Browse All Posts (95)

Naba Kumar and the MLVC team announce the open-source release of MLVC, a learned video codec that replaces traditional codec primitives with end-to-end neural compression. The post shares bitrate savings versus H.264/H.265, real-time performance targets on commodity NPUs, and what’s included in the GitHub release (models, weights, training scripts, and conversion tooling).

Allison announces that Anthropic’s Claude Opus 5 is now selectable in GitHub Copilot, highlighting its strengths on long-running, multi-step coding tasks and agentic workflows, plus where it’s available, how admins enable it for Business/Enterprise, and how usage-based billing applies.

John Savill recaps a small set of Azure updates for the week of 24th July 2026, covering new capabilities across AKS, Azure Functions runtimes, networking, DDoS protection, Defender security assessments for PostgreSQL Flexible Server, and a new Log Analytics table aimed at generative AI workloads.

GitHub’s The Download rounds up developer news including TypeScript 7’s new native Go compiler, VS Code 1.129’s dedicated agent host runtime, Kimi K3’s 2.8T-parameter model, and Microsoft open-sourcing the 1996 Comic Chat IRC client, plus a few other notable open-source and ecosystem updates.

Visual Studio Code shares a short announcement for a new course on using Foundry Toolkit in VS Code to build, test, debug, and deploy AI applications.

Fokko at Work walks through what’s new for GitHub Copilot in Visual Studio Code 1.130, focusing on assisted tool approvals, Agents window improvements, and chat updates, with notes on how enterprise policies and plan differences can affect feature availability.

carlottacaste shares a short walkthrough of the Foundry Toolkit for Visual Studio Code and a companion VS Code Learn course, focused on keeping model selection, prompt iteration, and agent development inside VS Code, with links to a full video playlist and a featured setup episode.

Kayla Cinnamon gives a quick tour of the redesigned editor panel inside the Agents window in VS Code 1.129, showing how the updated layout supports agent-driven workflows and keeps code editing and AI-assisted interactions in one place.

Allison announces general availability of Copilot cloud agent for Linear, letting teams assign Linear issues to Copilot to produce draft pull requests, run work in an ephemeral environment backed by GitHub Actions, and report progress back into Linear with configurable models, branches, and custom agents.

arindamc explains how to build a real-time “row-to-intelligent-action” pipeline in Microsoft Fabric that captures shopping-cart signals via CDC, reshapes them into analytics-ready rows, and enriches each micro-batch with AI in a Spark Structured Streaming notebook to drive timely actions.

Allison announces that GitHub MCP Server already supports the upcoming stateless MCP specification, outlining protocol changes (like removing sessions and initialize) and what GitHub changed internally to stay compatible while improving scalability and verification.

AbodeSaafan explains how the Azure Logic Apps team migrated roughly 60,000 per-customer Azure Functions apps from the end-of-life v1/v2 runtime to Functions v4 (isolated worker) under live load, using shadow traffic, strict parity checks, and a progressive rollout with fast rollback and careful retirement of the old fleet.

sbaynes announces two new Microsoft in-house model variants—MAI-Image-2.5-Pro and MAI-Voice-2-Flash—now in public preview, and explains where they’re already running in production across Microsoft products and Azure, including pricing, performance claims, and developer entry points via Azure AI Foundry.

Allison announces a GitHub Mobile improvement that lets you use the Copilot cloud coding agent to investigate and fix failing GitHub Actions checks directly from a pull request, creating a follow-up PR for you to review and merge.

stevenbucher explains how Azure Policy for Kubernetes can now enforce policies using Kubernetes Validating Admission Policy (VAP) with CEL, via Gatekeeper’s integration. The post contrasts the older webhook/Rego flow with in-process validation, then walks through packaging a CEL constraint template into an Azure Policy definition and rolling it out across AKS clusters.

Steve Sweetman explains how AT&T built and scaled its telecom-focused OTel 2.0 models using Microsoft Foundry Managed Compute, combining open models from Hugging Face with AMD and NVIDIA GPU capacity to process around one trillion tokens while optimizing for cost, performance, and deployment speed.

Allison announces a public preview update for GitHub Projects and GitHub Issues: multi-select fields, allowing a single field to store multiple values and enabling filtering, grouping, and searching across project views.

Peter Ibekwe announces Agent Framework Declarative Workflows 1.0 for both Python and .NET, showing how to define multi-agent orchestration in YAML (branching, state, handoffs, and human approvals) and then load and run it as a standard runtime workflow.

