Engineering@Microsoft
How Microsoft empowers its developers to deliver at massive scale
Latest posts
Common annotated security keys
In April 2021, GitHub announced changes to their security token format that significantly enhanced security. The improvement leveraged two straightforward techniques: a fixed signature in the generated token and a checksum - both of which are highly effective in eliminating false positives (noise) and false negatives (missed findings). Microsoft also implements these techniques widely in our service providers. Internally, we refer to any key format that incorporates both techniques as 'identifiable' (a term also used in GitHub’s blog post). Identifiable secrets super-power open-source scan tools and more sophist...
Managed DevOps Pools – The Origin Story
Learn about how Microsoft's 1ES organization developed an internal service called "1ES Hosted Pools" to manage Microsoft's diverse Engineering system infrastructure and how it helped make significant improvements to productivity, cost savings, and security. This solution will soon be available as a third-party offering named "Managed DevOps Pools".
Developing with Accessibility in Mind at Microsoft
Celebrate the Global Accessibility Awareness Day GAAD by taking actionable and easy steps to build accessibility into your development life-cycle! Learn how tools like Accessibility Insights & Visual Studio can help find accessibility issues in development.
Copy-on-Write performance and debugging
This is a follow-up to our previous coverage of Dev Drive and copy-on-write (CoW) linking. See our previous articles from May 24, 2023, October 13, 2023, and November 2, 2023. Dev Drive was released in Windows 11 in October, 2023, and will be part of Windows Server 2025 this fall. Server 2025 and Windows 11 24H2 ship with an enhancement to automatically use copy-on-write linking (CoW-in-Win32). Here, we'll cover the results of several months of repo build performance testing for several large internal codebases, provide some information on determining whether a file is a CoW link, and share a few tips we found f...
How we built “Ask Learn”, the RAG-based knowledge service
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 interactivity, and popular sites like Microsoft Q&A. One of the most ambitious and impactful projects our engineers have built recently is Ask Learn, an API that provides generative AI capabilities to Microsoft Q&A and the ground truth necessary to power the new Microsoft Copilo...
Enhancing reliability in Microsoft Fabric and Azure Synapse through load testing
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 detai...
Accessibility Insights now supports WCAG 2.2 AA
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. Developers can now build with more accessibility in mind using Accessibility Insights for Web: This updated version includes testing support and guidance for WCAG 2.2 within the Assessment feature. We are constantly striving to improve user experience and added features that ma...
Building Paved Paths: The Journey to Platform Engineering
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—it’s a pretty safe bet that we’ll look back at this moment and see the world before AI, and a world powered by AI. It’s an all-up mindset shift that fundamentally changes how we interact with technology. In the developer space, GitHub Copilot has become the most widely-adopted AI...
Copy-on-Write in Win32 API Early Access
(Updated Apr 4 and 26, 2024 with some release news. Also see the next post) 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 build engines, tools, and runtime frameworks to support CoW. Related release information is here. We released some early benchmarks showing the automatic gain for .NET without the need for explicitly updating tools to use CoW. In testing a large ...