Browse All .NET Content (321)

.NET Team announces .NET 11 Preview 4 and highlights what’s new across the runtime, SDK, libraries, ASP.NET Core, .NET MAUI, C#, and Entity Framework Core, with links to detailed release notes and guidance on installing the preview SDK.

Rahul Bhandari (MSFT) and Tara Overfield recap the May 2026 servicing releases for .NET and .NET Framework, including security and non-security fixes, the CVEs addressed, and where to find release notes, installers, container images, Linux packages, and known issues.

Allison summarizes what’s new in CodeQL 2.25.4 for GitHub code scanning, including Swift 6.3.1 support, improved C# and ASP.NET taint-flow modeling, expanded Java/Kotlin query sanitizers to reduce false positives, and new data-flow barrier extensions to tune results across many languages.

samkemp announces Foundry Local 1.1.0, adding on-device live speech transcription, text embeddings for semantic search/RAG, and an Open Responses API client for streaming, tool calling, and vision. The post also covers WebGPU as an optional plugin, smaller JavaScript packages, and broader .NET compatibility for the C# SDK.

Nick Brady’s April 2026 digest covers Microsoft Foundry updates for model access, local inference, agent observability, and SDK changes across Python, JavaScript/TypeScript, .NET, and Java, with concrete guidance on quota tiers, tracing via OpenTelemetry, and monitoring/evaluation features for production agents.

osmancokakoglu announces the winners of the AI Dev Days Hackathon and summarizes the projects and the Microsoft stack they used, including Azure AI Foundry, Azure OpenAI models, and the Microsoft Agent Framework, plus common Azure services and DevOps practices used to ship production-grade agentic apps.

David McCarter joins On .NET Live to discuss practical coding standards (from the 20th anniversary edition of his book) and how they improve long-term maintainability, productivity, and performance in .NET codebases.

This roundup tracks a clear shift from agent capability to agent governance: more context, more observability, and more policy controls across Copilot, VS Code, and the CLI. On the platform side, Microsoft tightened the path from prototype to production with .NET agent building blocks, Azure AI Foundry deployment patterns, and data governance improvements that make RAG and operations easier to standardize. We also cover the less flashy work that keeps systems dependable at scale, including Fabric and Databricks operational updates, GitHub migration and ruleset changes, and security research that keeps token theft, privilege escalation, and supply chain risk in focus.

Authorised Territory demonstrates how to build an end-to-end durable workflow for an AI agent pipeline using the .NET Microsoft Agent Framework, running the Durable Task Scheduler Emulator in Docker Desktop and streaming workflow events in real time, with a local Ollama LLM.

Amanda Silver explains why Microsoft created TypeScript, focusing on the problems it set out to solve for large JavaScript codebases—adding structure and scalability while keeping compatibility with the existing web ecosystem.

hcamposu announces Microsoft Host Integration Server (HIS) 2028 preview, outlining the move to .NET 10 (including Linux support for non-SNA features), new REST-based connectivity for DB2 and CICS/IMS workloads, and a set of deprecations aimed at removing legacy dependencies and improving security and hybrid operations.

Jacob Alber walks through the Microsoft Agent Framework “Handoff” orchestration pattern for multi-agent workflows, showing how to model agent-to-agent routing as a bounded graph with shared conversation context, guardrails, and natural termination. The post compares .NET and Python authoring APIs and highlights when to choose Handoff vs Sequential or explicit conditional branching.

Daniel Roth and Javier Calvarro Nelson preview a new end-to-end component testing library for Blazor, coming in .NET 11. They explain the motivation for the approach, show how it tests real Blazor apps more reliably, and outline what feedback they’re looking for next.

Kristen Womack introduces an Azure Developer CLI (azd) template from Curity and Microsoft that deploys an AI agent app to Azure with least-privilege authorization. It focuses on using short-lived OAuth 2.0 tokens (JWTs) and token exchange so APIs can enforce data boundaries even when agent behavior is nondeterministic.

Reynald Adolphe walks through the April 2026 Visual Studio Code release highlights, focusing on the new Agents Window, tools for evaluating chat customizations, and updates to GitHub Copilot for CLI including “thinking effort” and remote control features.

Daniel Roth explains how Microsoft Copilot Studio upgraded its in-browser .NET WebAssembly engine from .NET 8 to .NET 10, what changed in deployment and packaging, and the performance gains the team measured—especially for larger, more complex agents running AOT-compiled code.

Microsoft Developer demonstrates how to connect GitHub Copilot to the Unity Editor using Model Context Protocol (MCP), then uses prompts to build a playable Unity prototype with C#/.NET. The video focuses on setup, permissions, agents/skills, debugging common workflow issues, and practical best practices for AI-assisted game development.

Microsoft Developer introduces Quest to Compile, a new show where two game-dev siblings explore modern game development in the .NET ecosystem, from fundamentals like gameplay code and debugging to practical workflows like Git version control and AI-assisted coding with GitHub Copilot.

Mark Russinovich discusses why Win32 is still treated as a first-class Windows API surface in 2026, and how Windows’ long-term compatibility commitments and the size of the desktop software ecosystem keep “legacy” APIs operationally essential.

David Ortinau and Gerald Versluis are joined by Nick Kovalsky to demo .NET MAUI work that combines Rust, SkiaSharp, and a drawn-UI approach, plus AI/ML live processing techniques he’s been building.

