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Developer Blogs

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 — they're...

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.

Back in July, we launched the Awesome GitHub Copilot Customizations repo with a simple goal: give the community a place to share custom instructions, prompts, and chat modes to customize the AI responses from GitHub Copilot. We were hoping for maybe one community contribution per...

The FOSSASIA Summit 2026 was an incredible gathering of developers, open-source contributors, startups, and technology enthusiasts from across the region. This year, Azure Cosmos DB and Azure DocumentDB were present at the summit with both technical sessions and a dedicated booth, giving...

Get the Inside Scoop on Visual Studio Subscriptions, Straight to Your Inbox  A few weeks ago I was talking with a Visual Studio Enterprise subscriber. Seasoned .NET developer. Ships production code. Knows his stack inside and out.  During the conversation I mentioned one of...

Doing the math backwards.

We’re excited to announce the general availability of private network support for Azure Cosmos DB mirroring in Microsoft Fabric, enabling customers to replicate operational data into Fabric from Azure Cosmos DB accounts secured with private endpoints or virtual networks while continuing...

We keep doing this thing where we solve a problem, celebrate the victory, then realize we've created three new problems we didn't even know existed. Remember when manually configuring servers was the bottleneck? So we built containers. Great! Now we're orchestrating thousands of them....

We are releasing patches for our self‑hosted product, Azure DevOps Server. We strongly recommend that all customers stay on the latest, most secure version of Azure DevOps Server. The latest release, Azure DevOps Server, is available from the download page. This patch addresses an...

New azd ai agent show and monitor commands help you diagnose hosted AI agent failures directly from the CLI.

Optimizing out the unnecessary probes comes with its own complexity.

Code-Defined Skills, Script Execution, and Approval for Agent Skills in Python When we introduced Agent Skills for Microsoft Agent Framework, you could package domain expertise as file-based skill directories and have agents discover and load them on demand. Now, the Python SDK takes...

Learn how VS Code uses AI across its own development workflow with GitHub Copilot agent mode, automated testing, and AI-powered code review. Read the full article

At GDC this year, we shared how machine learning is becoming foundational to real time graphics, and how DirectX is evolving to meet that shift across shader level and model level ML. ML is no longer a niche optimization or a postprocess trick. It’s increasingly embedded throughout the...

Java has powered some of the world’s most mission‑critical systems for decades and that’s a big part of why we’re excited to be back with the community at JavaOne 2026 (March 17–19 in Redwood City). At Microsoft, we get to work with Java teams every day: folks shipping at...

Agent harness is the layer where model reasoning connects to real execution: shell and filesystem access, approval flows, and context management across long-running sessions. With Agent Framework, these patterns can now be built consistently in both Python and .NET. In this post,...

On March 12th, 2026, the DirectX team and our hardware partners hosted DirectX: Bringing Console-Level GPU Developer Tools to Windows at GDC. We shared our dream of bringing console-level GPU developer tools to Windows, and today we are announcing a major step toward that goal...

See how the modernize-dotnet agent helps you assess apps, create upgrade plans, and modernize .NET projects from Visual Studio, VS Code, GitHub Copilot CLI, and GitHub.

An out-of-band release of .NET 10.0.5 to fix a critical debugger crash affecting macOS users with Visual Studio Code.

One of the weirdest calling conventions you'll see.

Today we announced the innovation we’re bringing in solving shader compilation for the ecosystem at our GDC Talk: Advanced Shader Delivery for Windows. Want to find out what this means for solving shader compilation for your title and customers? Read on! State of the Industry Long...

If you use build service identities like Project Collection Build Service to call Advanced Security APIs, the Advanced Security permission changes in Sprint 269 broke that. We restricted API access for build identities as a security improvement but failed to provide an early notice for...

Today we’re releasing the public preview of DirectStorage 1.4 and the initial public preview of the Game Asset Conditioning Library. Together, they introduce Zstandard (Zstd) compression as an option for game assets on Windows. This new support meets the needs of the gaming ecosystem,...

Join us for Azure Cosmos DB Conf 2026, a free global, virtual developer event focused on building modern applications with Azure Cosmos DB. Date: April 28, 2026 Time: 9:00 AM–2:00 PM PT Where: Streaming live on the Microsoft Developer YouTube channel, with additional...

Government agencies have an increased need for secure, verifiable, and compliant cloud environments that adhere to data sovereignty regulations, operate in a Zero Trust framework, and help reduce exposure to insider threats. Today, Microsoft marks a major milestone in secure cloud...

Don't take steps that are too large.

Find out about the new features in .NET 11 Preview 2 across the .NET runtime, SDK, libraries, ASP.NET Core, Blazor, C#, .NET MAUI, and more!

A recap of the latest servicing updates for .NET and .NET Framework for March 2026.

Save the date and tune in for our free, livestream event on March 23. Discover Aspire and learn how it can transform the way you build and deploy your distributed apps and agents.

Oh, this old thing?

Part 1 of the Azure Skills Plugin series Coding agents like GitHub Copilot and Claude Code are great at code, but getting your app to production on Azure is not just about writing code. Really, it is about making the right calls. Which service fits this app? Which SKU fits this...

Learn what's new in Visual Studio Code 1.111 Read the full article

Introducing the dotnet/skills repository and how .NET agent skills can improve coding agent workflows.

Building AI agents is getting easier. Deploying them as part of a real application, with multiple services, persistent state, and production infrastructure, is where things get complicated. Developers from the .NET community have requested whether a real-world example that shows running...

When I first found Visual Studio Dev Essentials, it felt like discovering a hidden door in the developer toolkit world. I’d heard about free tools and cloud credits, but I wasn’t sure if it would really matter in day-to-day coding life. The short answer: it absolutely...

