Engineering@Microsoft

How we built “Ask Learn”, the RAG-based knowledge service

April 22, 2024 Apr 22, 2024 04/22/24

Sarah Luck, Bob Tabor

My name is Bob Tabor and I’m a member of Microsoft’s Skilling organization. We create documentation and training content about Azure, developer tooling and languages, AI, Windows and much more hosted at Microsoft Learn. Our organization also develops and maintains the content publishing platform, the content hosting platform, the ...

Enhancing reliability in Microsoft Fabric and Azure Synapse through load testing

March 4, 2024 Mar 4, 2024 03/4/24

Predrag Vlatković

Microsoft has employed Azure Load Testing to enhance the reliability of Microsoft Fabric and Azure Synapse, ensuring they can handle high loads. Azure Synapse integrates various data analytics technologies, while Microsoft Fabric offers a full enterprise analytics solution. Through rigorous daily and weekly load testing, involving complex scenarios and extensive data sizes, Microsoft aims to identify and rectify potential issues, ensuring optimal performance. This testing, integrated within their development pipelines, supports continuous improvement, leverages Azure's scalability, and utilizes Power BI for detailed reporting, ultimately enhancing service reliability and user experience.

Accessibility Insights now supports WCAG 2.2 AA

December 3, 2023 Dec 3, 2023 12/3/23

Nandita Gupta, Jacqueline Gibson, Mark Reay

To celebrate the International Day for Persons with Disabilities on December 3rd we have some exciting new announcements for Accessibility Insights, Microsoft’s open-source suite of tools to help developers deliver accessible software! Technology plays a huge role in empowering everyone, including people with disabilities around the globe. ...

Building Paved Paths: The Journey to Platform Engineering

November 15, 2023 Nov 15, 2023 11/15/23

Amanda Silver

Over the past year, AI has taken the world by storm. Our industry is innovating at an unprecedented rate, bringing incredible products to market that make life and work easier and more efficient for real people across a wide range of sectors and job functions. Like previous industry shifts—the introduction of the PC, internet, and search—...

Copy-on-Write in Win32 API Early Access

November 2, 2023 Nov 2, 2023 11/2/23

Erik Mavrinac

(Updated Apr 4, 2024 with some release news.) On October 25, 2023, the Windows filesystem team released an early preview of copy-on-write (CoW) linking in the Windows 11 Insider Canary channel. This builds automatic CoW linking into the Win32 APIs when using Dev Drive or ReFS. If released next year, this will eliminate the need to update ...

Dev Drive is Now Available

October 13, 2023 Oct 13, 2023 10/13/23

Erik Mavrinac

(Edited Oct 31, 2023 to add info about later patch for InTune, Nov 6 and 8, 2023 to add Win11 23H2 image info, and Apr 4, 2024 to add info about Server. Also see the next post.) In a previous post, Dev Drive and Copy-on-Write for Developer Performance, we published early performance numbers for the new Dev Drive feature of Windows 11 and ...

Your Most Important Git Repos

August 24, 2023 Aug 24, 2023 08/24/23

Bryan Sullivan

What do you keep in your Git repos? Source code for your production applications certainly, but you probably also keep a fair amount of experimental and “hackathon” code. Maybe you keep your documentation in Git. Maybe, like the District of Columbia does, you even keep legal documents there. So which of these are the most important to ...

Load testing AAD-based authentication for Azure Cache for Redis

July 31, 2023 Jul 31, 2023 07/31/23

Rohit Anand

At Microsoft, we continue working on modernizing our services to make them faster, more reliable, and up to date with the latest technologies. In this blog post, we’ll cover how Azure Load Testing helped ensure that the Azure Active Directory (AAD) based authentication mechanism for Azure Cache for Redis met the performance criteria. Azure ...

Dev Drive and Copy-on-Write for Developer Performance

May 24, 2023 May 24, 2023 05/24/23

Erik Mavrinac

At Microsoft Build 2023 the Windows team announced Dev Drive, a new evolution of the Windows ReFS filesystem retuned for developer workloads like Git and builds. This new functionality will ship later this year in the Windows 11 23H2 refresh and is available now for early testing via the Windows Insider program.

Microsoft Dev Box for Microsoft engineers

May 23, 2023 May 23, 2023 05/23/23

Josh Zimmerman

We’re in an exciting time for technology. But to take advantage of the opportunities, it’s critical for developers to have access to the tools and resources that can help them stay productive and do their best work. At Microsoft, we’re migrating many of our developers to highly productive…