Microsoft
Developer Blogs

A variation where we try only once.

Learn what's new in Visual Studio Code 1.122 Read the full article

SPFx is powering the future of Microsoft 365 with AI driven portals and deep integrations across SharePoint and Microsoft 365. The May 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 based on your input.

Overview Today, we are pleased to announce Agility SDK 1.721-preview with new D3D features along with DXC 1.10.2605.4 adding VectorAccumulate to LinAlg in the existing Shader Model 6.10 preview.  The previous 1.720-preview and SM 6.10 preview blog is still relevant, as all of its...

Development workflows span terminals, IDEs, background agents, and custom assistants. What matters is whether they draw from the same current source. Learn MCP Server gives any MCP-compatible agent direct access to current Microsoft documentation - one endpoint, nothing to install, no...

Today we released PIX version 2605.28-preview, which can be downloaded here. This release complements the new D3D12 Agility SDK that was released today, version 721. This PIX release also includes initial preview versions of a lot of the exciting PIX features that we announced in our...

Learn how the Azure Chaos Studio team uses Aspire.Hosting.Testing to run hermetic, per-PR end-to-end tests across four services — with emulators, stubs, and no shared environments.

Just let each person take turns trying.

If you work with Microsoft SQL regularly, the AI conversation right now probably feels a little exhausting. Every week brings a new platform, a new pattern, a new opinion about how you’re “supposed” to build AI apps. Most of it assumes you’ll start over. You don’t have...

A practical pattern for using GenAI research agents to produce reliable internal tooling by verifying assumptions with detection classes and a final checklist.

Visual Studio 2026 versions 18.1 through 18.6 deliver a wave of improvements for C++ developers. For MSVC Build Tools, the v14.51 release is now generally available with runtime performance gains and improved C++23 conformance. We also introduced Sample Profile Guided Optimization to help...

Overview Following the GDC announcement of the partial graphics programs feature, we are pleased to announce that it is available today in the AgilitySDK 1.721-preview. Checkout the release blog for more details about the full release. This preview serves as a first look to...

You just created a Cosmos DB account. The portal handed you two keys and a connection string, it worked, and you moved on. That's what most developers do, and it causes problems later. This post is a guide for developers launching a new Cosmos DB app who want a secure default setup...

You ship an SDK, a CLI, an API, and developers use it. Now AI coding agents use it too, except they use it differently than humans do. Most of the time you have no idea what's actually happening between "developer types a prompt" and "agent generates code with your technology." Is the...

A dedicated home for MongoDB developers, MongoDB migrations, and modern document database development using Open Source on Azure   Today, we're excited to launch the new Azure DocumentDB blog — a dedicated destination for developers, architects, and organizations building...

The PackageManager API submits requests to the deployment engine for processing. Each request represents an instruction for the deployment system to carry out a defined set of actions, collectively referred to as a deployment operation. The operation associated with a request depends...

Caching the result and knowing when the cache is valid.

Want to get more out of your GitHub Copilot experience? Here are some easy ways to get started.

Material 3 (a.k.a. Material You) support is now available for .NET MAUI apps on Android. Here is how to enable it, what changes today, and what is still on the way.

There's a particular rhythm to good development work: you think, you try, you check, you adjust. This month's Visual Studio update leans into that rhythm. Whether you're sketching an approach with the Plan agent before touching a single file, reviewing a wave of changes across many files,...

A difference in philosophy.

Putting them in a place that can access only if you call Start.

At a glance — Native regular expression (regex) functions in T-SQL now accept varchar(max) and nvarchar(max) inputs of up to 2 MB across all seven regex functions, including the two table-valued functions (REGEXP_MATCHES and REGEXP_SPLIT_TO_TABLE). This capability ships in SQL Server...

You need to pump messages when idle, but maybe you are never idle.

Python developers working with Agent Skills can now author skills as files on disk, as inline Python code, or as reusable classes - and mix them freely through composable source classes that handle discovery, filtering, and deduplication. A skill living in your local repository, one...

AI coding agents promise to make you more productive. On the surface they do, but in practice they fall short: agents generate code that doesn't compile, use a deprecated SDK, or pick the wrong service entirely. Is it you using it wrong? Is it your tech stack? Or is it the tools you...

You ask Copilot to tackle something big, it gets to work, and a dozen file changes later you realize you had a completely different approach in mind. The code isn't wrong... it just isn't what you were going for. Last year, we introduced planning as a feature in Agent mode to help with...

Announcing a Public Preview .NET package that adds policy enforcement, startup tool scanning, fallback governance, and response sanitization to MCP servers with a single builder extension.

The `unsafe` keyword is being redesigned to mark caller-facing contracts rather than just syntax. Safety obligations between callers and callees become visible and reviewable. The model is motivated by the rise of AI-assisted code generation and arrives as a preview in .NET 11.

Trick question: You can't. But maybe you can fake it.

