Browse All Posts (139)

Allison announces a new GitHub Code Quality billing feature that lets organizations download a CSV report of license usage, including which active committers consumed licenses, which repositories they contributed to in the last 90 days, and whether committers are unique to a repo or org.

GitHub demonstrates how the Logitech MX Keypad integrates with the GitHub Copilot app to control Copilot Chat and voice prompts from dedicated hardware keys, plus manage projects, sessions, and MCP server toggles without leaving the coding flow.

Martin Woodward explains how GitHub Copilot’s agentic workflows are shifting development from issuing commands to expressing intent, and why “ambient intelligence” needs strong context, clear boundaries, and developer control. He also shares a practical example: mapping Copilot actions to physical controls like the Logitech MX Keypad.

Allison announces a November 16, 2026 deprecation of several AI models across GitHub Copilot experiences, and explains what admins and teams need to do to keep Copilot Chat, agent modes, and other Copilot features working with supported alternatives.

Greg Mohler explains how GitHub built “Evergreen”, a GitHub App that automates quarterly outside-collaborator access reviews and stale-repo archival using native GitHub features like Actions, issues, webhooks, and custom properties, with a fail-secure approach and an audit trail stored directly in git history.

Chet Husk introduces dotnetup, a public-preview toolchain manager that installs and updates user-local .NET SDKs and runtimes on macOS and Linux, with support for side-by-side stable, preview, and daily builds and predictable version pinning via global.json.

Microsoft Developer presents a Data Exposed session on Fabric Database Hub, focusing on bringing Azure SQL, SQL Server, Cosmos DB, PostgreSQL, and Fabric databases into a single place for discovery, estate-level visibility, governance, and AI-assisted insights to prioritize actions.

Mike Hulme explains how Azure is evolving its cloud-native platform to better support AI workloads and AI agents, focusing on coordinated compute/storage/networking, production-ready open-source foundations (notably Kubernetes), cost governance with FinOps, and “agentic” operations to improve reliability and efficiency at scale.

Lim Ai Leen reports on Bar-Ilan University’s pilot of an AI agent in Moodle that helps students search, summarize, and quiz themselves on course materials using natural language, built with Azure AI Services and Microsoft Copilot Studio and run in the university’s Azure environment.

Allison announces general availability of GitHub’s AI Scan for pull requests, an AI-powered code scanning capability that complements CodeQL by detecting vulnerabilities in PR changes (including languages and file types CodeQL may not cover) and surfacing advisory findings with explanations and suggested fixes.

GitHub explains why making stacked pull requests a native feature is more than just linking PRs and merging them in order, and how it required changes to core merge architecture and legacy systems.

Aaron Stark talks with Haishi Bai about Adaptive Applications, a capability-based architectural approach for building portable apps that can run across Azure, sovereign environments, edge, and on-premises. They focus on decoupling application needs (AI, data, identity) from the underlying services to meet compliance, residency, and continuity requirements.

Mads Kristensen introduces a new Visual Studio 2026 (18.11) option that stops a solution build after the first project failure, so you can get back to fixing the first error instead of waiting for queued projects to finish.

Allison announces general availability of agentic autofix for GitHub code scanning alerts, where Copilot explores the codebase, proposes and validates fixes with CodeQL, and opens a draft pull request. The post also covers where it can be used, required policies and permissions, and how billing works with AI Credits and Actions minutes.

Visual Studio Code shows how to keep momentum while working with agents by highlighting text to ask follow-up questions in a side chat with its own context, or quoting selected text directly into your current chat for an immediate response.

Allison announces that GitHub has retired email notifications for repository push events as of October 15, 2026, and explains the spam/abuse rationale. The post also points developers to a replacement approach using a GitHub Actions workflow triggered on push to send emails via their own SMTP server or email provider.

Eduard van Valkenburg explains how Microsoft Agent Framework for Python models and uses vector stores for embeddings, vector search, and agent context. The post shows how to define typed records, index and query data, expose vector search as an agent tool, and keep conversation history searchable via context providers across multiple database integrations.

John Edward explains an upcoming Microsoft Entra default-permission change that lets ordinary users create agent blueprints unless admins disable it. The post breaks down what’s changing, what isn’t, and the specific Entra admin center setting IT teams should review before the November 2026 rollout.

kinfey explains how to use small language models (SLMs) as typed “decision components” inside an application, then walks through a concrete pipeline using Microsoft Olive to LoRA fine-tune Qwen3.5-0.8B, export to CUDA FP16 ONNX, and validate decisions via option-letter probabilities.

