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Developer Blogs

This post announces the deprecation of MSI packaging beginning with PowerShell 7.7.

In Part 1 of this blog series set the stage for why platform engineering is being reshaped by agentic AI. (read it here) Basically we outline how instead of humans translating intent through layers of CLIs, SDKs, and bespoke workflows, capable agents can interpret natural-language...

We’re pleased to provide an update on C++23 support in the Microsoft C++ (MSVC) Build Tools. This blog post will cover the feature additions in MSVC Build Tools version 14.51, including C++23 language features, libraries, and ISO C++ Core Working Group (CWG) and Library Working Group...

March ships Foundry Agent Service GA with private networking, GPT-5.4 and GPT-5.4 Mini, Priority Processing, Phi-4 Reasoning Vision, SDK 2.0 GA across Python, JS/TS, Java, and .NET, Fireworks AI and NVIDIA Nemotron models, and third-party guardrails from Palo Alto and Zenity.

Ship local AI to millions of devices - fast, private on-device inference with no per-token costs.

Aspire 13.2 introduces isolated mode, letting you run multiple instances of the same AppHost in parallel without port conflicts. Learn how the --isolated flag solves development and testing workflows.

You can't, but you can cooperate with the other thread.

Learn what's new in Visual Studio Code 1.115 Read the full article

A new release of the Microsoft build of Go including security fixes is now available for download.

SQL MCP Server gives enterprises a secure, feature-rich way to enable agents to access data. This is accomplished without exposing the schema, risking consistency, or relying on fragile natural language parsing. SQL MCP Server is a feature of Data API builder, so deployments have a proven...

Learn how to connect your MCP server hosted on Azure Functions to Microsoft Foundry agents. This post covers authentication options and setup steps to give your AI agent access to custom MCP tools.

You can't, but you can arrange for the waiter to do it for you.

We’re excited to announce that the GitHub Copilot for Eclipse plugin is going open source under the MIT license and will be hosted on GitHub under the microsoft organization in the coming weeks. By open-sourcing the project, we’re inviting the community to contribute,...

Multi-agent systems demo beautifully. Putting them in front of real users is another story. In early prototypes, a terminal or a basic chat window is enough. But once agents start handing off to each other, pausing for approvals, or asking follow-up questions, those...

Build MCP tools with rich UI experiences using the new Fluent API for MCP Apps in the .NET isolated worker. Configure views, permissions, and security policies with just a few lines of code.

Agents bring rich, app powered UI experiences directly into Microsoft 365 Copilot chat, via MCP Apps or the OpenAI Apps SDK. Read about what customers and partners are building.

Introducing GitHub Copilot Modernization and diving into the assessment report as part of cloud modernization process

AI agents can write code but struggle to run and test it. Aspire gives your agent a codified app model to build, run, and observe your whole stack.

ASP.NET Core 2.3 will reach end of support on April 7, 2027. Learn what this means for your applications and how to upgrade to a modern supported version of .NET.

Azure Cosmos DB enables scalable AI-driven document processing, addressing one of the biggest barriers to operational scale in today’s enterprise AI landscape. Organizations continue to manage massive volumes of structured and unstructured content—contracts, regulatory filings,...

Reviewed by: Sumit Sarabhai If you've been writing SQL in Python, you already know the debate: positional parameters (?) or named parameters (%(name)s)? Some developers swear by the conciseness of positional. Others prefer the clarity of named. With mssql-python, you no longer...

Make Visual Studio floating windows work perfectly with PowerToys FancyZones. Flip one option to get independent windows, better snapping, and less friction.

The permanently ineligible list.

We've shipped a big round of updates to Agent Academy. Two new sections, a completely redone site experience, and more missions on the way. Here's what's changed. Quick recap for anyone new Agent Academy is a free, open-source curriculum for learning how to build agents with Microsoft...

After July 9, 2026, the Azure SDK for JavaScript will no longer support Node.js 20.x. Upgrade to an Active Node.js Long Term Support (LTS) version to stay secure and up-to-date.

