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Highlights
.NET Conf 2026 - Save the Date
Test what you ship: MSTest and Native AOT
Native memory for Microsoft Agent Framework with Azure Cosmos DB
Latest posts
Visual Studio Code 1.137 (Insiders)
Learn what is new in Visual Studio Code Insiders. Read the full article
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 ...
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.
.NET Conf 2026 Community Days Call for Presenters Is Open
Submit your session proposal for the community-led .NET Conf 2026 Community Days by October 6, 2026.
.NET and .NET Framework September 2026 servicing releases updates
A recap of the latest servicing updates for .NET and .NET Framework for September 2026.
Go 1.27.1-2 Microsoft build now available
A new release of the Microsoft build of Go is now available for download.
MSIX PackageVolume: How Package Storage Works
An MSIX package can be staged in several ways and locations: By far the most common is PackageVolume. We'll dig into the rest in future posts, but for now let's focus on MSIX PackageVolume. In the beginning... When MSIX first appeared in Windows 81 packages would be staged to a unique directory under . More specifically, packages were placed in a subdirectory named with the package's full name. For example: Every package has a unique package full name, and thus is staged to a unique subdirectory within its package volume. This is commonly referred to as a pkgdir. This illustrates one of MSIX's ...
Today I will… find hidden latency across a distributed .NET application
When a distributed application feels slow, the user sees one delay. The code behind that delay may run across a web frontend, backend services, databases, and external APIs. If you profile only the frontend while the backend is slow, the profiler can show that the frontend is healthy without revealing the actual bottleneck. This article shows how to narrow a cross-process performance problem with Visual Studio: identify the process that owns the slow operation, capture its CPU activity, inspect the report, and add a focused measurement when CPU samples cannot explain elapsed time. GitHub Copilot Profiler Agent...
A sample use of the winstart.bat file in Windows 95
For a driver that needs high resolution mode only in Windows.
The Agentic Road to Revenue
The Agentic Road to Revenue From SaaS concept to Azure Marketplace Building a SaaS application is only part of becoming a commercial software provider. To sell through the Microsoft commercial marketplace, the application also needs tenant isolation, subscription lifecycle management, billing integration, security evidence, and a publishable Partner Centre offer. To make this journey easier we have built SaaS_Skills into GIT-APE. This article follows Contoso Azure SaaS through seven stages, from selecting an offer model and applying the SaaS Architecture Reference Design to publishing its A...
Why don’t we allow stacks to be sparse, instead of forcing them to be contiguous?
Imagining how to report a memory allocation failure for a sparse page.
Azure SDK Release (August 2026)
Azure SDK releases every month. In this post, you'll find this month's highlights and release notes.
What happens if you change a window class’s GCL_CBWNDEXTRA ?
You're changing the value for future windows.
Native memory for Microsoft Agent Framework with Azure Cosmos DB
Agents are more useful when they can remember what matters beyond the current conversation. Today, we're announcing a new preview integration that gives Microsoft Agent Framework agents durable, cross-session memory backed by Azure Cosmos DB. The new Python package, , provides . Attach it to an agent once and it can automatically store conversation turns, extract durable memories, and recall relevant facts, summaries, and user profiles in later conversations. This integration was introduced by the Azure Cosmos DB team in Native Agent Memory for Microsoft Agent Framework, Powered by Azure Cosmos DB. Here, we...
SQL Decomposition in a Nutshell
Good software design principles apply inside the database too. See how decomposition, encapsulation, statelessness, and clear contracts can make complex T-SQL easier to read, test, reuse, and maintain.
Advocating for Uptime: The 6 Phases of Change
Schema changes are inevitable, but downtime doesn’t have to be. Learn a phased approach to safely evolve a production SQL schema while applications remain online.
Test what you ship: MSTest and Native AOT
MSTest source generation lets test projects use the same Native AOT and trimming deployment model as the applications they validate, while reducing reflection on the test execution path.
The case of the progress callback that never got called when progress happened
Are you talking to the right guy?
Go 1.27.1-1 and 1.26.8-1 Microsoft builds now available
A new release of the Microsoft build of Go is now available for download.
Stop alt-tabbing into the wrong Visual Studio
A user asked for per-solution color themes. It already ships, and it goes further than they asked. You run several instances of Visual Studio side by side, one per solution, and they all look identical. Same taskbar icon, same alt-tab thumbnail, same chrome. So, you land in the wrong one, start typing, and realize thirty seconds later you just edited the wrong repo. Could each solution get its own color theme? It can. It already does. And the way it works turns out to be more useful than a personal color preference. How to do it This uses the new settings experience introduced in Visua...
