Browse All Posts (106)

The Visual Studio Code Team shares incremental updates in the VS Code 1.134 Insiders changelog, including improvements to Voice Mode onboarding and chat UX, new editor association behavior for opening HTML in the integrated browser, and early support for running Codex sessions via the agent host with external model providers.

Visual Studio Code highlights improvements to the Markdown editing experience in VS Code, focusing on making it easier to work with Markdown files directly in the editor.

Dominik Titl presents a .NET MAUI Community Standup session on a developer tool that combines app inspection, layout analysis, and test recording with GitHub Copilot Canvas, showing how teams can capture evidence from real app interactions and use it to create repeatable tests and diagnose failures.

fredguis announces general availability of identity-based predicate filtering for SQL Audit Logs in Microsoft Fabric, aimed at reducing audit noise at enterprise scale by filtering audit events based on who is querying and what they’re allowed to see.

Chris Klug presents a .NET Data Community Standup session focused on practical ways to use Entity Framework Core interceptors, showing how interception hooks can be applied around EF Core’s database operations for cross-cutting concerns and diagnostics.

Kristen Womack announces general availability of the Azure Developer CLI (azd) extension framework and explains how platform and product teams can package repeatable Azure workflows as installable CLI extensions, including lifecycle hooks, provider integrations, version constraints, and MCP tool exposure for agent and developer-tool scenarios.

varghesejoji shares a hands-on walkthrough and reference implementation that wires Azure Monitor SLIs/SLOs, Azure Monitor health models, and the Azure SRE Agent into an end-to-end reliability flow, from OpenTelemetry telemetry and Prometheus alerts to incident investigation and proposed remediation.

sbaynes announces MAI-Code-1.1-Flash, a new coding model now running in GitHub Copilot, focused on better code quality and lower cost. The post highlights token-efficiency gains, benchmark improvements in Copilot CLI and .NET tasks, and production metrics like code survival and return visits.

goupadhy announces the July 2026 on-premises data gateway release (version 3000.326), focused on keeping Power BI Desktop and the Power BI Service aligned for refresh/query execution, and on improving security, authentication, diagnostics, and operational visibility for enterprise deployments.

Gloridel Morales announces the August 11, 2026 patch releases for Azure DevOps Server, with direct download links for the patched versions and a quick command you can run on the server to verify the patch is installed.

Chris Noring explains a practical workflow for investigating and controlling rising GitHub AI spend by combining the GitHub admin UI (Metered usage, Budgets and alerts) with the Billing Usage API to build repeatable, company-specific spend reports such as per-user rankings within a cost center.

Allison highlights what’s new in the GitHub Enterprise Server (GHES) 3.22 release candidate, including Copilot CLI support for disconnected environments, Enterprise Teams GA, improvements to secret scanning workflows, and more granular repository ruleset controls for reviews and bypass permissions.

Allison announces a GitHub Copilot for JetBrains release that adds persistent Copilot Memory, brings Ollama support as a BYOK model provider, and expands enterprise controls. The update also improves Codex/agent workflows, streamlines Copilot CLI setup from IDE terminals, and includes a set of UX and reliability fixes.

Allison announces a GitHub repository governance update that lets you convert classic branch protection rules into repository rulesets from the repository settings UI, preserving key protections like required reviews, status checks, and push restrictions while moving to the newer ruleset-based policy model.

Allison announces that the MAI-Code-1-Flash model will be deprecated across GitHub Copilot on September 10, 2026, and replaced by MAI-Code-1.1-Flash. The post explains what Copilot Enterprise admins may need to change in model policies and where users will see the updated model.

Natalie Guevara explains how “agentic” workflows change day-to-day development: developers don’t just write code, they design the delivery system around it. The article outlines a practical GitHub-centered flow where Copilot-driven agent work is triggered by repo events and validated through CI, reviews, and branch protections.

The .NET Team announces .NET 11 Preview 7 and highlights what’s new across the runtime, SDK, libraries, and app frameworks, with links to detailed release notes for C#, ASP.NET Core (including Blazor), .NET MAUI, EF Core, F#, and Windows Forms.

Rahul Bhandari and Tara Overfield recap the August 2026 servicing releases for .NET and .NET Framework, highlighting security and non-security fixes, the list of addressed CVEs, and where to find release notes, installers, container images, Linux packages, and known issues for supported .NET versions.

Allison announces that MAI-Code-1.1-Flash, Microsoft’s small-tier coding model with native vision support, is rolling out in GitHub Copilot, including where it can be selected, which Copilot plans get access, and how it’s billed under usage-based pricing.

Harshada Hole introduces first-class Git submodule support in Visual Studio 18.9, showing how submodules now appear in the Git UI and how you can add, update, and remove them without switching to a terminal.

Jordan Selig explains what the dedicated Azure API Management AI Gateway tier changes (and doesn’t change) for AI agents hosted on Azure App Service, using a runnable Python/FastAPI sample that forces all model and MCP tool traffic through the gateway with policy, telemetry, and secret-handling patterns.

Jan Kalis (co-written with Nikoloz Buligini) introduces Azure Container Apps Sandboxes (Preview) as a hardware-isolated microVM environment for running AI agent workflows safely, with practical controls like snapshots, restricted egress, managed identities, and VNet integration, plus a real production example from Templafy.