Learn how to build and deploy MCP (Model Context Protocol) apps on Azure Functions using TypeScript. This guide covers MCP tools, resources, local development, and serverless deployment with a practical weather app example.

If the compiler is complaining about things you didn't write, find out who wrote them.

Today, we're thrilled to announce that Microsoft Agent Framework has reached version 1.0 for both .NET and Python. This is the production-ready release: stable APIs, and a commitment to long-term support. Whether you're building a single assistant or orchestrating a fleet of specialized...

File copying is not a fundamental operation, nor is it even detectable at the file system layer.

React Native Windows v0.82 is here, marking a major milestone: the legacy Paper architecture has been fully removed. All applications now run exclusively on the New Architecture (Fabric), and this release also unlocks XAML controls for community modules — so Windows apps can seamlessly...

C# 15 introduces union types — declare a closed set of case types with implicit conversions and exhaustive pattern matching. Try unions in preview today and see the broader exhaustiveness roadmap.

Aspire 13.2 ships aspire docs, a CLI for browsing, searching, and reading official aspire.dev docs from your terminal, with the same source of truth available to AI skills and automation.

Tempting but misleading.

Learn what's new in Visual Studio Code 1.114 Read the full article

The March 2026 release of the Python and Jupyter extensions for Visual Studio Code is now available. Keep on reading to learn more!

These updates include a security fix for OpenSSL packaging on Windows, parallel file installation for improved performance, and other improvements and bug fixes.

This post shares context on the delayed timing of the PowerShell 7.6 release, our learnings, and the changes the team has already begun making to improve release predictability and transparency.

We’re excited to announce the General Availability of Social Identity Provider (IdP) support for Native Authentication in Microsoft Entra External ID. This release enables developers to integrate popular social sign‑in options such as Google, Facebook, and Apple — into native and...

We introduced the Markdown editor in July 2025 to bring Markdown support to large text fields in work items. Since then, we’ve received valuable customer feedback highlighting challenges with the editing experience, particularly when switching in and out of edit mode. Many users found...

Vectors, Analytics, and the End of ETL Part 3 of 4 - The Multimodal Database Series In Part 1: The Polyglot Tax we laid out the fraud detection scenario: a transaction comes in, and before you approve or deny it you need five checks. Order history (relational). Device fingerprint...

Building enterprise solutions is shifting from writing code to directing AI agents. Instead of stitching together APIs, CLIs, and scripts, developers are increasingly describing intent and letting agents execute. For enterprise platforms like Dataverse, this creates a new requirement:...

Bookmarks in Visual Studio have always been a simple, reliable feature. Many developers use them regularly, and over the years we’ve heard consistent feedback from those users. Bookmarks were useful, but there were a few core gaps that kept them from being as effective and relevant as...

If you work in field engineering, you know the scenario. A customer is deploying AKS in a regulated environment. They hit an issue during node bootstrapping. They want to know exactly what happens when a node joins the cluster, which components run in which order, and whether the...

Part 3 of the Azure Skills Plugin series Previously: How to Install the Azure Plugin You've installed the Azure Skills Plugin. The Azure MCP server is running. You have a huge collection of tools and skills at your disposal. So, now what do you actually say to...

Aspire 13.2 brings powerful new dashboard features for exporting and importing telemetry, querying telemetry via API, and improved GenAI telemetry visualization.

This month's Visual Studio update gives you new ways to customize GitHub Copilot. Custom agents allow you to build specialized Copilot agents tailored to your team's workflow, backed by the tools and knowledge sources that matter to your project. Alongside that, agent skills bring...

It was going to be like that when I got here.

Run, invoke, and monitor AI agents locally or in Microsoft Foundry with the new azd AI agent extension commands. Plus GitHub Copilot-powered project setup, Container App Jobs deployment, local preflight validation, and configurable timeouts.

This post shows how to write Azure service-related unit tests with Docker using Spring Cloud Azure.