GitHub hosts a “Rubber Duck Thursdays” coworking session where viewers can hang out with the team, ask questions, and hear what’s new in the GitHub ecosystem.

HARMEETGILL announces the general availability of OneLake resource instance rules in Microsoft Fabric, explaining how workspace admins can allow secure service-to-service access from specific Azure resource instances (like Databricks or Azure SQL) without relying on broad IP allowlists or private networking everywhere.

OfirSarfaty announces a public preview feature for Azure DDoS Protection: custom policies that let teams set protocol-specific detection thresholds and manage per-resource mitigation behavior, while keeping existing Azure Monitor visibility and DDoS telemetry.

John Savill gives a quick, practical introduction to Windows Sandbox, showing how to install it, what the underlying architecture looks like, and how to customize a sandbox session for safely running apps or processes in an isolated Windows environment.

Microsoft Developer introduces SQL MCP Server 2.0 and explains how it helps agentic apps work with production SQL data more safely, including new OBO authentication, MCP tool improvements, and security guardrails, with demos covering configuration and controlling access across Graph, REST, and MCP.

Anna Hoffman introduces Change Event Streaming (CES) in public preview across Microsoft SQL, showing where it fits for modern, event-driven application scenarios and how it differs from approaches like CDC and mirroring in SQL Server 2025, Azure SQL, and Fabric SQL.

Carlin Cherry explains why Dependabot now applies a default three-day cooldown before opening non-security version update pull requests, aiming to reduce exposure to fast-moving supply chain attacks where malicious package releases are discovered and removed within hours.

Allison announces a public preview for GitHub Issues agent automation controls, adding approvals, confidence ratings, and rationale so teams can review or auto-apply agent-driven changes like labeling, assigning, and closing issues.

GitHub shows how to tailor the GitHub Copilot for Jira integration so teams can reach draft pull requests faster, using ticket-level and space-level instructions to set defaults like target repo and branch naming, and to route specific work (such as API refactors) to custom agents.

Microsoft Threat Intelligence and the Microsoft Defender Security Research Team summarize Q2 2026 email and Teams threat trends, including the post-disruption decline of Tycoon2FA-linked phishing, shifts in QR code and CAPTCHA-gated lures, and notable BEC and malware-delivery campaigns, plus concrete Defender configuration and response guidance.

James demonstrates how the GitHub MCP Server connects GitHub Copilot to GitHub workflows inside VS Code, enabling natural-language issue management, pull request creation, and code review without switching tools.

Visual Studio Code shares a short clip highlighting a GitHub Copilot-related “did you know?” tip in VS Code, framed as a quick GitHub “hacking” moment for developers.

GitHub experiments with building a personal assistant using the GitHub CLI, focusing on how to wire up workflows and try out GitHub features from the command line.

junjieli introduces the Foundry Agent Canvas (public preview), a GitHub Copilot App extension that lets developers discover resources, scaffold and configure a Foundry hosted agent, test it locally with an embedded Agent Inspector, and deploy it to Foundry Agent Service using azd-driven workflows.

anandgmenon walks through running Azure Logic Apps Hybrid on a self-managed RKE2 Kubernetes cluster, including how to provide an ingress IP with MetalLB, connect the cluster to Azure Arc, install the Container Apps extension, and fix the RKE2-specific DNS and inotify issues that can break deployments.

Authorised Territory demonstrates how to add sampling to a .NET Model Context Protocol (MCP) server so an MCP tool can call back into a client’s locally running LLM (via Ollama) using a chat client.

brauerblogs shares a reminder to register for Microsoft’s “Path to Production for Agents” webinar series (July 27–28), focused on taking AI agent solutions from experimentation to secure, scalable production with guidance on governance, platform design, AgentOps, and multi-agent architecture patterns.

saniya0307 explains how Azure Local adds iSCSI SAN integration alongside Fibre Channel, enabling hybrid (S2D + SAN) and SAN-only disaggregated deployments so organizations can reuse existing storage arrays, scale compute and storage independently, and modernize virtualization infrastructure with Azure-consistent management.

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.

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.

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.

Kalaivanan explains how to use Azure API Management (APIM) as a control plane for Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers, focusing on enterprise-ready authentication, access control, observability, and governance. The post lays out practical patterns for putting APIM in front of MCP endpoints and using Entra ID, OAuth flows, and API Center for discovery.