PowerShell for macOS is now properly notarized and hardened, meeting both Apple and Microsoft security requirements.

How to move AI-assisted development from ad-hoc experimentation to a coordinated team-wide capability using AGENTS.md and reusable skills with GitHub Copilot CLI

Learn what's new in Visual Studio Code 1.121 Read the full article

PowerShell is a critical automation and configuration platform across enterprises—and as that automation grows, how you source, validate, and distribute PowerShell packages becomes just as important as the scripts themselves. Modern security guidance increasingly treats package feeds...

Aspire turns a team's scattered tribal knowledge into an explicit, incrementally-adoptable app model that humans, scripts, and AI agents can all use.

Prompt injection is the #1 risk on the OWASP LLM Top 10, and most agents in production today defend against it with one of two heuristics: a defensive system prompt, or a hand-rolled allowlist. Neither is deterministic. Both fail silently the day someone slips a [SYSTEM OVERRIDE] line...

You need to arrange to get one from the other.

Profile Guided Optimization (PGO) has long been one of the most powerful tools in the MSVC compiler's arsenal for improving the runtime performance of C and C++ applications. By using execution profile data collected from representative workloads, PGO enables the compiler to make smarter...

Walk through running quality, cost, and latency evaluations for the Foundry model router using an open-source GitHub repo designed for router-aware eval pipelines.

An MSIX package identity is composed of a five-part tuple that uniquely identifies a package. It consists of the following attributes: Name Version Architecture Resource Id Publisher Together, these fields form the canonical identity of a package. Programmatically, this identity can...

"A bad system will beat a good person [or agent] every time" ~Dr. William Edwards Deming (with apologies) I started vibe coding by writing prompts (often dictated into my phone), refining them with an agent in M365 Copilot, and creating handoff files to use with GitHub Copilot CLI. The...

Stop paying for idle GPUs while model weights copy to disk. Stream them straight into GPU memory instead with Run:AI Streamer from Azure Blob Storage. The Problem: Every Cold Start Costs You More Than Money GPU compute is among the most expensive cloud infrastructure, and every...

The storage control blocks were destroyed.

Native C++ projects (.vcxproj) now support NuGet PackageReference, the same modern package management experience .NET developers have used for years. Available as an experimental feature in Visual Studio 2026 version 18.7.

Package pruning in .NET 10 removes platform-provided packages from your dependency graph. With transitive auditing enabled by default, projects with these defaults have 70% fewer transitive vulnerability reports compared to projects using the previous defaults.

Reported incorrectly since the day it was written.

Last October, we released Advanced Shader Delivery (ASD) on the ROG Xbox Ally handhelds. Advanced Shader Delivery addresses one of the most frustrating challenges for PC players today – long load times and disruptive stuttering during a game’s first launch. The feature works by...

Maybe because it already exists?

Learn why the coding harness around GitHub Copilot in VS Code matters as models, tools, agents, and providers evolve. Read the full article

Learn how Visual Studio enables Segment Heap by default for new C++ projects and how to adopt and verify it in existing builds.

Use exponential backoff and circuit breaker patterns in Azure Functions with Service Bus SDK bindings. Control retry storms, protect dependencies, and degrade gracefully under transient failures.

You’ve probably experienced both of these, perhaps at the same time. First, that desire to let an agent get at your data. It’s driven by simplification and better experiences for the user and for you: fewer screens, fewer queries, fewer reports, and less code overall. Second, and...

Building powerful AI agents is only half the story, running them safely in production is the real challenge. As customers adopt Microsoft Agent Framework for agent orchestration, a clear need has emerged for robust, built-in governance. In this post, Imran Siddique from the AGT team walks...

Network security has a funny way of showing up late. You start with a web app, an API, storage, and Key Vault. The app works. The demo works. Everyone is happy. Then the production checklist shows up: Can storage and secrets be taken off the public internet? Can this app run inside our...

We are releasing new patches for our self‑hosted product, Azure DevOps Server. We strongly recommend that all customers stay up to date with the latest, most secure version of Azure DevOps Server. The most recent release, Azure DevOps Server, is available on the download page. The...

Announcing the stable release of the Azure SDK for Rust. This release includes stable libraries for Core, Identity, Key Vault (Secrets, Keys, Certificates), and Storage (Blobs, Queues).

If you lead a development team, you already know the pattern. You approve the travel, your developers attend a great conference, they come back energized, and then the work resumes exactly as it was. The ideas don't survive contact with the backlog. This July at VSLive! @ Microsoft...

Using data structures you already knew.

Safe, composable dataflow operators for Azure IoT Operations, built as WASM modules using the Component Model, WIT interfaces, and WASI Preview 2.

