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Highlights
.NET Conf 2026 Community Days Call for Presenters Is Open
The Agentic Road to Revenue
How can I remove the Close button from my window caption?
Latest posts
Bringing Correctly Rounded Math to Production with LLVM-libc
As we mentioned in the last cmath blog post, MSVC is using LLVM-libc for compile-time evaluation and runtime execution of math functions when is enabled. I invited LLVM-libc contributors Michael Jones and Tue Ly to write a guest blog post about how they’ve achieved what they’ve achieved. This is that blog post! I hope you enjoy it. I learned a lot from reading it, even after having spent a lot of time in this area. - Cody, Microsoft C++ Compiler Frontend Engineer Hi, I'm Michael Jones, the lead maintainer for LLVM-libc. Cody invited me and our math lead, Tue Ly, to write a guest post about LLVM-libc's math f...
Auto SR Comes to Intel Core Ultra Series-3 Processors
Today, we’re excited to announce we’re expanding the availability of Auto SR to Intel Core Ultra Series 3-based Copilot+ PCs. This builds off our previous expansion of Automatic Super Resolution (Auto SR) to support more gaming devices allowing more players to leverage Auto SR as a tool in their toolkit to better optimize games for improved experience. Download the Auto Super Resolution Package - Microsoft Apps to get started. Auto SR is designed to help games that struggle to hit playable frame rates at higher resolutions by allowing the game to render at a lower resolution, then using NPU-based upscaling ...
Build Your Own AI Agent Harness in C#, the MafClaw Live Series
I am building a complete C# agent live, from a single call around an IChatClient to a production-ready, observable, governed agent, using the Microsoft Agent Framework harness in a 4-part Microsoft Reactor series.
From Specialist Agents to Distributed Skills over MCP
Keep your domain services distributed. Move the specialist's instructions, not another model, into the orchestrator. A multi-agent system often starts with a straightforward design: one agent understands the user's request, delegates to specialist agents, and combines their answers. That was the starting point for my ski resort demo. A resort advisor calls specialists for weather, safety, ski coaching, and lift traffic. Each specialist owns its instructions and tools, and the advisor invokes it through Agent-to-Agent (A2A). It works. But it also raises a useful question: Does every specialist need its...
Investing in a more reliable Microsoft Graph PowerShell experience
We're focusing Microsoft Graph PowerShell on the platform where we can give you the most reliable, capable, and well-maintained experience: PowerShell 7.x and later. Built on modern .NET, PowerShell 7.x resolves many of the underlying assembly-loading and dependency issues that affect Windows PowerShell 5.x today. Concentrating our engineering there means faster fixes, quicker delivery of new features, and fewer platform-specific failures for you. To make that focus possible, today we're announcing that Windows PowerShell 5.x is entering a 12-month retirement period for the Microsoft Graph PowerShell modules. ...
AI Is Changing How We Code. It’s Also Changing How We Learn.
AI is changing software development at a pace no one can ignore. Developers now have powerful AI tools that can help us write code, understand unfamiliar codebases, troubleshoot problems, learn new frameworks, and get answers in seconds. That is an incredible opportunity. But as these tools become more capable, I believe something else is becoming more valuable too: learning directly from other developers. That’s one of the reasons I continue to believe so strongly in events like VSLive!. Learn from people who have done the work One of the things I value most about VSLive! is its focus on practica...
Your AI coding agent evaluation is only as good as its sandbox
Your AI coding agent passed the eval. But did the model know the answer, or did it find it somewhere on your machine? A correct answer can still invalidate your measurement.
Important updates: GitHub Copilot support ending for JetBrains 2025.1.x
To deliver new features faster and continue improving stability and performance, the GitHub Copilot plugin will end support for JetBrains IDEs version 2025.1.x (JetBrains platform build 251). Focusing on newer IDE versions helps us bring you new capabilities more quickly and maintain a high-quality experience. Our recommendation: The minimum supported JetBrains IDE version will be 2025.2.x, but we recommend upgrading to version 2026.1 or later and update your GitHub Copilot plugin to continue receiving the latest improvements. Timeline of deprecation The GitHub Copilot plugin will discontinue support for Jet...
Introducing Foundry Dev Pack: One Command to Start Building
Foundry Dev Pack prepares your machine for Microsoft Foundry development with an all-in-one installer for the tools you need across the terminal, VS Code, and coding agents.
From Redis pressure to a healthier service
Lessons from an Azure Managed Redis migration for Copilot Studio agent flows: cache efficiency, client reliability, staged rollout, and lower costs.
