Browse All Posts (106)

Microsoft Developer covers updates across Azure and .NET, including new Azure VM lifecycle guidance, SQL Server running on Azure Local for scenarios where cloud isn’t always available, and .NET Aspire 13.6 improvements aimed at making distributed app debugging easier.

robece-msft announces updates to Microsoft Fabric Real-Time Hub, including generally available Business Events and new Fabric Events capabilities. The post explains how governed, versioned event contracts help teams validate integrations early, route and transform signals, retain events for analysis in Eventhouse, and react to operational changes like capacity pressure and item lifecycle events.

sbaynes introduces StudentSim, a research system that trains personalized AI “student simulators” from de-identified learner records to evaluate and improve AI tutors before running costly human studies. The post explains how the simulators are measured, trained, and used as a feedback signal for tutor optimization across chess, writing, and math.

Christopher Harrison explains how to make GitHub Copilot more effective on a real codebase by storing project context in the repo. He covers repository and path-specific instructions, reusable “agent skills” for repeatable procedures, custom agents for broader work, and MCP servers (including Playwright) to connect Copilot to external tools.

pankajarora announces a preview refresh of the Microsoft Fabric Capacity Metrics app, adding new health, compute, and storage visuals plus an item details page to help capacity admins spot throttling, investigate high CU usage, and review 14-day item history across Fabric capacities.

sbaynes announces Microsoft’s plan to scale the Azure Maia accelerator system to multi-gigawatt deployments starting in 2027, outlining how Maia 200 is already running production inference and what architectural changes in Maia 300 target long-context, latency-sensitive, and agentic workloads.

Wuyi Weng shows how to run Qwen3.8-Flash-Next across two H100 GPUs on an Azure Spot VM, then instrument and troubleshoot it with OpenTelemetry, Application Insights/Azure Monitor, and Grafana. The post focuses on KV-cache behavior under agentic load, dashboard pitfalls, and a vLLM KV-cache FP8 setting that improves concurrency and time-to-first-token.

Allison announces a limited public preview feature that durably records the authenticated GitHub user who pushed each commit, and exposes that pusher identity in the UI and API. It also adds a ruleset condition to block pushes where committer metadata doesn’t match the pusher’s verified emails.

Tamir Dresher explains where Durable Task (and Durable Task Scheduler) actually helps in production: coordinating long-running workflows that need durable waits, replay, and recovery. Using five concrete scenarios—including Azure tenant provisioning and an AI-assisted incident workflow—he shows what durability solves and what your app still must own.

TwinkleCyril announces general availability of Custom SQL Pools in Microsoft Fabric Data Warehouse, explaining how admins can isolate workloads, cap compute allocation per pool, and classify requests by statement type (SELECT vs NONSELECT) to protect interactive reporting from heavy ingestion and transformation activity.

Visual Studio Code shares a short video about adding Halloween-themed styling to VS Code, focusing on customizing the editor’s look and feel with themes.

John Edward explains a planned Microsoft Entra ID change that lets users register passkeys and other passwordless methods as their first MFA option, removing the previous requirement to set up SMS or voice first. The post outlines rollout phases and what admins should review in Conditional Access and authentication method policies.

This week's ML roundup focuses on making scalable ML and agentic systems easier to operate inside governed Azure environments. We cover Anyscale on Azure reaching GA for Ray workloads on AKS with enterprise controls, plus Azure Databricks updates that target high-volume data movement, orchestration clarity, and cost visibility. On the analytics side, Fabric and OneLake guidance ties agent reliability to governed semantics and retrieval (RAG), while performance and architecture notes highlight ways to reduce load on operational systems and keep feedback loops fast.

Welcome to this week's GitHub Copilot roundup, where the main story is Copilot getting more practical in enterprise settings through on-device models, intelligent routing between local and cloud inference, and generally available local sandboxing powered by Microsoft eXecution Container (MXC). Model choice expanded across Copilot surfaces with Claude Haiku 5.5 going GA and Copilot CLI adding local model discovery via Ollama, making it easier to standardize speed, cost, and privacy defaults across teams. On the governance side, GitHub introduced a purpose-built secret detection model that spans GitHub and Copilot, and added org-level billing and policy controls for Copilot code review so spend and eligibility are easier to manage.