Why is this even a question?

You can steal them from your owner.

Azure SDK releases every month. In this post, you find this month's highlights and release notes.

On 12/31/2026, we will begin restricting updates to sensitive properties on non-draft email messages (including subject, body, and recipients). Apps will need Mail-Advanced.ReadWrite (or .All / .Shared) with admin consent to continue modifying these fields. Review your current usage and update permissions now to avoid unexpected failures.

Aspire 13.2 enables TypeScript developers to define AppHosts directly in TypeScript, with the same streamlined Aspire application model.

Because it opted out.

A step-by-step guide to enable search in the semantic kernel agents using bing grounding in Azure Foundry AI Agent using A2A.

Learn what's new in Visual Studio Code 1.113 Read the full article

Today we released PIX 2603.25 which can be downloaded here. These releases include everything in the previous 2602.25 release, plus the following bug fixes: Fix capture layer issue corrupting tiled resources in some scenarios Fix debug layer error during capture in query heaps ...

The dialog box lets you change how it waits.

And the developers running Claude Code and GitHub Copilot CLI didn't notice... Status Page Says 'Operational.' Your Subagents Say Otherwise. If you're running autonomous agents in any serious capacity, you've experienced this: model provider outages aren't edge cases —...

SPFx is powering the future of Microsoft 365 with AI driven portals and deep integrations across SharePoint Teams and Viva. The March 2026 update shares new features and the roadmap for the next evolution built for the AI era. This is a transparent community driven journey that we shape together.

Microsoft Entra is a globally distributed service that provides identity and access management to millions of customers world-wide. To scale reliably and remain resilient during failures, Microsoft Entra uses an eventually consistent directory model. Key takeaway A successful write to...

A few months ago, I was talking with a developer who said something that stuck with me:  “I love building apps. I just don’t love rebuilding the same UI controls over and over again.”  That’s the reality for a lot of teams. You want to focus on your business logic,...

A very primitive version of recovery.

We recently released a step-by-step course from simple chat to AI agents using LangChain4j 👉http://aka.ms/LangChain4j-for-Beginners Now watch the new 6️⃣part Video series with tons of hands-on demos. Let's break down what you'll learn. Introduction to...

SQL code analysis has been part of the SSDT workflow for a long time. Before deploying a schema change, you could run a set of static analysis rules against your project to catch potential issues, things like missing primary keys, deprecated syntax, or objects that could break under...

We've talked about the human scale problem and what happens when infrastructure scales but understanding doesn't. If you've been following along, you know the thesis: our tools have outpaced our ability to operate them, and platform engineering is how we're fighting back. But here's...

Making schema changes often means jumping between tools. You write code in VS Code, then switch to a separate tool to deploy your changes : exporting a script, running it manually, or copy-pasting into a query editor. Either way, it pulls you out of your flow. With the latest updates to...

Announcement of Version 2 of Generative AI for Beginners .NET, a free course rebuilt for .NET 10 with Microsoft.Extensions.AI, updated RAG patterns, and new agent framework content across five structured lessons for building production-ready AI apps.

Deploy and monitor an AI agent on Microsoft Foundry using the Azure Developer CLI (azd). This tutorial covers infrastructure scaffolding with Bicep, one-command deployment, local development, and real-time log streaming—all from Visual Studio Code.

Today we are excited to announce the availability of TypeScript 6.0! If you are not familiar with TypeScript, it's a language that builds on JavaScript by adding syntax for types, which enables type-checking to catch errors, and provide rich editor tooling. You can learn more about...

Aspire 13.2 brings TypeScript AppHost authoring, an agent-native CLI, Foundry integration, and more.

After ten months using GitHub Copilot Coding Agent (CCA) in dotnet/runtime, the .NET team shares data-driven lessons on cloud-AI-assisted development.

You'll have to ask nicely.

To deliver new features faster and continue improving stability and performance, GitHub Copilot plugin will end support for JetBrains IDEs versions 2024.2 and 2024.3. By focusing on newer versions, we can bring you new capabilities more quickly and ensure a high-quality...

