AI
Using Azure Blob Storage as a durable filesystem for LangChain Deep Agents
LangChain Deep Agents is an open-source agent harness with built-in capabilities for building LLM-powered agents and applications, including complex, multi-step workflows. A model can reason and generate responses, but it needs a harness to do useful work over time. The harness provides the tools and runtime that let the model retrieve the right context, take actions, and manage work across multiple steps. Deep Agents supplies that structure through planning, context management, a virtual filesystem, memory and skills, specialized subagents, and human approval points. Filesystems give agents a familiar way ...
Foundry hosted agent isolation with Microsoft Agent Framework
Foundry hosted agent isolation exposes two independent controls. User isolation identifies whose data may be used. At the same time, Foundry hosted session isolation identifies where code and files continue to live. For each control, Foundry can resolve the value or the application can provide it. Therefore, the available choices support direct callers, trusted middle tiers, application-managed sessions, and shared session pools. While Foundry hosted agents are generally available in Microsoft Foundry, the AgentServer SDKs and the Microsoft Agent Framework Foundry hosting packages for .NET and Python are stil...
Knowledge cutoff is a poor proxy for model capability
A model can fail on features released before its knowledge cutoff, then succeed on ones released after it. We tested hundreds of product changes and found that the date tells you far less than the work does.
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.
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.
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, ...
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...
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.
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.
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.
New Azure SQL Foundations video series with GitHub samples
Bob Ward and I recently released a series of videos, read more in the original blog post or go directly to the series on YouTube. The Azure SQL Database Foundations series are four videos that take you from your first Hyperscale database to AI features running against your own operational data. We also included how to assess and migrate (with AI and skills!) to Hyperscale in the first place, and the common optimizations you should consider. Every episode ships with a repo, so you can follow along in your own environment instead of watching someone else’s terminal.
From dotnet run to Foundry Hosted Agent in 3 lines of C#
You built an agent with Microsoft Agent Framework and it works great on your machine. Now what? Turns out deploying it to production takes 1 NuGet package, 3 lines of C#, and 2 commands. Let's do it.
Outgrowing SQL Server Express? Upgrade to Azure SQL Database Free Tier in 3 Steps
If you’ve been building local prototypes, internal tools, web backends, or lightweight services on SQL Server Express, you know the routine: it’s free, familiar, and gets the job done – until you hit hardware limits or spend weekends manual backup scripts and handling OS patches. Learn how to upgrade from SQL Server Express to Azure SQL Database free tier in 3 simple steps. Whether you're running SQL Server 2022 (or older) and hitting the hard 10 GB storage wall, or using SQL Server 2025 and realizing 50 GB of disk space doesn't solve the strict 1.4 GB memory bottleneck, staying on Express limits your applica...
Azure Cosmos DB in the Agentic Era: Data Tools for Developers and AI Agents
Anthropic's 2026 Agentic Coding Trends Report captures an important tension in how developers use AI. Engineers report using AI in roughly 60% of their work, yet say they can fully delegate only 0–20% of their tasks. AI is becoming a constant collaborator, but it still needs setup, supervision, validation, and human judgment. That gap is especially relevant when an agent starts working with a database. Database requests often sound easy. “Show me the failed orders from last week.” “Why is this query expensive?” “Does this container have the field I need?” For a developer, answering those question...
From single call to agents: five new Claude capabilities now available in Microsoft Foundry
Structured outputs, web search, web fetch, MCP connector, and tool search are now available for Claude models hosted on Azure in Microsoft Foundry, turning a model endpoint into a production agent platform.
Beyond Vector Indexes: Azure SQL Brings Optimizer Intelligence to Vector Search
Why production AI retrieval depends on more than vector index performance. It's easy to think of AI retrieval as a vector search problem. For many developers, the first conversation starts with vector index benchmarks: How many queries per second can it handle? What's the latency? What's the recall? How well does it scale? Those metrics are critical, but production AI retrieval rarely consists of vector similarity alone. Equally important is what happens when vector search becomes part of a real application workload, one that includes filters, joins, security policies, ranking logic, and live operational d...
Routing and Failover for Microsoft.Extensions.AI
Route requests across models and providers natively in Microsoft.Extensions.AI with RoutingChatClient, SemanticRoutingChatClient, and FailoverChatClient — new experimental primitives for content-based routing, failover, and custom routing policies.
From Sync APIs to support for the GPT-5 model series and agentic workflows: What’s new in Azure Content Understanding – August 2026
Enterprise content is no longer just something people read. AI apps and agents are only as useful as the information they can understand, yet much of the world’s enterprise knowledge is locked in documents, forms, tables, images, audio, and video. The latest Azure Content Understanding updates help developers turn that content into structured, grounded data with less custom processing. This release brings broader support for the GPT-5 model series, lower token usage, improved confidence scoring, new synchronous APIs for Read and Layout, advanced contextualization for higher-quality extraction, new tax-focused pre...
Azure Content Understanding GPT-5 Series Guide: Model Selection, Grounding Improvements, and Confidence Enhancements
Enterprise content is no longer just something people consume. As organizations increasingly rely on AI to extract and act on information from documents, images, audio, and video, Azure Content Understanding is expanding support for the GPT-5 series and improving grounding and confidence to deliver greater flexibility, efficiency, and quality. This expanded model catalog enables organizations to choose the right level of intelligence for each workload, helping reduce costs for high-volume processing while preserving access to advanced reasoning capabilities where needed. It also provides optimized pipelines tu...