Browse All Posts (121)

Gloridel Morales announces the September 2026 patch release for Azure DevOps Server, including the Patch 8 download link, release notes, and a quick command to verify whether the patch is installed on your server.

Kayla Cinnamon explains how to review agent-generated changes inside the GitHub Copilot app using three built-in panels: a diff view for inspecting edits, a terminal for running project commands, and a browser preview for validating UI changes before creating a pull request.

Allison announces a public preview of a refreshed repository-level pull request listing page on GitHub, focused on making it faster to find and act on PRs with improved filtering, advanced search, and a more compact, information-dense layout.

Brendan Burns explains why Microsoft was named a Leader in the 2026 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Container Management, and uses the announcement to outline how AKS, Azure Container Apps, Azure Arc, and Fleet Manager are positioned for AI, hybrid, and edge container operations at scale.

Allison announces a public preview that adds GitHub REST API endpoints for enabling and managing GitHub code scanning’s AI Scan for pull requests at both the organization and repository level, making it easier to roll out AI-powered security detections across selected repos without manual UI configuration.

GitHub spotlights the open source project DocumentDB as part of its Open Source Friday series, focusing on the project and its place in the broader open source ecosystem.

yaronc announces a preview Fabric REST API that exposes item lineage as a dependency graph you can query from code, enabling automated impact analysis, documentation/catalog scenarios, CI/CD checks, and richer context for AI agents that need to reason about upstream sources and downstream consumers.

Rena Liu announces Azure AI Speech LLM 2607 and explains what changes for developers building speech-to-text and real-time voice experiences, including better multilingual and mixed-language recognition, improved punctuation and numeric transcription, lower latency, and a simpler phrase list parameter for domain-specific customization.

Steven Truitt shares a hands-on walkthrough of using Microsoft Discovery as AI assistance to take a small chip-design project from a rough spec through C and HLS, into Verilog RTL, and finally to physical layout and basic timing/power optimization using open-source EDA tooling.

Allison announces GitHub Actions cache-mode, a generally available workflow/job setting that lets teams apply least-privilege access to the Actions cache and reduce cache poisoning risk by controlling whether jobs can restore and/or save caches.

Microsoft Security Research breaks down a large-scale business email compromise campaign that used AI-assisted executive impersonation and fake invoices to push finance teams into fraudulent ACH payments, and maps practical mitigations using Microsoft Defender for Office 365, Defender XDR, and Security Copilot.

Santhosh_Ravin1 announces a preview update to Microsoft Fabric’s Spark Native Execution Engine that adds native JSON reading and parsing. The post explains why JSON parsing often becomes a pipeline bottleneck in lakehouse workloads, and how keeping JSON in a columnar native path can improve end-to-end Spark job performance.

Dmitrii Korolev explains how C# 15 union types and closed class hierarchies behave in ASP.NET Core when serialized with System.Text.Json, including what works in Minimal APIs, MVC, SignalR, Blazor, and OpenAPI, plus the trade-offs around discriminator-free JSON and ambiguous payloads.

Steve Sweetman explains how to govern AI agent spend in Microsoft Foundry by combining request-path token limits, observability (traces, monitoring, evaluations), and finance-grade budgets, then tying those signals to ROI so teams can decide what to optimize, scale, or retire.

Allison announces the deprecation of the MAI-Code-1-Flash model across GitHub Copilot experiences and points Copilot Enterprise admins to the steps needed to enable the replacement model via Copilot model policies and settings.

Microsoft Developer introduces the Azure SQL Database Foundations series, positioning it as an entry point for learning core concepts around Azure SQL Database and how it fits into building and running cloud-hosted relational databases on Azure.

mnshnth announces that workload orchestration for Azure Arc is now available in the Azure portal, focusing on a portal-first onboarding flow that lets teams deploy a pre-packaged app to an Azure Arc-enabled Kubernetes cluster in minutes and then scale the same approach across distributed sites.

Microsoft Developer covers automatic index compaction (public preview) and how it can reduce or eliminate traditional index maintenance work for Azure SQL Database, Azure SQL Managed Instance, and SQL database in Microsoft Fabric.

kchoi announces a public preview feature in Azure Arc Site Manager that centralizes monitoring and management of Azure Local workloads across multiple sites, including Azure Local virtual machines and Kubernetes clusters, with bulk actions plus grouping, filtering, and search to speed up day-to-day operations.

Maria Bledsoe outlines how Azure IaaS resiliency is shifting from one-time DR planning to continuous design-and-operations practices, highlighting new and updated Azure capabilities for assessing resiliency posture, reducing blast radius during failures, and validating recovery readiness.

