Microsoft
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Get the latest information, insights, and news from Microsoft.
Highlights
Publish Visual Studio Marketplace extensions securely with Trusted Publishing
The Microsoft building that was reportedly haunted
The paper that explains how Microsoft SQL learned to recover without undoing everything first
Latest posts
Work IQ: SharePoint Tools
Bring SharePoint into your custom apps and agents with Work IQ API New SharePoint tools are coming to the Work IQ API, bringing SharePoint content and actions to your custom apps and agents through the same workplace intelligence layer that powers Microsoft Copilot. Work IQ connects AI to your organization’s knowledge, people, and workflows, combining context, memory, and skills to help agents understand work and act on it. With these new tools, developers can build agents that find files, manage lists and libraries, and work with approvals—all within the signed-in user’s existing permissions. By dynamically d...
Microsoft Foundry extension for Azure Developer CLI is generally available
Set up, test, evaluate, and deploy hosted agents with the generally available Microsoft Foundry extension for Azure Developer CLI, keeping agent and deployment configuration alongside your code.
Help Shape the Future of .NET: Take the 2026 .NET Developer Survey
Take the 2026 .NET Developer Survey to share your experience, help identify common challenges, and guide future .NET investments. The survey takes about 15 minutes.
Modernize your .NET apps for Windows Arm64 with GitHub Copilot
Modernize your .NET apps for Windows Arm64 with the GitHub Copilot upgrade agent, from identifying migration blockers to planning and making code changes.
Your best AX fixes are hiding in agent trajectories
All five agent runs produced a working script, and nothing in the eval score looked wrong. The trajectories told a different story. Every run read a DLL as raw bytes to find plugin names, and three scripts would quietly reroute a CI runner's network traffic. Here are the patterns to look for in your own agents' trajectories, and what to change in your product when you find them.
October 2026 Node.js vulnerabilities: Azure DevOps security guidance
On October 21, 2026, the Node.js project released fixes for 10 vulnerabilities. These include flaws in DNS resolution and TLS certificate validation, along with a Brotli decompression bug that can corrupt memory and potentially allow code execution when an application processes attacker-controlled data. The fixes shipped in 22.23.4, 24.22.1 and 26.12.1, with different affected branches and prerequisites for each CVE. Azure Pipelines can use Node.js in several contexts, including agent task runners, pipeline-selected tools and application runtimes. Each has a separate update path. Vulnerability scope...
You shouldn’t change the style of a Win32 static control after it has been created
It doesn't really handle that case.
Bring Agentic Coding On-Device with Foundry Local
Foundry Local brings agentic coding directly to developer hardware.
What’s new in Microsoft Foundry | October 2026
Plan your Microsoft Ignite November 17-20 viewing, then explore October's Copilot harness preview, GA browser automation and hosted-agent resilience, Decisions API, and SDK updates with chapter-linked Handoff demos.
Important updates: GitHub Copilot support ending for JetBrains 2025.2.x
Following our previous announcement about ending support for JetBrains 2025.1.x, we're continuing to update the minimum supported IDE versions for GitHub Copilot. Our general principle is to support approximately one year of JetBrains IDE releases, allowing us to focus on newer platform capabilities while continuing to improve GitHub Copilot's features, stability, and performance. With JetBrains 2026.3 now available, the GitHub Copilot plugin will end support for JetBrains IDEs version 2025.2.x (platform build 252) in the coming months. The minimum supported IDE version will move to 2025.3.x, although we r...
Intelligent Terminal 0.3: A new way to manage your tabs and agents
This is the biggest update to Intelligent Terminal since we launched. This release introduces the new sidebar for managing your tabs and agents, including recent agent sessions and agents running in other terminal windows. You also get rich tab information you can customize, global search, and a filter for focusing on your agents. Intelligent Terminal now detects installed agent CLIs and adds them to the new tab menu, while headless mode keeps selected tabs running after you close the terminal. You can grab the update from the Microsoft Store or by heading to the release page on GitHub. Let's dive in! Introduci...
Advancing the Quality-Efficiency Frontier for Coding AI on Windows PCs
Powered by NVIDIA RTX Spark, we are bringing the promise of unmetered local intelligence to increasingly demanding coding workloads—giving developers greater freedom to experiment, delegate, and iterate on their own hardware, without per-token cloud charges. Highly capable mixture-of-experts (MoE) models are making this opportunity tangible. These models tackle complex coding tasks spanning reasoning, implementation, testing, and debugging, while advances in efficiency are bringing more of that capability onto local devices. With 128 GB of unified memory, RTX Spark PCs enables us to ask a crucial question: how...
