Browse All Posts (94)

Fokko at Work demos the GitHub Copilot and Visual Studio Code 1.138 updates, focusing on sharing Copilot automations, running agent sessions inside local Dev Containers, and improvements to Voice Mode session awareness, with notes on how enterprise policies and pricing plans can affect feature availability.

Jesse Houwing breaks down a nasty PSScriptAnalyzer failure in GitHub Actions where Invoke-ScriptAnalyzer intermittently crashed with a missing Get-Command, then shows how Copilot-assisted investigation, benchmarking, and targeted fixes turned it into a deterministic, faster analyzer with evidence reviewers can rerun.

Allison announces updates to GitHub Copilot’s impact dashboard and reporting APIs, adding 28-day feature engagement metrics so enterprise and organization admins can see which Copilot experiences are being used regularly and where enablement may be needed.

Allison announces expanded GitHub Copilot CLI reporting in the Copilot usage metrics API, adding agentic activity metrics for skills, custom agents, MCP servers, slash commands, and plugins, plus guidance on how counts are calculated and who can access the reports.

Madhura Amlekar explains a common Azure API Management failure mode where custom-domain certificate renewals break when APIM sits behind Front Door, Traffic Manager, or Application Gateway. The post shows why validation passes at deployment but fails months later, and how to redesign the edge so renewals stay reliable.

Bruno Capuano and Justin Yoo walk through updates to Interview Coach, a .NET sample that uses Microsoft Agent Framework and the GitHub Copilot SDK to build an agent-powered interview practice app with specialist agents, shared MCP tools, and a Blazor UI.

Gwyneth Peña-Siguenza demonstrates agent-first development in Visual Studio Code, focusing on practical workflows for running AI agents, controlling what they can do, understanding where sessions execute, and using built-in debugging views while building an app in agent mode.

goupadhy announces a preview soft-delete lifecycle for standard-mode on-premises data gateways in Microsoft Fabric, letting tenant and gateway admins restore deleted gateway clusters and members within a 30-day retention window instead of having to recreate them after accidental deletion.

Ron Pessner explains how Microsoft’s Secure Now experience in Microsoft Security Exposure Management turns common security guidance into prioritized actions, focusing on the fundamentals that reduce exposure as AI-driven and cross-domain attack paths become faster and harder to triage.

Microsoft Developer shows how to build and customize a hosted agent directly from the GitHub Copilot Chat window using Foundry Canvas, focusing on moving from an initial agent to a more production-ready setup with best-practice checks, generated fixes, observability upgrades, and testing with Agent Inspector.

Allison announces that the Ubuntu 26.04 GitHub Actions runner image is now generally available, and explains how the ubuntu-latest label will migrate from Ubuntu 24.04 to 26.04 with a staged rollout window and guidance to avoid broken builds.

Michaela Isaacs announces general availability of Mirroring for Google BigQuery in Microsoft Fabric, positioning it as a supported way to bring BigQuery data into Fabric for broader analytics work without building or maintaining ingestion pipelines.

Microsoft Developer introduces Rayfin, an open-source SDK and CLI for defining and deploying application backends to Microsoft Fabric as first-class Fabric items, highlighting how Fabric identity, governance, and compliance carry through to the deployed app and why Fabric’s SQL database option matters.

Rob Lefferts shares Microsoft’s latest email security benchmarking results, explaining how Microsoft Defender performs across pre-delivery filtering and post-delivery remediation, what the data says about evolving threats, and which product investments (including prompt injection protection) are driven by real-world measurement.

Allison announces the general availability of workflow execution protections in GitHub Actions, covering allowlist-based controls for who can trigger workflows and which events can start them, plus new workflow-level targeting, Insights for auditing, and a REST API for managing policies as code.

Jason Helmick announces the GA release of Microsoft Desired State Configuration (DSC) v3.3.0, detailing new built-in Windows resources, a registry-backed adapter, server-mode command updates, expanded --what-if coverage, new expression functions, and experimental synthetic export filtering for export operations.

abhilashasr proposes an Azure-native pattern for keeping Private Endpoint DNS records in centrally owned Private DNS zones when workloads span multiple Entra tenants. It combines Azure Policy (DeployIfNotExists) with Azure Lighthouse delegation, and outlines deployment phases, validation checks, and security guardrails.

Sayanika outlines an architecture pattern for a retail “growth intelligence” agent built with Azure AI Foundry (Foundry IQ) that reasons across Microsoft Fabric (Fabric IQ + ontology), Dynamics 365 Finance & Operations data exposed via an ERP MCP server, SharePoint policy documents, and optional Web IQ signals to answer cross-domain business questions.

sbaynes shares a hands-on walkthrough of using Microsoft Discovery as an AI assistant to learn a full chip-design flow, from a written spec through C/HLS, RTL in Verilog, and physical layout with OpenROAD, including basic timing and power optimization experiments.

tejabhutada lays out practical patterns for integrating ServiceNow with Azure DevOps, focusing on real-world sync scenarios like requests-to-user-stories, incident/bug routing across multiple orgs, and demand-to-feature delivery. The post highlights where native connectors work, where they break down, and what capabilities matter most for reliable, secure syncing.

greenie-msft introduces Dynamic Workflows for Azure Functions hosted skills, showing how to run multi-step, long-running AI-driven plans using Durable Functions so work can continue beyond the original trigger while keeping state, retries, and timers durable.