Rob Lefferts explains how threat actors are using AI brands (like ChatGPT, Copilot, DeepSeek, and Claude) as social-engineering bait, and how Microsoft Defender helps detect and disrupt these campaigns across email, identity, endpoints, and SaaS signals.

AzureAndrewChen announces the general availability of Dell Managed PowerScale for Microsoft Azure, a Dell-operated managed file storage service that can be provisioned and managed through Azure-native interfaces. The post highlights supported protocols, scale limits, and how the service integrates with Azure networking and Blob Storage tiering.

Allison announces that the GitHub Actions Xcode 27 runner image now runs on macOS 27 (public preview), enabling Apple app validation against the latest macOS version while keeping the same workflow runner labels.

Visual Studio Code announces a new “VS Code pet” coding companion that you can trigger from GitHub Copilot Chat in VS Code using the /vscode-pet command, and invites the community to submit name ideas during a one-week window.

Juan Montes profiles Kinaxis’ Maestro platform and how it uses Azure (including AKS, Databricks, Azure OpenAI, Cosmos DB, and Azure AI Content Safety) to run large-scale supply chain scenario modeling, forecasting, and agentic AI experiences. The piece also touches on Kinaxis’ internal use of GitHub Copilot for an agentic, PR-driven development workflow.

Thomas Maurer introduces the new digital sovereignty adoption guidance in the Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework, explaining the sovereign cloud continuum and a practical three-phase path (planning, architecture/governance, and operations) for building and running controlled Azure workloads across public, private, and partner cloud models.

GitHub shows how to use the new attach flag in the GitHub CLI to add images directly to pull requests and issues, making it easier to share screenshots and other visual context during reviews and issue triage.

Microsoft Developer introduces Toolboxes in Microsoft Foundry as a way to make MCP (Model Context Protocol) integrations more enterprise-ready, with centralized governance, consistent authentication, and reusable configuration across multiple agents and tools.

Microsoft Developer discusses the MCP Triggers & Events experimental extension, showing how agents can poll MCP servers for events and be triggered via webhooks, and what new event-driven agent architectures this enables.

Caitie McCaffrey reviews the current state of the Model Context Protocol (MCP), focusing on the major changes in the 2026-07-28 specification release and what they mean for developers building AI agents and agent-to-agent communication patterns.

Microsoft Developer explains why Dynamic Client Registration becomes a scaling problem for MCP clients, and how switching to Client ID Metadata Documents turns the client_id into a durable, URL-based identity that servers can fetch on demand.

Jeremiah Lowin shows how MCP Apps can render interactive UI (buttons, charts, forms) directly inside AI clients, and walks through building these experiences in Python using FastMCP and Prefab—from basic components to dynamically generated interfaces.

Den Delimarsky explains how MCP authorization evolved, covering the original OAuth profile, protected resource metadata, changes to client registration, and how enterprise-managed authorization fits into the model.

Microsoft Developer demonstrates how to build modern Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers in VS Code, moving beyond simple local tool calls to more production-ready agent integrations with notifications, elicitation, stateless HTTP, and plugin-based distribution.

Sam Morrow discusses GitHub’s Model Context Protocol (MCP), covering what his team is shipping across MCP server and client implementations, plus the spec areas he’s most excited about and what’s coming next.

Jakub Oleksy’s August 2026 GitHub availability report breaks down five production incidents across GitHub Actions, authentication, and Copilot services, including what failed, how GitHub mitigated impact, and what reliability work is planned next (capacity, autoscaling, retries, and regional failover).

Authorised Territory demonstrates how to build domain-specific AI agent evaluators in .NET using Microsoft Agent Framework connected to a local Ollama model, then run automated checks against the agent’s responses to validate both content and output structure.

Nick Brady rounds up July and August 2026 updates for Microsoft Foundry, including GA for Hosted Agents, Voice Live integration, and Toolboxes, plus Model Router pool/region changes and new model releases. It also calls out SDK migrations (Python/JS/Java/.NET) and runtime requirement bumps you should test before upgrading.

HilaryWang announces a public preview feature for Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets that lets Azure automatically choose availability zones based on SKU availability, capacity signals, and your placement constraints, reducing the need to maintain region-specific zone lists for multi-region zonal deployments.

Allison announces a new npm security protection: after signing in with a recovery code, any npm account is placed under a 72-hour security hold that blocks publishing and other sensitive write actions while still allowing sign-in and package installs.