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Build your own claw and agent harness with Microsoft Agent Framework
What does it take to build your own "claw" - a capable, CLI-style agent that can plan, use tools, remember things, and safely act on your behalf? Coding agents and assistants like these can feel like magic, but underneath they are an agent harness: a loop around a language model wired up...
Read moreClick to read more about this postIn memory of the man who put red and green squiggles under words
Starting in Word and expanding to nearly every other word processor, and even things that aren't word processors.
Read moreClick to read more about this postStop overloading your skills
You built a skill for your technology. API references, authentication flows, SDK patterns, error handling, version info, all packed into one skill. The agent calls it, gets all that context, and generates code. The kicker? You've just wasted a lot of tokens.
It already knows
Models have...
Read moreClick to read more about this postLatest posts
Jul 7, 2026
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Applications Are Not Packages
Applications are not packages.
Let me repeat.
Applications are not packages.
This is a common misconception due to the (too) often blurring of concepts and terminology. Packages and applications are different and distinct things, so it's important to understand what those words mean...
Inside MSIX
Jul 7, 2026
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How did Windows 95 decide that a setup program ran?
It used some heuristics.
The Old New Thing
Jul 7, 2026
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Don't rewrite your CLI for agents
There's advice making the rounds: replace your CLI args with a single --json payload so agents can use your tool more effectively. The thinking being, that agents already think in structured formats, and nested data maps cleanly to JSON. Flat args on the other hand, force awkward...
Microsoft for Developers
Jul 7, 2026
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Agent Skills for .NET Is Now Released
You can now give your .NET agents reusable packages of domain expertise - instructions, reference documents, and scripts they load only when a task needs them - through a stable, production-ready API. Agent Skills for .NET in Microsoft Agent Framework has moved out of experimental preview...
Microsoft Agent Framework
Jul 7, 2026
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What's New in Microsoft Foundry | June 2026
Claude is now generally available in Microsoft Foundry. Here's everything else that shipped between Build 2026 and the end of June — autopilot agents, expanded Toolboxes and Routines, Agent Optimizer's private preview, and more.
Microsoft Foundry Blog
Jul 6, 2026
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See our new Azure Cosmos DB Design Patterns
Design patterns are where good data modeling lives or dies. In a NoSQL database like Azure Cosmos DB, the difference between a schema that scales to millions of operations per second and one that fights you at every turn usually comes down to a handful of well‑understood patterns: how...
Azure Cosmos DB Blog
Jul 6, 2026
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I opened a file with FILE_FLAG_DELETE_ON_CLOSE , but now I changed my mind
You can't change your mind, but you can do it a different way.
The Old New Thing
Jul 6, 2026
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Need a different partition key in Azure Cosmos DB? Pick the right approach
Once you create a container, its partition key is fixed at creation, and you can’t change it in place. However, if your original key starts causing problems like cross-partition queries or hot partitions, you need to consider your options for changing it. This post explains the...
Azure Cosmos DB Blog
Jul 6, 2026
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Not all model upgrades are upgrades
A new model drops with lower per-token pricing and better benchmarks. You switch. A week later someone asks why the agent is burning 12x more tokens on the same task while producing worse output.
We ran 150 agent tasks across 15 scenarios on two models, Claude Sonnet 4.6 and Claude...
Microsoft for Developers