Wiliam Rosa explains Azure Databricks’ new (beta) configurable retention for supported system tables, including the 30–3,650 day range, the default behavior when enabled, and how to set the st_retention value via the Databricks Account Settings API for governance and long-term auditing needs.

Hidde de Smet lays out a practical way to judge whether a repo is actually ready for AI coding agents, using GitHub Copilot cloud agent as the concrete example. It focuses on repeatable setup, shared commands, focused tests, CI enforcement, and security boundaries so agent sessions aren’t wasted on missing prerequisites.

varghesejoji shares a practical PowerShell-based approach for securing Azure Managed Redis capacity when regions/SKUs are constrained, using a bounded retry “poller” that rotates through approved candidates, records state between runs, and stops on success or on errors that need human intervention.

Stephen Toub breaks down how GitHub rewrote the Copilot agent runtime from a TypeScript/Node.js/V8 stack into a production Rust runtime, largely using Copilot agents. He explains the architectural drivers (in-process hosting, lower memory, better startup), the incremental port strategy, interop layers, regression patterns, and the measured performance gains.

Bruno Capuano introduces MafClaw, a four-part live series that builds a production-ready AI agent in C# using the Microsoft Agent Framework harness—starting from a minimal IChatClient wrapper and progressively adding tools, planning, safe file access, approvals, memory, skills, code execution, observability, governance, evaluations, and deployment to Microsoft Foundry.

Aashna Garg and Julia Kasper explain Project HydraFusion in GitHub Copilot, focusing on how orchestrating multiple models per request (instead of selecting a single model) can reduce frontier-model costs, and how the approach is evaluated with demos and benchmarking.

Allison announces a GitHub Enterprise Cloud update that lets enterprise admins automate SSO authorization for existing classic PATs and SSH keys across multiple SSO-protected organizations using an enterprise-installed GitHub App and a new bulk-authorization REST API.

Allison announces an additive SCIM change in GitHub: user responses now include the standard profileUrl attribute (RFC 7643), making it easier for identity providers and provisioning integrations to map SCIM users to the linked GitHub account without extra lookups.

Allison announces general availability of Copilot budget increase requests, letting members request additional AI credits when they hit their limit and enabling org/enterprise owners and billing managers to approve, adjust, or deny requests directly from GitHub settings under usage-based billing.

Tommaso Stocchi compares two multi-agent architectures in Microsoft Agent Framework: delegating work to specialist agents over A2A versus moving specialist instructions into distributed skills served over MCP, with concrete migration steps, code snippets, and measured differences in model calls, latency, and token usage.

Deepak_JV explains how Azure Confidential Clean Rooms supports privacy-preserving data collaboration for advertising use cases like audience matching and campaign measurement, using Spark SQL queries inside a Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) to help protect each participant’s raw data and provide verifiable governance.

Mark Gitau and Azin Heidarshenas summarize Azure’s MLPerf Inference v6.1 submissions for DeepSeek-R1 on NVIDIA GB300/GB200 NVL72, highlighting throughput and latency-focused results across Interactive, Server, and Offline scenarios at 1-rack and 4-rack scale.

GitHub hosts Cassidy and GPS discuss common AI “hot takes” aimed at developers, including whether reading code still matters, how hiring expectations are changing, and whether ideas like MCP and RAG are being misunderstood or prematurely declared “dead.”

fiveisprime previews a guided GitHub Copilot experience in VS Code that aims to take developers from an app idea to a deployed Azure application using a structured workflow with explicit checkpoints for scaffolding, local setup, and deployment.

Allison announces an update to GitHub code scanning: AI Scan for pull requests can now run even when CodeQL default setup isn’t enabled, expanding where AI-powered vulnerability detections can be applied for GitHub Advanced Security customers.

Wiliam_Rosa explains a public preview update to Azure Databricks Genie in Slack: when Genie answers include charts, Slack now shows the visualization as an image (not just text). The post also covers the required Slack app reinstall to grant files:write and a SQL query to audit Slack-originated Genie requests.

Waldek Mastykarz explains why AI coding agent eval pass rates can be misleading when the sandbox leaks information, and how to design evaluations around information boundaries rather than individual tool deny-lists.

The Visual Studio Code Team shares the 1.139 Insiders changelog, highlighting updates across the editor, terminal, extensions, and authentication APIs, plus ongoing Copilot-related work like agent-driven PR flows and improved model selection in multi-turn conversations.

Pieter Vandenheede breaks down four practical BizTalk migration paths—do nothing (short-term), coexistence, domain-by-domain migration, and big-bang replacement—and provides a decision matrix to help teams choose an approach that fits their constraints and risk tolerance.