Deprecation notice: Low-trust SharePoint add-ins in SharePoint Server Subscription Edition
Support for low-trust SharePoint Add-ins in SharePoint Server Subscription Edition ends on January 12, 2027. The January 2027 public update will disable these add-ins by default. Organizations should identify affected solutions and plan their migration to supported alternatives, such as SharePoint Framework (SPFx). SharePoint REST, CSOM, and JSOM APIs are not affected.
Give your coding agent a head start with Microsoft Agent Framework skills for .NET and Python
We have added installable Microsoft Agent Framework builder skills for .NET and Python. They give coding agents Microsoft-maintained guidance for building and modifying Agent Framework applications, from choosing the right pattern to wiring tools, sessions, workflows, and hosting. These are development-time skills for your coding assistant, not runtime skills loaded by the application you ship. Use a coding agent that supports the Agent Skills format. With GitHub CLI, install the .NET skill from : For Python: Both examples use for the latest repository guidance. Pin ...
Keep learning, keep building! Make the most of VSLive! with your Visual Studio Subscription
Keeping up with new technology is one thing. Finding worthwhile opportunities to explore what matters most to your work is another. That's where VSLive! can help. It brings technical learning, hands-on experience, expert guidance, and a community of developers together in one place, giving you focused time to explore evolving technologies and decide what’s worth bringing back to your team. And if you're an eligible Dev Essentials member, Visual Studio Professional subscriber, or Visual Studio Enterprise subscriber, you have benefits that can provide a significant discount for these in-person events. D...
There are things with ranks, but it’s not always clear what the ranks mean
The problem with documentation written by people who know the feature too well.
Your voice shapes SPFx: take our developer survey
Help shape the future of SPFx. Share your developer experience in our survey, open until December 9, 2026, and help guide future investments. Explore highlights from a year of updates, including Copilot UX components, and discover what’s next on the roadmap and how to get involved in the community.
GitHub Copilot is now a default agent in JetBrains Air
GitHub Copilot is now available in the JetBrains Air as a default agent. Select GitHub Copilot as your agent, delegate coding tasks, and work through results without leaving your IDE. All you need to get started is a GitHub Copilot subscription: Built in collaboration with JetBrains and powered by Agent Client Protocol (ACP), this integration brings GitHub Copilot into Air's native agent experience. Developers can select GitHub Copilot from the agent picker, sign in with their existing GitHub Copilot subscriptions, and start delegating coding tasks, managing parallel agent sessions, and reviewing changes wi...
Announcing XAML IntelliSense Support in the WinApp VS Code Extension
From creating your first project to writing UI and debugging with package identity, the WinApp extension helps you build Windows apps right in VS Code. It combines language support for app manifests with tools to create, run, debug, package, and sign your app, bringing more of your everyday development workflow into the editor. Get it now: Install the WinApp extension from the VS Code Marketplace. We're excited to announce the release of v0.4. This release introduces an experimental preview of project-aware IntelliSense for your WinUI XAML, adds a command for creating new WinUI apps, and lets you build and ru...
My Favorite Undocumented Feature in SQL MCP Server
Deploy Microsoft's SQL MCP Server in minutes without a configuration file. Learn how DAB_CONNSTRING enables fast deployment using Docker, Azure Container Apps, ACI, or AKS.
Modernize MongoDB applications with Azure DocumentDB: From assessment to what’s next
Migrating an existing MongoDB application shouldn't mean starting over. The application code, data models, APIs, and integrations you've already built represent years of investment. The challenge is moving forward while preserving what works. For many organizations, modernization is about more than moving a database to the cloud. It's an opportunity to simplify operations, optimize costs, build on open-source technologies, and prepare applications for new requirements, including AI-powered experiences. Azure DocumentDB provides a path forward. Microsoft's fully managed, MongoDB-compatible database service i...
Delivering Skills in NuGet packages
Agent skills can be delivered in NuGet packages as a way to deliver up-to-date library documentation to models.
Get Ready for .NET Conf 2026!
.NET Conf is one week away! Join us November 10-13 for the launch of .NET 11, two days of Microsoft sessions, and two days of Community Days.