This week's Azure roundup focuses on making production operations more predictable across clusters, workflows, and clouds. AKS adds multi-NIC capabilities for stricter network separation, Argo CD GitOps on AKS reaches GA, and Azure Arc simplifies onboarding for EKS and GKE to unify policy and inventory. On the app and integration side, Functions previews bring structured, durable AI workflows and agent bindings, while API Management expands into MCP tool governance and requires action on service-tag network rules for classic tiers. Cost and reliability updates round out the week with Databricks cost controls, measurable token economics for self-hosted LLM serving, and concrete resiliency steps like Site Recovery for Azure Local plus new PostgreSQL backup options.

This week's DevOps roundup focuses on making AI and platform operations more governed, observable, and harder to break by accident. On Azure, new reference patterns tie API front doors, event-driven integration, and end-to-end correlation IDs into traceable AI intake pipelines, while Durable Functions and Ray on AKS updates push AI workloads toward predictable orchestration and measurable cost. On the platform side, GitOps with the Argo CD extension reaches GA, Azure Arc expands multicloud Kubernetes onboarding, and GitHub and npm tighten controls around secret detection, publishing guardrails, and pull request hygiene. We close with a few pipeline-impacting reminders, including Azure AD Graph retirement risk and practical tooling updates for day-to-day operators.

Welcome to this week's Security roundup, where the common thread is turning AI-driven workflows into something you can govern, audit, and operate under real enterprise constraints. Microsoft previewed a cleaner model for agent runtime control by putting MCP tool calls behind Azure API Management, while GitHub expanded enforceable guardrails with Copilot local sandboxing and a new context-aware model for leaked secret detection. On the platform side, teams need to plan for Azure AD Graph retirement, test broker-based sign-in on macOS, and start post-quantum authentication work where it will hurt first (certificates and PKI), alongside a few easy-to-miss deadlines that can still cause outages if they slip.

This week in .NET, the focus is on making everyday development workflows faster and more repeatable, from a rearchitected C# Dev Kit for VS Code to editor updates that keep Git and Copilot sessions easier to manage. On the app side, Blazor AI Components show how to build structured, tool-driven agent experiences with explicit approval steps, while Azure Functions managed connectors (preview) reduce integration code with triggers and typed clients for thousands of services. We also cover pipeline-impacting CodeQL 2.27.2 changes, a practical NativeAOT trimming technique using linker substitutions, and new guidance for reliable UWP and WinUI 3 UI testing with MSTest and Microsoft.Testing.Platform.

This week's Weekly AI Roundup focuses on what it takes to run agents like real software: governed tool access, enforceable runtime boundaries, and measurable cost and quality. GitHub Copilot expanded practical model choice (including Claude Haiku 5.5), brought MXC-powered local sandboxing to GA, and added tighter enterprise controls for JetBrains, code review billing, and usage metrics. On Azure, the story moved toward durable execution and production integrations with Dynamic Workflows, Python agent bindings, and managed connectors, backed by tracing patterns in Foundry and OpenTelemetry-based TokenOps. Security and evaluation rounded out the week with a purpose-built secret detection model, new lessons from AI-assisted vulnerability research, and shared benchmarks and playbooks (ReviewBench and the Agent Experience approach) to make agent behavior testable and improvable.

Rama Bhimanadhuni explains how Microsoft is working with the Open Compute Project (OCP) and major hardware vendors to standardize reliability and manageability for large, multi-vendor AI clusters, focusing on RAS signals, diagnostics, telemetry, and safer firmware update workflows to keep fleet capacity and availability high.

Khalid Abuhakmeh explains how Directory.Build.props lets you set shared MSBuild defaults (like Nullable, LangVersion, and analyzers) once for an entire .NET solution, how nested files behave, and when to switch to Directory.Build.targets or Directory.Packages.props for late-bound logic and centralized package versions.

Khalid Abuhakmeh shows how to use C# 15 union types on .NET 11 to model a workflow as a single state value plus one Next method, with exhaustive switch expressions and typed inputs/results. He also covers how to persist and rehydrate workflow state using System.Text.Json with an explicit discriminator.

John Edward outlines a practical audit process for old online accounts, focusing on reducing account-takeover risk through breach checks, password hygiene, MFA, recovery settings, and reviewing third-party access like OAuth tokens and API keys.