GitHub shows how to use the GitHub Copilot app to automate recurring developer chores like daily Dependabot reviews and pull request triage, using scheduled or issue-triggered tasks driven by plain-English prompts and producing summaries you can act on.

Vishnu Charan TJ explains how new integrations between Azure Blob Storage and the NVIDIA Dynamo stack can speed up LLM inference on AKS, focusing on faster model weight loading for cold starts and KV cache offloading to reduce time-to-first-token latency.

Bret Myers explains how to break down Microsoft Fabric Data Warehouse capacity consumption by combining the Capacity Metrics app with Query Insights, so you can attribute warehouse-level CU usage to specific queries, users, and workloads during a selected time window.

Allison announces an update to GitHub Copilot billing reporting: the AI usage report now includes a per-model token breakdown (input, output, cache read/write) alongside AI credits, making it easier to explain charges and identify cost drivers.

Paul_VicenteH explains why retrieval and reranking are separate stages in a RAG pipeline, then demonstrates hybrid retrieval (including RRF) and learned reranking across Azure AI Search, Azure SQL, PostgreSQL Flexible Server, and Azure Cosmos DB using the SQuAD dataset.

Edward Burns introduces the GitHub Copilot SDK for Java and walks through a Jakarta EE 11 sample app that runs Copilot agent sessions on virtual threads, registers tool-calling APIs via annotations or lambdas, streams events to a real-time UI, and supports BYOK model providers (including Azure endpoints).

msft-shreyas introduces the preview of “Build agent with AI” for Microsoft Fabric Data Agent, an assistant that helps creators explore schemas, learn from query history, generate agent and data source instructions, and validate example queries against real data before applying configuration changes.

Srikanth Shoroff explains why Microsoft Defender Experts MDR was named a Leader in the 2026 IDC MarketScape for enterprise MDR/MXDR, and outlines how the service uses the Microsoft Defender platform, Microsoft Threat Intelligence, and expert-led operations to triage, investigate, and respond to incidents around the clock.

John Savill introduces the core differences between AI, machine learning, deep learning, and generative AI in a short “Tech in Five” explainer, giving a practical mental model for how these terms relate and where LLMs fit in.

GitHub shows how to use GitHub Copilot with the gh-stack skill to split large, agent-generated changes into smaller stacked pull requests, making review and merging easier. The video covers installing the gh-stack CLI extension, verifying the skill setup, prompting Copilot to generate a PR stack, and reviewing and merging the stack on GitHub.

Peter Steinberger shares a practical take on what actually limits scaling AI-assisted software development: not compute or automation, but human attention, taste, and design judgment, and the need to close the loop with automated verification to build trust in AI-generated code.

Microsoft Threat Intelligence breaks down the DeadLock ransomware encryptor and its decentralized “recovery chat” ecosystem, covering execution flow, defense evasion, cryptography choices, and post-encryption behaviors. The post also includes Microsoft Defender detections, indicators of compromise, and practical hardening guidance to reduce ransomware impact.

Allison announces updates to Copilot Chat on github.com, including new controls to minimize the chat overlay and quickly resume recent conversations, plus in-chat indicators that show token spend and per-session/per-message quota to help track usage and budget.

Visual Studio Code shows how to convert existing prompts into reusable “skills” using the Migration feature in VS Code, so teams can standardize and reuse prompt-based workflows more easily.

John Edward explains how to apply FinOps practices to high-volume Azure AI workloads, focusing on the real cost drivers behind model usage, compute, and request patterns. The article lays out practical tactics—visibility, right-sizing, scaling, batching, caching, and guardrails—to keep AI spend predictable without sacrificing latency or reliability.

Allison announces a GitHub notifications change: custom thread subscription settings are being removed, and existing custom subscriptions will be converted to “Subscribed,” which may increase notification volume for affected threads.

This week in Security, the focus shifted from building agent guardrails to operating them safely in real enterprise environments, with clear patterns around least privilege, approval gates, and centrally enforced allowlists. On the developer platform side, identity-first CI/CD continued to replace long-lived secrets, from Azure DevOps workload identity authentication to NuGet.org moving API keys to a 30-day lifetime and pushing OIDC trusted publishing. Supply chain defenses broadened with expanded Dependabot malware advisories and fresh threat intel on an npm worm that abuses preinstall hooks to steal credentials. Hybrid and SOC operations rounded out the week with Azure Local confidential compute and SIEM integrations, plus case studies on macOS evasion tactics and Defender-driven ransomware containment.

This week's .NET roundup centers on making agent and MCP workloads reliable in the real world, from durable long-running tasks on Azure App Service to the stateless-first direction in MCP C# SDK 2.0. On the security and supply chain front, NuGet.org is capping API key lifetimes (pushing teams toward OIDC-based Trusted Publishing), while ASP.NET Core in .NET 11 preview expands automatic CSRF defenses using Fetch Metadata headers. We also cover practical developer experience updates, including richer CI test reporting in Microsoft.Testing.Platform, Blazor performance and lifecycle tweaks in .NET 11 Preview 7, and a concrete local AI sample for live speech-to-text with Foundry Local.