PackageType: Main, Framework, Resource, Optional, Bundle
Every MSIX package is one of four package types: MSIX also supports Bundle packages. Bundles are somewhat different from those four package types: a Bundle is a container for one or more MSIX packages. Windows APIs nevertheless expose Bundle alongside the other package types when identifying packages. Each package type has its own behaviors, nuances, and rationale worthy of a dedicated discussion. We'll take a brief whirlwind tour of MSIX package types here and explore them in greater detail in future blog posts. What does imply? What does actually mean? MSIX packages have various properties and beh...
Today I will… improve test coverage
Today I want to look at how we can improve on the test coverage that we have in the Interview Coach application. This application has some unit tests in it already, but I'm sure there is room for improvement. Defining our baseline Before we start writing tests, it's a good idea to have a baseline of what our coverage is so that we can find out where the gaps are, rather than just writing tests "for the sake of writing tests". We can do this using the Analyze Code Coverage for All Tests, from either the Command Palette (CTRL + SHIFT + P) or the Tests menu. Running the analyzer, we can see where our coverage ...
Build an interview coach app with the GitHub Copilot SDK
An interview coach has to do more than ask questions. It needs to read a resume, follow up on an incomplete answer, and save enough context to give useful feedback at the end. Some of that work is conversation. Some of it requires calling an application service. The GitHub Copilot SDK lets you use the runtime behind Copilot CLI for that work inside your own application. You provide instructions and callable tools. Copilot handles the model interaction and resulting tool calls, while your application owns the interface and business workflow. For a developer building a personal assistant or an internal workflow, ...
Why do Microsoft job levels start in the high 50’s instead of starting at a sane number like 1?
It used to start at 1, but that was the old system.
Coding agents are picking Azure SQL Database
I went looking for Azure SQL Database in a recent coding agent benchmark, honestly unsure whether Microsoft SQL would show up. Armature ran a study where real coding agent CLIs (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor) were dropped into six synthetic-but-realistic repositories and asked to pick a database, then actually build with it. 356 runs were completed across three personas: vibe coder, junior developer, senior engineer. Every session is published, so you can replay the prompts, the searches, the commands, and the code. Azure SQL Database came in second! Not second behind AWS. Second behind Neon, and ahead of Amazon...
Performance Improvements in .NET 11
Take a tour through hundreds of performance improvements in .NET 11.
C++ in the Age of AI: Visual Studio at CppCon 2026
At CppCon 2026, we shared how Visual Studio is evolving to help you work more effectively with large C++ codebases, improve build and runtime performance, adopt the latest language features, and incorporate AI into your existing workflows. This post is a companion reading guide for our session, C++ in the Age of AI: How Visual Studio Is Evolving, with links to learn more about the features and improvements we discussed. We will update this post with the YouTube video once the recording of the talk is available. What's new in Visual Studio 2026 These two release roundups provide the most complete overview of ...
Intelligent Terminal 0.2.2572: Faster, Smoother, and More Reliable
We're back with Intelligent Terminal v0.2.2572, and this one is all about making things faster, easier to use, more reliable, and more polished. This release lands over 60 fixes and improvements as well as API key support for local models, automatic approval for supported agents, and native slash commands your agent brings with it. You can grab the update from the Microsoft Store, via , or by heading to the release page on GitHub. Let's dive in! Faster, lighter, snappier We went after the parts of the product you feel every day: API key support for local models Plenty of endpoints need an API key, and ...
Share your .NET story with the community
Share how your team uses .NET to solve real problems and help us bring more community stories to .NET Conf 2026 and other .NET channels.
Why didn’t ReadDirectoryChangesW provide a way to correlate the two sides of a rename operation?
Perhaps it wasn't necessary, or perhaps it didn't occur to them that this a problem.
What’s New for C++ Developers in Visual Studio 2026 (18.7 – 18.10)
Over the past few months, we have continued shipping monthly Visual Studio 2026 releases, delivering improvements across all stages of the development cycle. In this blog post, we'll recap everything that changed from version 18.7 through 18.10 (released this month) that is relevant for C++ developers. This includes new tools for maintaining and navigating C++ projects, along with Git, GitHub Copilot, and debugging improvements that support the way large native codebases are built. Some headlines include the GitHub Copilot modernization experience (now generally available) to guide you through MSVC upgrades, a...
MulticloudDB SDK: Cross-cloud portability in the coding agent era
Building cross-cloud solutions with best-of-breed cloud-native databases means learning multiple SDKs, translating queries, handling different errors, and testing across providers. The Multicloud DB SDK for Java lets you share that work across Azure Cosmos DB, Amazon DynamoDB, and Google Cloud Spanner. You (or your coding agent) write CRUD and query logic against one Java API, with provider selection and connection settings in configuration. We demonstrated one application running unchanged across two providers at Azure Cosmos DB Conf 2026 on April 28, 2026, in MultiCloudDB: Write Once. Run Anywhere.. The SDK is...