John Edward explains the planner-executor loop as a practical architecture for building agentic systems on Azure, focusing on how to separate planning from execution, validate model outputs, and run tool calls safely. The article maps the pattern to Azure services and highlights reliability, observability, and access-control decisions needed for production use.

dchelupati explains how to scale Azure SRE Agent from a single team to enterprise-wide use, focusing on access control, guardrails, auditing, multi-agent topologies, and “agent as code” practices for repeatable deployment and governance.

dchelupati shares a practical “start small” adoption guide for Azure SRE Agent, focused on picking a first operational use case, connecting only the required context (telemetry, repos, runbooks), and expanding into repeatable workflows with the right triggers and permissions.

Meagan McCrory explains that Extended Security Updates (ESU) for Windows Server 2012 and 2012 R2 ended on October 13, 2026, and outlines practical next steps to reduce security and compliance risk by upgrading, migrating to Azure, or modernizing workloads.

Lee Murray explains how VS Code’s modernized UI preview evolved from the 2026 themes and the Agents window, and how developer feedback is shaping layout density, editor tabs, theming controls, and performance work in the workbench.

Daniel Roth hosts a Blazor Community Standup with the Infragistics team to walk through the stable release of the free, open-source Ignite UI component library for Blazor, what components are included, and how to use them in real Blazor apps.

Sandeep Sen announces the stable Azure MCP Server 3.0 release and explains what’s new for bringing Azure operational tooling into MCP-compatible AI agent workflows, including Terraform and Advisor tooling, more predictable client integration, and security-focused defaults for resource creation.

Jakub Oleksy reports on GitHub’s September 2026 reliability work and incidents, including database pressure reductions, overload controls, added headroom for GitHub Actions, expanded failure containment for pull requests, and progress moving production workloads and traffic to Azure.

Allison announces updates to HydraFusion in GitHub Copilot, including a refreshed frontier-model pool, improved Cascade and Critique orchestration workflows, and a new HydraFusion Max option for deeper reasoning on demanding tasks across VS Code, the Copilot app, and Copilot CLI.

Taylor Cuilty explains how GitHub redesigned repository star history to return trends (daily counts) without exposing stargazer identities, while also cutting database load dramatically by filtering by time range before aggregating.

sbaynes reports on Microsoft and partners disrupting a Chinese-language cybercrime marketplace behind large-scale phishing and scam campaigns, including YAM Store, CoGUI, and Iron Man. The piece explains how criminals bought accounts, hosting, and ready-made impersonation templates, and outlines the legal and technical steps used to seize domains and disable accounts.

Jon Galloway and the .NET team (Daniel Roth, Gerald Versluis, and Chet Husk) host a release party-style walkthrough of .NET 11 Release Candidate 2, highlighting their favorite features and showing what’s new across the .NET stack, including Blazor and .NET MAUI.

paulyuk shows how the Azure SRE Agent canvas fits into GitHub Copilot (App and Copilot CLI) so on-call engineers can validate an agent’s incident diagnosis with their own telemetry, queries, and access controls, then share a reviewed update back to the team.

The Visual Studio Code Team shares early release notes for VS Code 1.143 Insiders, highlighting updates to MCP server configuration, Agent Host chat controls for background shells, and a new extension contribution point for Explorer title actions.

sukkaur announces a preview feature that enables workspace-level Private Link connectivity for SQL database in Microsoft Fabric, aimed at tightening network access and reducing exposure by keeping database traffic on private networking paths.

Microsoft Developer demonstrates an end-to-end workflow for building and shipping a hosted AI agent from the terminal using GitHub Copilot CLI and Microsoft Foundry, including planning, resource creation, model selection, evaluation-driven improvements, and a secure Azure Functions proxy to connect the agent to a website chat experience.

Joe Filcik and Colin Murphy explain how Azure Content Understanding uses grounding and field-level confidence to make document extraction results inspectable and actionable, then show how to calibrate confidence thresholds (per document type and per field) to route work in human-in-the-loop review workflows.

Sameen Karim joins The GitHub Podcast to explain how GitHub’s native stacked pull requests work, including the internal merge architecture changes, how linked PR chains avoid “ghost merges,” and how the team addressed CODEOWNERS-related security loopholes while keeping stacked review workflows practical for engineering teams.

Visual Studio Code shows how the Agents window can create and manage a pull request end-to-end, including drafting the PR title and description, tracking CI checks, monitoring reviews, resolving conflicts, keeping the branch in sync, and merging automatically with configurable control.

James Rempt shares takeaways from VSLive! San Diego on how experienced Visual Studio developers are adopting GitHub Copilot and other AI tools, while spending more time validating generated code and leaning on hands-on learning. The post also highlights how Visual Studio Subscription benefits support ongoing skill-building.

Allison announces a public preview for GitHub Actions workflow dependency lockfiles, aimed at making workflow runs reproducible and reducing supply-chain risk from moved tags/branches or compromised actions. The post explains how to generate and maintain `.github/workflows/actions.lock`, and how admins can enforce lockfile usage with a new policy.