Today we’re announcing the general availability of Email and SMS one‑time passcode (OTP) as second‑factor MFA for Native Authentication in Microsoft Entra External ID. This enables developers to add step‑up security to native sign‑in and sign‑up flows while keeping users fully...

Look for the conflicting definitions to see where they are coming from.

Microsoft 365 Copilot is now embedded as an in-app sidecar within Power Apps, Dynamics 365 Sales, and Dynamics 365 Customer Service—removing the need to switch between apps to find context or complete steps. 

February brings Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.6 and Sonnet 4.6 with 1M-token context, GPT-Realtime-1.5 and GPT-Audio-1.5, Grok 4.0 GA, the Microsoft Agent Framework reaching Release Candidate, and the Foundry REST API quietly going GA — laying the foundation for imminent SDK GA announcements across Python, .NET, JS/TS, and Java.

We’re improving how add-ins appear on the ribbon in Outlook on the web and the new Outlook on Windows. These updates make add-ins easier to find and align the experience across Outlook clients.

Today we are excited to announce the Release Candidate (RC) of TypeScript 6.0! To get started using the RC, you can get it through npm with the following command: npm install -D typescript@rc TypeScript 6.0 is a unique release in that we intend for it to be the last release based on...

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

It's already gone. If you need more information, you should have been remembering it.

When setting up an experiment is complex, agents can automate the process to make it faster and more reliable.

Join us at GDC Festival of Gaming 2026 for a deep dive into Visual Studio, GitHub Copilot, PowerToys, and the Windows tools that speed up your daily dev workflow. We'll show how these tools work together to boost productivity and cut friction across your entire inner loop. Session...

We briefly paused our quarterly release cycle to focus on reliability and performance, but now we're back with Windows Terminal 1.25! We are also updating Windows Terminal stable to version 1.24, which will include all of the features from this previous blog post. Some notable features...

Discover what’s new in the v1.0 release of the official MCP C# SDK, including enhanced authorization, richer metadata, and powerful patterns for tool calling and long-running requests.

Perhaps it's because you dispatched it.

For the last decade, platform engineering has relied on explicit API interaction layers: CLIs, SDKs, pipelines, wrappers, and UI workflows that translate human intent into machine‑safe API calls. AI agents are now short‑circuiting much of that stack. By combining natural language...

  Hey WinUI developers! If you’re new around here, WinUI Gallery is the go-to app for exploring WinUI 3 controls, samples, design guidance, and handy tools — all in one place. Today, we’re excited to announce WinUI Gallery 2.8, bringing jump list support, new samples,...

Explore agent orchestration, extensibility, and continuity in VS Code 1.110: lifecycle hooks, agent skills, session memory, and integrated browser tools. Read the full article

MSVC Build Tools v14.51 improves performance through a wide range of new optimizations.

What's new in the Visual Studio Code February 2026 Release (1.110). Read the full article

When JSON Met Graph Part 2 of 4 - The Multimodal Database Series A note on naming. Throughout this series, when we say "SQL Server 2025" we also mean Azure SQL. The multimodal capabilities we discuss - native JSON, graph, vector, and columnstore - are available across both the...

The excitement is building as we head into the 2026 Game Developer Conference and the DirectX team has a lot to share. We will be showcasing major updates in asset streaming, GPU tooling, ML-powered real-time graphics on Windows, and shader compilation at...

Of course, anything can happen if you break the rules.

The new azd appservice swap command makes deployment slot swaps fast and intuitive.

Learn GitHub Copilot CLI with this free, 8-chapter hands-on course. Review code, generate tests, debug issues, and build custom agents and skills - all from your terminal. No AI experience needed. Works with GitHub Copilot Free. Clone the repo or open in Codespaces to get started.

Just some useless trivia.

Data API builder (DAB) 1.7+ delivers secure MCP-based CRUD access with deterministic, policy-enforced query generation and an upcoming aggregate tool that enables complex, production-safe analytical questions without exposing raw SQL to AI agents.

You get notifications that might not make sense.

The JavaScript AI Build‑a‑thon Season 2 starts today! Join a free, four‑week, hands‑on program—from Local AI and RAG pipelines to multi‑agent hackathon—designed specifically for JavaScript/TypeScript developers.

Windows App Development CLI v0.2 is here! This release is driven largely by community feedback and packs in native .NET project support, manifest placeholders that eliminate hardcoded executable names, Microsoft Store Developer CLI integration, a revamped help experience, and more....

Modern software development is moving fast—and AI is now a practical part of how Microsoft developers design, build, and ship applications every day. From writing code in Visual Studio and VS Code, to building cloud-native apps on Azure, developers are looking for ways to stay...

You can now equip your Microsoft Agent Framework agents with portable, reusable skill packages that provide domain expertise on demand — without changing a single line of your agent's core instructions. With built-in skills providers for both .NET and Python, your agents can discover...

We are excited to release a new update to the Team Calendar extension. This update includes a series of visual refinements across the extension, introducing a more consistent design language, smoother transitions when expanding and collapsing sections, improved contrast for better...

Making sure it triggers when you need it, and not when you don't.

Java is the backbone of enterprise software engineering, and the conversations happening around it right now are the most exciting they've been in years. From AI-assisted development workflows to Kubernetes performance tuning, the community is moving fast - and JCON Europe 2026 is one of...

Running MongoDB at scale eventually forces a trade-off: invest heavily in managing your own infrastructure or move to a managed service and risk losing the compatibility and portability your team depends on.  Azure DocumentDB is a fully managed, MongoDB-compatible database on...

If you want to skip the explain and get started super quick with adoption + impact insights, use gh-devlake to deploy a GitHub Copilot impact dashboard in a few CLI commands. So! You've rolled out GitHub Copilot to your engineering teams. You've got the built-in dashboards. You...