My Posh project for setup and themes.

richpaw describes a reference architecture for running Microsoft Discovery on a Windows VM in Azure and connecting it to an Azure CycleCloud HPC cluster via Azure NetApp Files (NFS) and SSH, so agentic workflows can submit Slurm jobs, read/write POSIX files, and stay inside a private network boundary.

richpaw explains how Microsoft Discovery combines agentic AI with Azure HPC to speed up semiconductor EDA workflows, focusing on closed-loop orchestration across tools, data, and compute so teams can triage regressions, explore physical design tradeoffs, and converge on signoff faster.

Ron Frenkel explains how the Azure Copilot Observability Agent (now generally available in Azure Monitor) helps teams investigate Azure AI Foundry and GenAI agent issues using Application Insights telemetry, including failures, latency, tool-call errors, token spikes, and dependency bottlenecks with evidence-backed root cause analysis.

Jacklyn Carroll introduces canvases in the GitHub Copilot app: shared, interactive workspaces that let you collaborate with an agent beyond a chat thread. The article shows example prompts and outcomes for building canvas extensions that support issue triage, codebase visualization, session/worktree cleanup, prompt coaching, and cross-tool knowledge discovery.

GitHub gives a beginner-friendly tour of the GitHub Copilot app, positioning it as an agent-native desktop workspace for GitHub tasks. It shows how to start an agent session, hand off a real coding task, watch Copilot explore a codebase, run tests, and iteratively review and merge changes.

Allison announces that Gemini 3.6 Flash is rolling out as a selectable model in GitHub Copilot, highlighting its focus on coding and longer-horizon agentic tasks, plus where it’s available and what admins need to enable for Business and Enterprise plans.

sbaynes announces an expanded Microsoft–Mistral partnership that brings Mistral Medium 3.5 and OCR 4 into Microsoft AI Foundry and Copilot Studio, with deployment options spanning Azure cloud, Azure Local, and fully disconnected environments aimed at regulated industries that need stronger control over data and operations.

Waldek Mastykarz and Garry Trinder share a practical approach to improving AI agent behavior by testing changes locally first. Using a SharePoint Framework (SPFx) upgrade scenario, they show why “obvious” tweaks often fail, and how to emulate documentation and MCP server changes to validate hypotheses quickly.

MattH_OneLake explains how Microsoft Fabric mirroring can surface Snowflake-managed Apache Iceberg tables in OneLake without copying data, by replicating Iceberg metadata via shortcuts and virtualizing the tables as Delta Lake so they can be queried across Fabric engines.

Allison announces that GitHub Enterprise Cloud admins can now manage a cost center’s AI credit pool directly in the billing UI for Copilot Business and Copilot Enterprise, including automatic pool limit calculation and options for what happens when the included credit limit is reached.

GitHub introduces GitHub Code Quality (now generally available) and shows how CodeQL analysis plus AI-assisted findings and Copilot Autofix can surface and fix issues directly in pull requests, with rulesets to enforce quality gates at merge time.

Allison announces an update to GitHub Copilot usage reporting: Copilot Business and Copilot Enterprise users can now see the number of AI credits used in the current billing cycle, even when an admin hasn’t configured an individual budget.

Daniel Roth hosts an ASP.NET Community Standup covering what’s new for ASP.NET Core and Blazor in .NET 11 Preview 6, including async minimal API validation, automatic CSRF protection, OpenAPI 3.2 updates, unions, and improvements across Blazor and SignalR.

John Savill gives an overview of Microsoft IQ and how it’s meant to bring the right intelligence (enterprise data, web data, and model capabilities) to AI agents, including the different “IQ” surfaces (Work, Fabric, Foundry, Web) and the security/identity considerations around least privilege and protection.

John Savill gives a quick overview of Microsoft IQ, outlining what it is at a high level and how it fits into Microsoft’s AI-related ecosystem.