The perils of binding to value types in XAML
Loss of identity.
Behind SPFx Dev Skills: testing what agents know and fixing what they miss
How much guidance does an AI coding agent actually need? See how we used evaluation data to target SPFx knowledge gaps, improving results without wasting tokens on what models already know.
Servicing While In Use and ERROR_PACKAGES_IN_USE
How does MSIX service a package while it's in use? Simple: It doesn't. A core principle of MSIX servicing is: Do not service a package while it's in use. Deployment provides several ways to deal with that constraint. Options range from terminating applications to deferring servicing until the package is no longer in use. How hard can it be? 'Servicing a package' means any deployment activity modifying software, including update, remove, repair and other operations. Altering installed software can be highly disruptive if the software is in use. Executables and DLLs may be mapped into running processes. File...
Today I will… review GitHub PRs
Today I will show you how we can tackle one of the most common tasks when working in a development team or managing an open-source project, and that is working with Pull Requests. While we're going to be using the GitHub tooling within Visual Studio for this, the approach would be very similar with Azure DevOps. Getting our PRs Start by opening the pull requests for your repository. Select Git → GitHub → View Pull Requests. You can also search for the command in the Command Palette with Ctrl+Shift+P. From here, Visual Studio will load all the PRs in the repo and group them to the ones that are assigned to m...
Microspeak: Funded / unfunded
People are our most valuable asset.
Enterprise Live Migrations is now in public preview
Move Azure DevOps repositories to GitHub Enterprise Cloud with data residency while minimizing disruption Over the last several years, we’ve encouraged customers to move their repositories from Azure Repos to GitHub to take advantage of the latest AI-powered and agentic development experiences. We know that making this move at enterprise scale isn’t always straightforward. Critical repositories can’t simply be taken offline for days, and large migrations often require complex coordination and extended development freezes. ELM is designed to make these migrations more predictable, with minimal disruption to deve...
Power Azure SRE Agent with the tools it needs
Use Azure Connector Namespace to host MCP servers and give Azure SRE Agent access to the operational tools it needs without managing the server infrastructure yourself.
Bacpac and Dacpac, the similarities and differences
When you need to move an entire database or move the objects in a database, bacpac and dacpac files often come up because of all of the tooling options to interact with them. Bacpac and dacpac files share some core similarities as well as some major differences in how they're used in SqlPackage and other SQL tools, but their flexibility can create a bit of confusion. In this post, we are going to discuss exactly what makes bacpac specifically important, as well as explore the options that a dacpac is capable of. A bacpac is primarily a portable copy of schema and data whose model is limited to the Azure SQL Data...
AWE does not require PAE, though PAE makes it much more useful
All dressed up with nowhere to go.
Only believe what you can validate: a verification framework for agentic AI
How to read this article This article picks up where my January piece left off. My catch phrase is still the same: "only believe what you can validate". This article is about validation. If you are new to agentic AI (in modernization contexts), I would highly recommend reading The Realities of Application Modernization with Agentic AI first. Start there, then come back. The problem with "looks good to me" I have had a version of the same conversation many times over the last months. I work with a customer on an agentic application modernization. In this concrete example we are facing one of 150 COBOL module...
Try the new SqlClient and Retry connections natively
Microsoft.Data.SqlClient includes configurable retry logic for SqlConnection and SqlCommand, giving .NET applications built-in resilience for transient SQL Server failures without requiring Polly.
On forcing all derived classes to implement a specific non-virtual method, part 2
Explicitly denying that you implement the method.
SharePoint Framework (SPFx) roadmap update – August 2026
SPFx 1.24 Beta 3 is now available, React 18 support is coming in 1.24, and a new Copilot Components preview program opens for customers and partners.
Azure Developer CLI (azd) – August 2026
Welcome to the August 2026 edition of the Azure Developer CLI () release blog. This post covers releases 1.30.0, 1.31.0, 1.31.1, 1.31.2, and 1.32.0. To share your feedback and questions, join the August release discussion on GitHub. Highlights: New features 🔌 Extensions The extension framework reached general availability this month. Read more in The Azure Developer CLI extension framework is generally available. 📦 Container deployment Breaking changes 🪲 Bugs fixed Provisioning and deployment Pipelines and update...
How Uno Platform uses .NET, MCP, and AI to build high quality apps
How Uno Platform built two Model Context Protocol servers in C# so AI agents can ground themselves in real documentation and then see and drive a running cross-platform .NET app.