Microsoft at CppCon 2026
Microsoft will be at CppCon 2026 in Aurora, Colorado, which is taking place from September 14 through 18. Join us for talks from Microsoft speakers and colleagues across the C++ community and visit the Microsoft booth Monday through Thursday to meet the team and discuss the tools, technologies, and challenges that matter to you. If you can't make it, you can still watch the talks later on YouTube. Survey Whether you are going to the conference or not, we also invite you to take our annual CppCon survey at aka.ms/cppcon/survey. Your feedback can help us improve our C++ developer tools and focus on solving the mo...
Building a Japanese LLM Evaluation Pipeline: Lessons from a Two-Day Hackathon
ISE hackathon produced a reusable Japanese LLM evaluation pipeline with multi-turn, facet-based scoring, cross-provider model support, and publication-ready benchmarking outputs.
How can I remove the Close button from my window caption?
Not through normal means.
MSVC C++23: constexpr cmath with LLVM Libc
Proposal P0533R9 made numerous math functions in the standard library compile-time evaluable in C++23. Implementing the feature required a good bit of time and effort, but MSVC is preparing its experimental implementation for the 14.52 build tools (compiler version 19.52)! We are still refining the feature, so expect the dust to settle only when this has shipped for production. The feature is enabled with a combination of the or later and compiler options. It is initially shipping as experimental and off by default because our implementation is powered by a new math library at compile-time and runtime, which...
September Patches for Azure DevOps Server
We are releasing new patches for our self‑hosted product, Azure DevOps Server. We strongly recommend that all customers stay up to date with the latest, most secure version of Azure DevOps Server. The most recent release, Azure DevOps Server, is available on the download page. The following versions have been patched. For more details on these updates, see the release notes: ⬇️Azure DevOps Server Patch Download ✅Verifying Installation To verify that the patch is installed, run the following command on the Azure DevOps Server machine using the patch installer you downloaded: Replace with the name of the...
Announcing Azure AI Speech LLM 2607: Better Multilingual Accuracy, Easier Customization
Learn how Azure AI Speech LLM 2607 improves multilingual and mixed-language recognition, lowers latency, and simplifies domain-specific customization with enhanced phrase lists.
Use C# unions and closed hierarchies in ASP.NET Core
Learn how C# unions and closed hierarchies work with System.Text.Json across ASP.NET Core Minimal APIs, MVC, SignalR, Blazor, and OpenAPI.
Why is the x86 undefined instruction called ud2? Why 2?
It came after <CODE>ud0</CODE> and <CODE>ud1</CODE>.
MSVC Build Tools Preview updates – September 2026
The MSVC Build Tools Preview is updated regularly with the latest features and fixes from the MSVC development team. This post covers updates from the past month, currently targeting the v14.52 release. This encompasses changes across the compiler frontend, backend, linker, standard library, and related tools. Although you can acquire the MSVC Build Tools Preview through either the Visual Studio 2026 Stable Channel or Insiders Channel, Insiders gets MSVC Preview updates more quickly (roughly weekly). To check whether it is installed, make sure one or both of these components are selected in the Visual Studio In...
What’s new in Microsoft Foundry: July and August 2026
Catch up on July and August in Microsoft Foundry: stable Hosted Agent and Toolbox SDK paths, Claude tools on Azure-hosted deployments, Model Router updates, local inference improvements, and the SDK migrations worth checking before you upgrade.
Advancing trusted AI innovation with Agents and new Azure OpenAI models in Azure Government
Today, we are announcing expanded AI capabilities available across the Microsoft Azure for US Government portfolio. The Microsoft Foundry Agent Service is now available in Azure Government, giving organizations managed infrastructure on which to build, deploy, and operate AI systems that can reason over authorized information, use approved tools, and help complete multi-step work. Additionally, GPT-5.6 Sol, GPT-5.6 Terra, and GPT-5.6 Luna are now available through Microsoft Foundry in Azure Government. Together, these capabilities give public-sector organizations more choice in how they build secure, scalable AI ...
What algorithm did Windows XP use to choose your initial user picture?
It's random, really.
Your work might not need the smartest model
The smartest model can cost five times more and deliver the same result, or even a worse one. See how evaluating your own work helps you get more value from your agent budget.
Announcing .NET 11 Release Candidate 1
.NET 11 Release Candidate 1 is available with improvements across libraries, runtime, SDK, MSBuild, NuGet, C#, F#, ASP.NET Core, .NET MAUI, and Windows Forms.