Authorised Territory demonstrates how to add API versioning to a .NET 10 Minimal API using the Asp.Versioning.Http NuGet package, including query-string and URL-segment versioning approaches, plus how to mark an API version as deprecated and test requests using a Visual Studio 2026 .http file.

Tao Chen and Shawn Henry explain how to take a Microsoft Agent Framework (MAF) agent from local development to production by deploying it as a container to Foundry Hosted Agents, with built-in identity, scaling, session persistence, versioning, and observability.

Shyju Krishnankutty shows how to build durable, multi-step AI agent workflows with the Microsoft Agent Framework: start with an in-process .NET console workflow, add durability via the Durable Task runtime and scheduler, then scale out with parallel agents and host the same workflow on Azure Functions.

Devi Priya explains how GitHub Copilot Workspace supports intent-driven, multi-file refactoring across a repository, including a practical walkthrough that modernizes an app’s authentication flow and highlights planning, review, and adoption best practices.

Jeremy Likness shows how the Microsoft Agent Framework (v1.0) builds on Microsoft.Extensions.AI to create autonomous, tool-using AI agents in .NET, including multi-turn sessions, memory via context providers, and graph-based workflows for orchestrating multiple agents.

This week’s roundup is about turning agentic tooling into something teams can run, budget, and govern. GitHub Copilot’s shift to token-based billing and AI Credits makes cost a first-class part of rollout checklists, especially as agent-style IDE and PR workflows expand and code review begins consuming both AI Credits and GitHub Actions minutes. On the platform side, GPT-5.5 in Microsoft Foundry, Microsoft Agent Framework 1.0, and A2A/MCP interoperability point toward more standardized agent runtimes, while Azure and Fabric updates reinforce the same operational theme: tighter identity, clearer observability, and more precise controls in both connected and constrained environments.

Authorised Territory demonstrates how to use dependency injection with class-based skills in the .NET Agent Framework, showing how an AgentSkillResource function can resolve services via DI instead of instantiating them with new, while the agent runs a local LLM using Ollama.

Hidde de Smet shows how to combine five GitHub Copilot customization file types in a single .NET Aspire repo, so the right instructions, skills, prompts, and agent roles load at the right time without bloating every chat request.

Fokko at Work demos selected new features in Visual Studio Code 1.118 that affect GitHub Copilot workflows, including Chronicle, remote control for Copilot CLI sessions, semantic indexing with GitHub text search, dedicated context for skills, and updates related to token-based billing and token efficiency.

mosiddi explains how the Agent Governance Toolkit (AGT) “shifts left” governance for AI agents by catching security and compliance violations before runtime, using pre-commit hooks, PR gates, CI checks, and release-time controls like SBOMs, signing, and provenance attestations.

Kristen Womack summarizes the April 2026 Azure Developer CLI (azd) releases, focusing on multi-language hooks in azure.yaml, extension framework updates, Copilot-assisted troubleshooting, and a set of security, provisioning, and CI/CD reliability improvements across versions 1.23.14 through 1.24.2.

Sayed Ibrahim Hashimi explains that Visual Studio 2026 18.6 Insiders 3 now uses the TypeScript 7 Beta native preview by default, what performance improvements to expect, how to switch back to TypeScript 6.x or pin a specific preview, and which IDE features still have gaps.

Luis Quintanilla walks through ConferencePulse, a Blazor Server app on .NET 10 that uses .NET’s composable AI stack—Microsoft.Extensions.AI, DataIngestion, VectorData, MCP, and Microsoft Agent Framework—to build RAG-based Q&A, AI-generated polls/insights, and a multi-agent session summary.

despindola announces general availability of prefix-scoped access for User Delegation SAS in Azure Blob Storage, letting you scope SAS tokens to a virtual directory (prefix) within a container. The post explains why this helps least-privilege access and includes REST API and .NET SDK examples plus required parameters like sr=d and sdd.

David Levy joins Data Exposed to recap a burst of recent Microsoft SQL driver and SDK releases, including mssql-python updates with Bulk Copy and Apache Arrow support, plus new versions of SqlClient and JDBC.

Allison summarizes the April 2026 update for GitHub Copilot in Visual Studio 2026, focusing on agentic workflows like launching cloud agent sessions from the IDE, user-level custom agents and skills discovery, a new debugger agent flow, plus chat history, shortcut customization, and new C++ tools.

Authorised Territory demonstrates how to add a class-based skill to an AI agent built with the .NET Agent Framework, using a locally running LLM via Ollama and building on a previously created starter solution.

Jack Batzner shows how to add a governance layer to MCP-based AI agents in .NET using the Agent Governance Toolkit, including policy-driven tool-call authorization, security scanning of tool definitions, response sanitization to reduce prompt-injection risk, and built-in audit/telemetry via OpenTelemetry.

McKenna Barlow explains that starting in .NET 11 Preview 4 and Visual Studio 18.8, VSTest will stop shipping a transitive Newtonsoft.Json dependency, switching to System.Text.Json (and JSONite on .NET Framework). The post outlines who might break, what errors to expect, and the typical one-line fix.

Matt Clark announces official SDK-style project support for VSSDK-based Visual Studio extension (VSIX) projects in Visual Studio 18.5, covering what changes, expected build-time improvements, and the key migration steps (including XAML and deploy settings).