Browse All Posts (99)

James Montemagno and Pierce Boggan demonstrate an end-to-end “agent-native” workflow with GitHub Copilot, moving between Slack, the Copilot app, VS Code, and the terminal to build, test, and ship an application. The session highlights connected agent sessions, live previews, automated issue triage, PR creation and resolution with agent merge, and HydraFusion for model/workflow selection.

Allison announces generally available improvements to GitHub Copilot code review, including a clearer pull request overview that tracks findings across review iterations, smarter auto-resolution of Copilot comments, and generated commit titles/descriptions when accepting eligible batches of suggestions.

Allison announces that GitHub’s REST API can now manage the “Restrict code coverage” repository ruleset condition, enabling teams to enforce minimum coverage or limit coverage drops on pull requests programmatically across many repositories.

Allison summarizes the September 14 weekly GitHub Copilot updates, including improvements to Copilot code review, new auto model selection tiers, admin controls and usage metrics for Business/Enterprise, a Sentry canvas in the Copilot app, and new agent workflow features in VS Code.

Allison announces that several AI models will be deprecated across GitHub Copilot experiences on October 19, 2026, and outlines which replacement models to use plus how Copilot Business and Enterprise admins can enable alternatives via model policies.

javedeqbal explains how to extend an Azure Landing Zone for FinOps at scale by layering application-centric monitoring, consolidated alerting, automated remediation, and richer cost allocation on top of Azure-native governance, observability, identity, and cost-management services.

Allison announces stage-only npm granular access tokens, which let CI/CD workflows stage package versions for review while preventing direct publishing to the npm registry. The post explains how staged publishing works with 2FA approval, what permissions stage-only tokens still have, and how to prepare for npm’s January 2027 token transition.

John Savill runs through a quick Azure weekly update covering AKS Azure Linux with OS Guard retirement, Azure Red Hat OpenShift hosted control planes, Application Gateway HTTP/3 over QUIC, AVNM high-scale mesh, storage migration over SMB, PostgreSQL skills and MCP, Azure SQL DB soft delete, AVD endpoints, and Azure Payments HSM v2.

Amanda Silver reflects on Microsoft’s shift toward building developer products in the open, touching on early ASP.NET support for jQuery and the later open-sourcing of TypeScript, Chakra, .NET, and Visual Studio Code.

GitHub shares a short clip from the GitHub Podcast discussing whether needing to fine-tune an AI model just to work effectively with a codebase is a sign of deeper codebase structure and maintainability issues.

GPS unpacks a set of common “AI hot takes” and reframes them into practical guidance for day-to-day software work, covering how to review AI-generated code responsibly, where judgment matters more than tool choice, and how MCP, skills, and RAG can fit together in real agent workflows.

Visual Studio Code shows how to customize the Agents window using new background support, focusing on personalizing the AI/agent experience inside the editor.

Wiliam_Rosa explains why Azure Databricks Genie Agents need the same ongoing evaluation discipline as production ML models, and walks through Genie Agent Benchmarks, including SQL-based “Chat mode” scoring, LLM-judged “Agent mode”, and a practical workflow for monitoring and improving agent accuracy over time.

Prakhar Sharma outlines a practical pattern for treating Azure VM images like versioned build artifacts: bake once with Packer, publish to Azure Compute Gallery, validate the published version via an Azure DevOps pipeline, capture evidence, and promote only approved image versions.

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.

Sayanika walks through building a conversational analytics agent that queries data in OneLake using Microsoft Fabric semantic models and Fabric IQ Ontology, with a Copilot Studio setup that normalizes messy location inputs (e.g., abbreviations and misspellings) before running ontology-backed queries.

Tyler Kight explains an upcoming Azure Monitor Workspace change that makes PromQL regex matchers fully anchored (spec-compliant), which can cause existing queries, alerts, and dashboards to return fewer series. The post shows how to update matchers for exact/starts-with/contains intent and how to move an AMW to query engine version 2.0.

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 that uses Azure AI Foundry (Foundry IQ) to orchestrate reasoning across Microsoft Fabric (Fabric IQ + ontology), Dynamics 365 Finance & Operations via an ERP MCP server, SharePoint policy documents, and web intelligence, backed by Azure AI Search.

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.