Browse All Posts (109)

hareshgowri announces a preview feature in Microsoft Fabric that lets you ingest CSV and Parquet files directly from OneLake into Materialized Lake Views, turning the bronze layer into a declarative step. The post shows the SQL syntax, schema modes, lineage tracking, and refresh options for building end-to-end medallion pipelines.

Gloridel Morales announces the October 2026 patch release for Azure DevOps Server, with links to Patch 9 downloads and the corresponding release notes, plus a quick command to verify whether the patch is installed on your server.

Ali Zaman explains how Microsoft Discovery coordinates AI agents to help scientists reduce a large research space into a smaller set of promising candidates, speeding up scientific discovery and reducing the number of experiments needed.

.NET Team announces .NET 11 Release Candidate 2, highlighting updates across the runtime, SDK, MSBuild, NuGet, F#, ASP.NET Core, .NET MAUI, and Windows Forms, plus links to detailed release notes and guidance for getting started with the RC2 tooling.

Allison announces general availability of the Gemini 4 Argon model in GitHub Copilot, including where developers can select it, which Copilot plans get access, and how admins can control availability via model policy and default model enablement settings.

sbaynes explains what changed when an AI agent moved from summarizing production network incidents to proposing (and potentially executing) real fixes, and why “safe autonomy” needs multiple deterministic layers rather than a single guardrail.

Allison announces new GitHub audit log events that let organizations and enterprises track manual dismissals and reopenings of GitHub Code Quality findings, including who performed the action, when it happened, and which repository, rule, and findings were affected.

Batu Ozturkler explains how GitHub Secret Scanning reduced false positives and sped up scanning by replacing an LLM-based stage with a compact, fine-tuned ModernBERT classifier that uses surrounding code and text context to decide whether a candidate string is a real credential.

mk_sunitha introduces Fabric App functions (preview), a TypeScript-based serverless capability for Fabric Apps that lets builders run secure server-side logic, use application authentication to access downstream resources, and manage secrets safely. The post also shows how to scaffold, debug, and deploy functions, including using GitHub Copilot in VS Code.

Allison announces updates to GitHub secret scanning: new detectors for Salesforce, Anthropic, and Cloudsmith, plus expanded push protection defaults that block commits containing Anthropic API keys when secret scanning is enabled.

sergeig888 announces the general availability of Microsoft Fabric “My workspace” governance improvements, including new admin REST APIs for granting and revoking temporary admin access and guidance for restoring orphaned workspaces after a user is deleted in Microsoft Entra ID.

mariozeng explains how Microsoft is rethinking power delivery for Azure AI infrastructure, focusing on grid-to-chip efficiency for high-density GPU systems. The post covers LVDC and 800VDC distribution, disaggregated rack power (Mt. Diablo), solid-state transformers with energy storage, and server-to-silicon power delivery design.

sdighe explains how large-scale AI training and inference are pushing datacenter networks to evolve, and why networking now needs to be designed as part of the AI system. The post highlights open specifications like Multipath Reliable Connection (MRC), plus industry efforts around optical interconnects and Ethernet scale-up networking.

Bryankel summarizes six open-source hardware security innovations announced at the Open Compute Project Global Summit, covering workload-attached HSM design (Tessera), integrated TPM in the BMC, whole-system attestation (Composite EAT), hierarchical bare-metal management, streaming-boot recovery, and Caliptra 2.2 silicon hardening with post-quantum crypto support.

Allison announces updates to GitHub Copilot enterprise managed settings enforcement, including a startup policy freshness requirement and minimum client version enforcement for the sandbox managed setting key.

Ali Zaman explains Microsoft Discovery and how it coordinates specialized AI agents to help scientists run an evidence-driven research loop, using battery design as the example and focusing on why search and summarization aren’t enough for real R&D workflows.

Jack Tracey explains that Azure Verified Modules (AVM) has moved from a community-led effort into Azure engineering, with dedicated engineers maintaining the specs, framework, and selected modules. The post outlines changes to AVM’s support statement and introduces a tiered module ownership model planned for early 2027.

Chu Lahlou explains how Azure Content Understanding prebuilt analyzers go beyond a schema by packaging domain knowledge with grounding and confidence signals, so document extraction results are safer to automate. The post also shares benchmark results for Advanced Contextualization in Content Understanding 2.0 Preview, covering quality, modeled cost, and latency.

Allison announces updates that make it easier to detect when Dependabot alerts have been withdrawn, including a new webhook action and a clearer REST API response for removed alerts.

Allison announces an update to GitHub billing that makes the “Budgets and alerts” page easier to use by listing all budgets in one place with search and filtering, helping personal, organization, and enterprise admins find and manage budgets faster.

Allison announces new Security Overview metrics for GitHub code scanning AI Scan on pull requests, helping org and enterprise admins track findings generated and resolved, remediation rate, repo-level trends, and how often developers apply autofix suggestions.

Khalid Abuhakmeh explains how C# 15 extends collection expressions with a new `with(...)` element, letting you pass constructor arguments (like comparers and capacity) without giving up the `[a, b, c]` syntax.

Khalid Abuhakmeh shows how to replace ASP.NET Core Minimal API JSON output with the REDox serializer by implementing a custom IResult, then benchmarks REDox vs System.Text.Json to see whether serializer speedups translate into faster HTTP endpoints.

Allison announces new GitHub Copilot enterprise managed telemetry controls that let admins attribute Copilot activity to a specific user while keeping prompts, responses, and tool content disabled by default, with fine-grained OpenTelemetry capture settings across Copilot CLI, the Copilot app, and VS Code Agent Host sessions.

Rahul Bhandari and Tara Overfield recap the October 2026 servicing releases for .NET and .NET Framework, highlighting security and non-security fixes and pointing to the official CVE lists, release notes, installers, container images, Linux package guidance, and known-issues pages for supported versions.

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.

GisliGudmundsson shares a reference pattern for running Azure AI Foundry workloads inside a secure Azure landing zone, using private endpoints and private DNS zones, disabling local auth in favor of managed identity, and placing Azure API Management in front to enforce token limits and emit token usage metrics.

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.

Allison announces a new Dependabot option that lets organizations configure private registries with Anonymous authentication, useful for internal mirrors that allow unauthenticated reads while still working within GitHub.com’s egress allowlist and registry access controls.

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 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.