Engineering@Microsoft
How Microsoft empowers its developers to deliver at massive scale
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How Microsoft Engineers Build AI: Learn about scalable RAG-enabled AI Apps
For developers, the emphasis on building intelligence into apps has never been clearer. Over the next three years, 92% of companies plan on investing in AI to achieve business outcomes like enhancing productivity and delivering better customer service. At Microsoft, developers and engineers are pushing the boundaries of AI at scale, crafting applications that harness the power of cutting-edge machine learning models and advanced AI techniques. To help both newcomers and seasoned AI developers understand these methodologies, we are thrilled to introduce a new video series – How Microsoft engineers build AI. We’l...
Dev Box Ready-To-Code Dev Box images template
Microsoft One Engineering System (1ES) team shares a sample for building Ready-To-Code Dev Box environments pre-configured with the necessary tools, repositories, and settings, ensuring consistency and reliability across teams.
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...