Visual Studio Code introduces the VS Code Learn extension, aimed at making it easier to get started with agentic development workflows inside VS Code.

sbaynes announces new Azure AI and HPC infrastructure options built with AMD hardware, including upcoming HDv2 and HXv2 CPU VM families and the ND MI455X v7 VM for production-scale AI inference workloads.

Allison announces general availability of GitHub Code Quality for GitHub Enterprise Cloud and GitHub Team, combining deterministic CodeQL analysis with AI-assisted detection and Copilot Autofix to flag maintainability and reliability issues in pull requests, plus new org-level dashboards, coverage reporting, ruleset-based quality gates, and APIs.

John Edward outlines practical Azure architecture best practices for enterprise applications, covering the Azure Well-Architected Framework, scalability and high availability patterns, security with Zero Trust, observability, infrastructure as code, CI/CD, cost controls, networking, disaster recovery, and governance.

This week focused on making ML systems easier to run in production, from securing outbound AI calls in SQL Server 2025 to tightening governance and cost visibility across OneLake. Fabric updates added storage tiering and reporting, plus clearer architecture patterns for building an AI-ready data foundation. On the real-time side, Eventstreams matured with stronger connectors, event-time processing, and practical CDC-to-action reference flows, while new guidance covered context-aware AI layers and safer automation patterns for calling Fabric REST APIs.

This week's Azure roundup focuses on practical ways to put AI agents behind enterprise guardrails, with Azure API Management (APIM) emerging as the control point for identity, spend limits, routing, and observability. Azure AI Foundry now adds an AI Gateway control plane that can create or associate an APIM AI Gateway from the Foundry admin console, giving platform teams a clearer governance surface while keeping the data path and policies in APIM. The posts also show how to enforce per-consumer entitlements, emit per-model token metrics to Azure Monitor and Application Insights without changing client code, and layer Azure Front Door plus WAF for defense in depth. The theme running through all of it is moving from policy to proof, where continuous telemetry and audit-ready evidence become part of operating agent platforms at scale.

This week, GitHub Copilot got easier to measure and easier to govern, with expanded usage metrics (including Copilot app activity) and new repository-level reporting that links adoption to where work ships. Security workflows tightened as AI detections land directly in pull requests, agentic autofix can open draft remediation PRs with validation reruns, and the Copilot app adds an on-demand /security-review check. On the tooling side, Visual Studio and JetBrains pushed multi-model choice, endpoint control, and safer integrations (including MCP trust and BYOK endpoints), while Copilot code review became more configurable and even usable from GitHub Mobile for quick fixes.

This week's AI roundup centers on a clear operational shift: centralize access, authorization, and auditability as agents move from demos into real systems. Azure API Management and Foundry's AI Gateway control plane show how teams can enforce token limits, routing, and telemetry, while MCP's enterprise-managed authorization patterns tighten end-to-end tool access using Entra ID and App Service auth. On the engineering side, stable Agent Skills for Python, long-running MCP tools on Azure Functions, and richer MCP outputs push agent tooling toward repeatable, debuggable workflows. Copilot and security updates round it out with repo-level usage metrics, more configurable code review, AI-powered code scanning detections, and agentic autofix that make cost, policy, and least-privilege design part of everyday development.

This week's Security roundup connects active threat intel with the platform controls teams can use to reduce exposure. Microsoft detailed ACR Stealer intrusion chains and ShinyHunters-linked OAuth abuse against Salesforce, while a real @asyncapi npm compromise showed how CI misconfigurations and trusted publishing can turn PRs into malware delivery. On the platform side, GitHub shipped more in-PR security signals (AI detections, agentic autofix, and Copilot security review) plus safer supply-chain defaults like Dependabot cooldowns and stronger secret scanning automation. Rounding it out, Entra ID moves to passkeys by default and new guidance focuses on governing AI agents and tool access with least privilege, gateways, and auditable authorization.

Pamela Fox announces MCP Live, a free livestream focused on the Model Context Protocol (MCP), including updates from MCP maintainers and teams at Microsoft and GitHub, plus sessions on building MCP servers in VS Code and upcoming MCP authorization work.