Browse All Posts (110)

Pieter Vandenheede explains how to decide whether to keep BizTalk after Microsoft confirmed BizTalk Server 2020 is the final release, and what conditions make “staying” a deliberate (and limited) choice. He also outlines practical signals that it’s time to move and frames the shift from “if we migrate” to “how we migrate safely.”

Thomas Maurer explains how Adaptive Apps and the open-source Radius control plane help teams engineer, test, and prove application portability across Azure, Azure Local, and other Kubernetes environments by separating app intent from environment-specific implementations.

GitHub shares three practical workflow changes to reduce review fatigue and keep pull request backlogs under control when teams adopt AI coding tools, focusing on better prompt inputs, smaller changes via stacked PRs, and shifting reviews toward assessment rather than line-by-line editing.

Luis Quintanilla invites teams to submit real-world stories about building, modernizing, and improving applications with .NET, with the goal of featuring more community and customer examples at .NET Conf 2026 and across official .NET channels.

Mariyaali announces the general availability of the SQL DW operations skill for Microsoft Fabric Data Warehouse, which lets teams use natural-language prompts (for example via GitHub Copilot CLI) to run bounded, read-only diagnostics and get structured findings, evidence, and recommended next steps for common warehouse incidents.

Allison announces new configuration tiers for GitHub Copilot auto model selection—efficiency, balance, and intelligence—so teams can control how Copilot trades off cost, response quality, and response time per prompt, with billing based on the model selected.

GitHub introduces CVE Lite CLI, a local dependency vulnerability scanner for JavaScript and TypeScript projects, highlighting how it classifies direct vs transitive issues, validates fix versions with OSV, and outputs exact upgrade commands across npm, pnpm, Yarn, and Bun.

Pieter Vandenheede breaks down Microsoft’s BizTalk Server lifecycle update, what stays supported through 2028/2030, and why “support isn’t strategy” for long-term integration platforms. He outlines practical next steps: inventorying your integration landscape, planning timelines, and evaluating Azure Integration Services (including Logic Apps) as the direction Microsoft is investing in.

Rick Strahl explains why files under ASP.NET Core’s wwwroot are public by default, and how to protect dynamically generated “static” files (like admin logs) so they still respect authentication and authorization rules.

John Edward explains Microsoft’s general availability release of MCP-compliant tools in Copilot Studio agent workflows, and why standardized tool access matters for building enterprise AI agents that can reliably interact with proprietary systems, dynamic knowledge sources, and custom actions under existing governance.

This week's Weekly AI Roundup focuses on what it takes to run agents as real production workloads: Azure landing zone-based reference architecture, identity and observability baselines, and cost controls that make audits and FinOps practical. On the grounding side, Fabric and Foundry content reinforced that agent quality depends on a governed meaning layer, with ontology work, lineage graphs, and the growing "IQ" family shaping how truth flows into prompts and tool calls. MCP continued to mature with spec updates, enterprise-focused authentication direction, and more practical implementation patterns, while GitHub Copilot pushed further into agent workflows with managed permissions, reporting, and programmatic security rollouts. We also saw operational AI tighten up in Azure Copilot troubleshooting, faster multilingual speech recognition, and more evidence that closed-loop scientific and security agents need the same governance, evaluation, and lifecycle discipline as any other platfor

This week's .NET roundup centers on shipping and hardening: .NET 11 Release Candidate 1 arrives with go-live support, and September servicing updates land across supported .NET and .NET Framework versions. On the developer experience side, C# 15 unions and closed hierarchies move from theory to practice in ASP.NET Core, with concrete guidance for JSON binding and OpenAPI anyOf contracts. We also look at cleaner Azure-to-App Service integrations using Managed Identity, new troubleshooting patterns for distributed .NET Aspire apps with Visual Studio and Copilot, local AI agent evaluation in .NET with Agent Framework and Ollama, and CodeQL updates that make ARM64 scanning workflows easier to run and maintain.

This week in DevOps, the focus shifted toward running fleets and pipelines with tighter guardrails and less manual work. Azure Arc pushed more hybrid and edge day-2 operations into the portal, while Azure Compute and Azure Copilot targeted faster VM startup paths and more structured troubleshooting inside RBAC boundaries. On the delivery side, GitHub and npm added policy-first controls around pull requests, caches, and account recovery, and Copilot moved deeper into review and remediation workflows with clearer model and sandbox governance options. We will walk through what changed, where it reduces operational toil, and what teams should validate before rolling these updates across environments.

This week's Security roundup focuses on identity-first cloud defense and the controls that stop attacks at the first chokepoints: authentication, messaging, and the cloud control plane. Microsoft published a Cloud Web Applications Threat Matrix that turns ATT&CK techniques into concrete hardening priorities for App Service and serverless workloads, while new incident writeups show how passkey-themed lures, AI-assisted impersonation, and AiTM patterns translate into real Entra ID and M365 compromise paths. On the DevSecOps side, GitHub shipped enforceable guardrails (blocking PR merges with unresolved secrets, least-privilege cache access, and API-managed AI Scan rollout) alongside CodeQL updates, and the agent story matured with Citadel architecture guidance plus enterprise policies that constrain Copilot agent actions. Rounding it out are platform updates like user-bound delegation SAS in Azure Storage, managed-identity triggers for App Service integrations, network-aware migration pl

This week's ML roundup focuses on making AI systems more reliable by tightening the connection between governed data and agent grounding, from Fabric's lineage-first item relations API to table-level discovery in OneLake Catalog search. We also saw practical Spark work that pushes latency down and correctness checks earlier, including Structured Streaming real-time mode for fast quarantine and native JSON parsing in Fabric's Native Execution Engine. Finally, three production case studies (supply chain planning, closed-loop lab discovery, and feedback-to-work-item automation) show what agentic systems look like when they ship with traceability, safety controls, and human review.