Wrapping things up.

Learn how custom-built AI agents are dramatically improving the .NET MAUI contribution workflow, reducing issue resolution time by 50-70% while increasing test coverage and code quality.

Earlier this week we release the public preview for our Azure DevOps MCP Server. Today we are excited to let you know that the Azure DevOps MCP Server is now available to use in Microsoft Foundry. For those who are new to Foundry, Microsoft Foundry is a unified platform for building and...

Reaching the modern day.

In this post we explore the evolution from Azure IoT Operations Data Processor Pipelines to Dataflows, why we adopted a hybrid strategy with custom Rust pods, and the architectural lessons we learned building event detection systems at the edge.

Learn what's new in Visual Studio Code 1.112 Read the full article

We all know this, even if we don't like to admit it: modern infrastructure can scale infinitely, but human understanding doesn't. We've all seen it happen - organizations going from managing dozens of servers to thousands of containers, from deploying weekly to deploying hundreds of...

We're excited to announce the General Availability of PowerShell 7.6, the next Long Term Support (LTS) release of PowerShell. PowerShell 7.6 is built on .NET 10 (LTS), continuing the alignment between PowerShell and the modern .NET platform. PowerShell 7.6 includes reliability...

New azd ai agent run and invoke commands let you start and test AI agents from your terminal—locally or in the cloud.

Authentication tokens exist to answer one question: is this caller authorized to do this? They are not intended to be a stable data interface, a schema you can depend on, or an input into application logic. If your application decodes tokens and reads claims from them, this is an...

Remember when we announced the Public Preview of DiskANN vector indexes back in November and mentioned that once you created the index, your table became read‑only? Yeah… about that... 😅 We shipped early because the demand for Vector search in SQL was overwhelming. We knew the...

Handling Long-Running Operations with Background Responses AI agents powered by reasoning models can take minutes to work through complex problems — deep research, multi-step analysis, lengthy content generation. In a traditional request-response pattern, that means your client sits...

The MSSQL extension for VS Code v1.41 continues to evolve, delivering features that make SQL development more integrated, more powerful, and more developer-friendly. In this release, we're introducing the Public Preview of Schema Designer with GitHub Copilot, Data API builder, and SQL...

Read how inline image attachments are handled when they’re programmatically added to a mail item's signature or body in Outlook on the web and the new Outlook for Windows

Double the size, double the fun.

Taming the Noisy Inbox: How I Used MCP to Automate Email and Teams Triage How the Model Context Protocol (MCP) turns your AI coding assistant into a workplace productivity engine — connecting Microsoft 365 data to your terminal workflow.   The Problem We All Share If you work...

Part 2 of the Azure Skills Plugin series Previously: Announcing the Azure Skills Plugin This post is all about getting you up and running. I won't go deep on capabilities, architecture or anything like that here - that's coming in future posts in this series. The goal is to...

We're back with a fresh PowerToys release – PowerToys 0.98! This month introduces the new Command Palette Dock, along with a refreshed Keyboard Manager experience and many other improvements across the utilities. You can grab the update by checking for updates in PowerToys or by...

Guest blog post on building a real time assistant using OpenAI Realtime API using .NET, F#, Microsoft.Extensions.AI and .NET MAUI.

We're excited to announce the Cursor plugin for Azure Cosmos DB bringing AI-powered database expertise, best practices guidance, and live database connectivity directly into your coding workflow. Whether you're designing a new data model, optimizing queries, or building a RAG...

Appeasing the invisible return address predictor.

When we released the local Azure DevOps MCP Server, it gave customers a way to connect Azure DevOps data with tools like Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code through GitHub Copilot Chat. The next step was to make this experience easier to get started with and to enable it for services...

The next-gen Foundry Agent Service is generally available today with end-to-end private networking, Voice Live integration, expanded MCP authentication, GA evaluations with continuous monitoring, and hosted agent deployments in six new Azure regions.