Wiliam_Rosa explains how to get earlier, more actionable cost visibility in Azure Databricks using tags, Unity Catalog system tables, account-level budgets, and scheduled SQL alerts—plus Azure-specific features like serverless usage policies that propagate tags into Azure Cost Analysis.

Allison announces updates to GitHub Copilot for JetBrains, including enterprise-managed default agent models, a new “Fix” action from diagnostics that opens inline chat, and controls for MCP server startup. The release also improves chat navigation and account UX, boosts reliability, and drops support for JetBrains IDE 2025.1.

GitHub hosts a two-hour live-coding session with Wes Bos, Burke Holland, and Pierce Boggan showing how GitHub Copilot can take a 3D foldable phone simulator from scratch to running functional web apps, including parallel agent workflows, model choices, and practical debugging in the browser.

Wuyi Weng shares a practical, numbers-driven guide to self-hosting the Qwen3.8-27B model on an Azure H100 Spot VM, including the exact vLLM serving flags, a Docker Compose deployment, and an end-to-end observability setup with OpenTelemetry, Application Insights, and Grafana to decide when Spot hosting breaks even.

Allison summarizes the October 5 weekly GitHub Copilot releases, covering a new Claude Haiku 5.5 model option, generally available local sandboxing controls for agent sessions, Copilot app account separation for licensing vs repos, Copilot CLI local model discovery via Ollama, and new VS Code agent-session management features.

Brittany Pugh lays out a production-minded reference architecture for document-heavy intake on Azure, showing how to put AI behind a governed API gateway, process work asynchronously, and keep an end-to-end audit trail with a single correlation ID across API Management, Service Bus, Functions, and Event Grid.

Allison announces CodeQL 2.27.2, detailing new and improved analysis across C/C++, Go, Rust, and JavaScript/TypeScript, plus notable query updates for C# and GitHub Actions. The post also calls out a macOS 27/Xcode 27 limitation for traced analysis and a breaking change in the Go control-flow graph library.

santiagxf announces a public preview integration that connects Microsoft Agent 365 governance with Azure API Management runtime enforcement for MCP servers and tools, adding optional threat and data protection checks via Microsoft Defender and Microsoft Purview.

chandanAggarwal announces a public preview feature for Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) that enables multi-NIC worker nodes and attaching a dedicated NIC directly to a pod using upstream Kubernetes Dynamic Resource Allocation (DRA) APIs, powered by the AKS-managed DRANET driver.

Bruno Capuano and Daniel Roth introduce the Blazor AI Components and show how they enable agentic experiences in .NET apps beyond basic chat, including structured streaming responses, tool invocation, approval gates, and multi-step workflows coordinated through shared state.

Erik Ejlskov Jensen shows how his open-source T-SQL static analysis rules and tooling can help enforce database design standards, including live feedback while writing SQL and using rule enforcement to guide AI-assisted database and EF Core model generation.

Thomas Maurer announces two NVIDIA GTC Berlin sessions covering Microsoft Sovereign Cloud updates and how to run Sovereign AI from Azure to the edge using Azure Local and Foundry Local, with an emphasis on control, compliance, resilience, and security requirements.

Satya Nadella announces Microsoft-Decision-1, a new model aimed at fast, high-quality structured decision-making, and shares where Microsoft is already testing it plus where developers can access it.

GitHub shares a short documentary-style look at what a 48-hour hackathon is actually like, from idea formation and rapid prototyping to learning through trial and error. It also touches on how tools like GitHub Copilot can help participants turn rough concepts into working applications under tight time constraints.

John Savill runs through the Azure Weekly Update for 9th October 2026, covering a set of platform changes and retirements across AKS, App Service, developer environments, networking/WAF, API Management, PostgreSQL, SQL Server, and Fabric/OneLake, plus a security-focused note on Always Encrypted with Intel SGX enclaves.

Waldek Mastykarz introduces the AX Practitioner Playbook, a practical method for evaluating how AI coding agents use your SDKs, docs, CLIs, and MCP tools, diagnosing why they fail, and validating fixes before shipping changes that improve agent behavior.

John Edward explains Microsoft’s Windows Update certificate rotation planned for 2027, including the two expiration deadlines and which Windows client and server versions need specific security updates to avoid losing access to Windows Update. It also outlines practical inventory, compliance, and recovery steps for IT teams.