This week's Azure roundup focuses on turning enterprise AI from pilots into repeatable platform work. Microsoft sharpened the recommended path: start with Azure landing zones for identity, networking, and policy, then use Microsoft Foundry to operationalize agents and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) with consistent guardrails. Governance and cost control are treated as day-2 requirements, with token limits, rate controls, and Azure API Management's AI Gateway highlighted as practical enforcement points. If you are building internal copilots, the guidance reads like a deployment checklist for standard auth (Microsoft Entra ID), telemetry (Azure Monitor), and spend attribution you can tie back to outcomes.

This week's GitHub Copilot updates pushed agentic workflows from "use at your own risk" toward something admins can govern and teams can run every day. Enterprise managed permissions for agent operations and JetBrains sandbox controls make it possible to enforce runtime guardrails (block, allow, or require approval) across common risk areas like shell access, files, and outbound domains. On the workflow side, the Copilot app, VS Code Agents, and CLI routing updates reduced friction in multi-step work, while code review and Code Quality autofix features moved PRs and static analysis closer to an "agent-assisted" default. Rounding it out, new usage metrics for VS Code Agents, a MAI-Code-1-Flash deprecation, and more guidance on MCP and BYOK setups give platform teams clearer levers for rollout, measurement, and cost control.

kedikala lays out a practical security framework for agentic apps on Azure, focusing on how to keep tool calls safe when untrusted content can steer an agent toward sensitive reads or risky writes. The post breaks controls down across identity, retrieval, request validation, execution constraints, and outcome verification.

GitHub explains how hill climbing can be used to iteratively improve AI agent performance by running targeted evals, benchmarking results, and using the feedback loop to steer responses toward higher accuracy over time.

Wiliam_Rosa breaks down how Spark Structured Streaming’s Real-time mode (as implemented in Azure Databricks) can cut anomaly-detection latency from seconds to sub-millisecond, using an Ethereum transaction pipeline that classifies events as ALLOW or QUARANTINE based on protocol invariants and sensitive-payload checks.

Allison announces new generally available GitHub Copilot usage metrics that track activity in the dedicated VS Code Agents window, including both aggregate (enterprise/org) and per-user fields for 1-day and 28-day reporting periods.

Allison announces improvements to GitHub Copilot code review, including automatic resolution of addressed review comments, smarter commit message suggestions when applying Copilot fixes, and deeper review analysis using Copilot SDK shell tools plus an ensemble approach for Lite reviews.

jordanselig explains a new public preview capability in Azure Managed Connectors: sending trigger events directly to Azure App Service apps. The post covers how the App Service destination is configured, how managed-identity callbacks are authenticated with App Service built-in auth (Easy Auth), and includes an end-to-end sample with Bicep and Azure Developer CLI.

Tomoko Tanaka shows how her team turned event marketing runbooks into “ops as code” using GitHub Issues, GitHub Actions, and GitHub Copilot. The post breaks down the repo patterns (issue forms, labels, skills in Markdown, and a DRY_RUN switch) that automate setup, daily screening, and post-event reporting with guardrails.

John Savill shares a quick Azure Weekly Update covering recent platform changes and previews, including VM ephemeral OS disk caching, Azure Functions Flex Consumption custom TLS, user delegation SAS updates, AZD extension framework work, Azure Load Testing Playwright expansion, and new Copilot-related items.

Martin Woodward shares his pick for a new GitHub Copilot feature: the GitHub Copilot app, a native Windows and Mac experience aimed at agentic coding workflows across issues and pull requests, with isolation via separate Git worktrees.

Fokko at Work demos selected new GitHub Copilot features in Visual Studio Code 1.137, including automations, attaching GitHub issues and pull requests directly in chat, and voice mode, with notes on how enterprise policies and pricing plans can affect feature availability.

Visual Studio Code shows how to connect your own Azure-hosted AI models to GitHub Copilot in VS Code using Bring Your Own Key (BYOK), so teams can control which models are available in Copilot and pick the right model for different coding tasks.

Rohon Mohapatra explains how the Citadel reference architecture builds on AI landing zones and Microsoft Foundry to standardize enterprise AI operations—covering shared access controls, observability, identity, and security governance across multiple teams and workloads.

KimVaddi explains why many oil & gas AI initiatives stall on inconsistent business meaning rather than data volume, and argues that the “meaning layer” is the real readiness bottleneck. The post connects OSDU, Azure Data Manager for Energy, and Microsoft Fabric IQ’s preview ontology capability as a practical path to governed, cross-domain reasoning.

Allison summarizes the September 7 weekly GitHub Copilot releases, including Jira integration in the Copilot app, Project HydraFusion model orchestration in Copilot CLI, new agent automations and voice mode updates in VS Code, and expanded enterprise sandbox controls for Copilot in JetBrains.

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.