Sparse Package
We recently discussed External Location and how it lets Windows find files referenced in but installed by some other (not-MSIX) installer. Many people call this kind of package a "Sparse package". Many even think sparse packages are the important feature, and External Location is a minor implementation detail. But...what is a sparse package? First, let's create one. HOWTO create a sparse package At its simplest, a sparse package contains and other footprint files, and no payload files.1 For example, here's a simple manifest for a HelloWorld application: The manifest declares , indicating it is intended ...
Your app needs documents. Do you really want to build a document platform?
File storage is rarely just file storage. Imagine your team is building a contract management application. At first, the document requirement looks straightforward: upload a file, organize it, retrieve it, and let the right people open it. Then the real requirements from your customer, security, and operations teams arrive, and the scope quickly expands to collaboration, authentication, permissions, governance, and administrative controls. What began as a feature has become a document platform. And now your team is spending cycles on content services instead of adding unique customer value. SharePoint ...
Go beyond the basics: Explore specialized Azure plugins for your AI agent
Explore six specialized Azure plugins for AKS operations, cost management, Advisor recommendations, Kusto graph analysis, Azure Local, and Foundry IQ, with example prompts and installation commands.
How do you implement a random-access database when you don’t have random-access external storage?
You just store it all in memory, in your own program.
ChatGPT runs on Azure Cosmos DB. Prove you can build what’s next.
Take the newly AI-focused DP-420 exam free at Microsoft Ignite—or take the certification exam today and save 50% through Data Days. OpenAI’s storage platform uses Azure Cosmos DB to help serve products used by more than one billion people each week. If you want to build AI applications at that kind of scale, the newly updated DP-420 certification gives you a way to validate your expertise—and registered, in-person Microsoft Ignite 2026 attendees can take the exam onsite for free. DP-420 now centers on Building AI Applications with Azure Cosmos DB, in...
Sneaking into the auditorium for the Windows 2000 launch rehearsal
Wait, that's not him.
My Team Is Growing, How Do I Structure Who Gets Access to What?
Your project started with one or two people. Now developers, operators, analysts, and applications all need access to Azure Cosmos DB. Giving everyone the same permissions might feel efficient, but it makes every identity more powerful than its job requires. As your team grows, organize access around jobs, not people. Separate management access from data access, assign roles to groups and workload identities, and use the smallest practical scope. You do not need a complicated permission model for every person. You need a small set of repeatable access patterns. Separate managing the account from using i...
The paper that explains how Microsoft SQL learned to recover without undoing everything first
Under the Hood: The Research Behind Microsoft SQL, part 2 Here’s a scenario that used to be genuinely frightening: you kick off a bulk load of a few hundred million rows in a single transaction. Somewhere in the middle, the server goes down. Not because of your load, just an unlucky reboot. When SQL Server comes back, it has to undo everything that transaction did before anyone can touch those tables. Row by row (I think I’ve heard probably Bob Ward say “row by agonizing row” to describe this). Working backwards through the log. That exact thing happened to an Azure SQL customer, and the team wrote it in...
Everything released in October 2026 for Azure Developer CLI
The October recap for the Azure Developer CLI (`azd`). Preview service deployments before making changes, deploy to Container Apps express, remove stored environment values, and use extension-defined infrastructure providers in generated pipelines. Extension APIs gain stable contracts, and provisioning validation, cancellation, and upgrade recovery improve.
Is Azure SQL Database Hyperscale “distributed SQL”?
In my last post, I broke down the Socrates paper, the research that became Azure SQL Database Hyperscale. Writing it made me want to tackle a question I think trips a lot of people up when they're choosing a database: is Azure SQL Database Hyperscale "distributed SQL"? It's a fair question. "Distributed SQL" has become shorthand for "the relational database that scales in the cloud," and anything outside that bucket tends to get filed under "the relational one my company already has." I'd rather not leave that to assumption, so here's how I think about it. What people usually mean by "distributed" When ar...
The Microsoft building that was reportedly haunted
Lots of rumors, little confirmation.
Does ‘eval’ in the workspace path change what your agent does?
Your eval might be telling the agent it's a test before the agent reads a single instruction. Eval tools need a fresh folder for every run, and the easiest way to get one is a temp directory with a random name like . The agent sees that path on every turn, in the system prompt as its working directory and in the output of every tool call. If models can tell when they're being tested, a folder literally called is about the easiest giveaway there is. So we checked whether the folder name changes what agents do. Across about 900 runs and four models, it made them more convinced they were being tested, but it didn'...