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Highlights

Using Codes to Increase Adherence to Prompts

Agentic systems have some discretion in the parameters they sent to tooling, but there are cases, such as experimentation, when you need 100% adherence to a set of parameters.

C++ symbol context and CMake build configuration awareness for GitHub Copilot in VS Code

C++ code navigation and build system tooling play an important role in the developer inner-loop. Code navigation tooling provides a precise, semantic understanding of your codebase, while build system tooling helps you express build configurations and variants for reproducible builds. In...

Customizing the ways the dialog manager dismisses itself: Detecting the ESC key, second (failed) attempt

Sniffing the synchronous keyboard state is still not precise enough.

Feb 26, 2026

Measuring actual AI Impact for Engineering with Apache DevLake

Eldrick Wega

If you want to skip the explain and get started super quick with adoption + impact insights, use gh-devlake to deploy a GitHub Copilot impact dashboard in a few CLI commands. So! You've rolled out GitHub Copilot to your engineering teams. You've got the built-in dashboards. You...

All things Azure

Feb 26, 2026

Announcing Shader Model 6.9 Retail and New D3D12 Improvements

Amar,

Serena

Today, we are pleased to announce that Shader Model 6.9 and other features have been officially released with Agility SDK 1.619 and complementary DXC 1.9.2602.16. Many of these features have been in preview status since 2025. Simultaneously, we are releasing a handful of new preview...

DirectX Developer Blog

Feb 26, 2026

PIX 2602.25 and 2602.25-preview - support for new D3D features and misc quality-of-life improvements

Austin Kinross

Today we released PIX 2602.25 and 2602.25-preview, which can be downloaded here. These releases include everything in the previous 2601.15 release, plus: 2602.25: includes support for all of the new D3D12 features released today in Agility SDK 619.0, including Shader Model 6.9, DXR...

PIX on Windows

Feb 26, 2026

Vector Data in .NET - Building Blocks for AI Part 2

Jeremy Likness

Discover how Microsoft.Extensions.VectorData brings unified vector database access to .NET - one interface for semantic search across any vector store with built-in support for embeddings, filtering, and RAG patterns.

.NET Blog

Feb 26, 2026

Fence Barriers: Fine-Grained GPU Synchronization in Direct3D 12

Bill Kristiansen

Introducing Fence Barriers We are excited to share the preview release of Fence Barriers (Tier-1), a new capability now available in AgilitySDK 1.719-preview (https://devblogs.microsoft.com/directx/directx12agility/). Fence Barriers expand on Enhanced Barriers to provide support for...

DirectX Developer Blog

Feb 26, 2026

D3D12 Shader Execution Reordering

Amar Patel

Now officially released, Shader Execution Reordering (SER) is an addition to DirectX Raytracing that enables application shader code inform hardware how to find coherency across rays so they can be sorted to execute better in parallel. SER support is a required feature in Shader...

DirectX Developer Blog

Feb 26, 2026

D3D12 Opacity Micromaps

Amar,

Adam

DirectX Raytracing (DXR) now supports Opacity Micromaps (OMMs), enabling hardware to handle alpha tested geometry more efficiently than relying only on costly AnyHit shader invocations. At GDC 2025 DXR 1.2 was announced including OMMs, and you can see it discussed in this: GDC...

DirectX Developer Blog