Try the latest updates to MSVC Build Tools Preview

Learn what's new in Visual Studio Code 1.120 Read the full article

PyCon US 2026

Artificial Intelligence is evolving rapidly. What began as simple prompt-and-response systems is now transforming into fully autonomous, agentic AI architectures capable of reasoning, orchestrating tools, interacting with enterprise data, and invoking external systems dynamically. While...

Process API improvements in .NET 11, including high-level APIs for starting processes, capturing output without deadlocks, handle inheritance control, lifetime management features, and a lightweight `SafeProcessHandle`-based API surface.

.NET MAUI apps on Android, iOS, and Mac Catalyst now run on CoreCLR by default in .NET 11, unifying the runtime across all of .NET.

Visual Studio now supports Agent Skills, which are reusable instruction sets that teach Copilot agents how to handle specific tasks like running a build pipeline, generating boilerplate, or following your team's coding standards. Define a skill once, and the agent applies it automatically...

Keeping things moving.

We are excited to announce general availability for the SharePoint Framework 1.23. We are rolling out new features in extensions, preview of new CLI and addressing known npm audit issues.

These skills enable your agent to take your ideas to a native Windows app in minutes! They are built around the end-to-end loop: scaffold, build, run, test, iterate. They've been optimized to know how to drive each stage, recognize common failures that get normal agents stuck in...

MSVC Build Tools v14.51 GA available in Visual Studio 2026 18.6

Find out about the new features in .NET 11 Preview 4 across the .NET runtime, SDK, libraries, ASP.NET Core, .NET MAUI, C#, Entity Framework Core, and more!

Sometimes you need to know whether the current process has package identity. Certain Windows features require it, and behaviors can differ—both technically and culturally. For example, classic Windows applications often store settings in the registry, whereas packaged applications...

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

Foundry Local 1.1 adds live transcription, embeddings, Responses API, WebGPU plugin, and download cancellation.

Compatibility, of course.

  We've been working on something new for WinUI developers: a set of open-source project and item templates for WinUI you can use directly from the command line. 🚀 With these templates, you can now create and run a new WinUI app using dotnet new, without needing to go...

April brings a wave of model arrivals — GPT-5.5, GPT-image-2, Microsoft first-party MAI models for image, voice, and transcription, Gemma 4, and Claude Opus 4.7 — alongside Foundry Local GA, Microsoft Agent Framework 1.0 GA, the Microsoft Foundry Toolkit for VS Code GA, batch evaluations for third-party agents, new tracing and monitoring capabilities, SDK updates across Python, JavaScript/TypeScript, .NET, and Java, and a reminder to register for Microsoft Build.

Many of you who have published VM Applications may have come across a difficult conundrum regarding security. To create an application version, you must upload your application package to a Storage blob, then provide the address of that Storage blob for replication to occur. The problem...

Putting the handles in a private container.

We are excited to announce the General Availability (GA) of AI_GENERATE_EMBEDDINGS and CREATE EXTERNAL MODEL in Azure SQL Database and Azure SQL Managed Instance. These two T-SQL features — CREATE EXTERNAL MODEL and AI_GENERATE_EMBEDDINGS — work together as a single,...

The Microsoft 365 Copilot Agent Evaluations tool helps developers measure and improve the quality of agents they build for Microsoft 365 Copilot.

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

You can track the file ID.

A Tour of the Handoff Orchestration Pattern Most multi-agent systems start out simple: a router agent receives a user request, picks the right specialist, and forwards the conversation. As long as each specialist can complete its task in one pass, that model works fine. The first...

We are excited to announce that GitHub Copilot build performance for Windows now supports project-specific builds! Available in the latest Visual Studio Insiders, you can target a single MSBuild project or CMake target instead of analyzing your entire solution. For game developers and...

These updates include improved locking for parallel builds, cross-platform PE dependency analysis, manifest support for the depend-info command, and other improvements and bug fixes.

The mailbox import and export APIs on Microsoft Graph are now generally available.

If you ever built an AI agent demo, you probably had this moment. Everything works: the agent interprets natural language, calls the right tools, and returns the right data. Then you start designing for the real users of the app. You think about data boundaries: what if someone tries to...

Aspire 13.3 is here with the Aspireify skill, command results, browser logs, Kubernetes and AKS deployment, and more.

Microsoft Copilot Studio recently upgraded its .NET WebAssembly engine to .NET 10. The migration was straightforward, simplified deployment, and delivered another round of meaningful performance gains for end users.

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,...

Otherwise, it'll get mapped back down to the 8-bit code page.

Evaluating AI agents for NL-to-SQL generation across Azure Databricks AI/BI Genie, GitHub Copilot CLI, and Microsoft Agent Framework. We achieved ~75% accuracy with schema documentation and runtime validation, while discovering that business logic errors represent a fundamental limitation requiring domain expertise.

Learn what's new in Visual Studio Code 1.119 Read the full article

Once you have your Microsoft Agent Framework (MAF) agent or workflow happily running locally on your dev machine, it's time to decide how to deploy your agent to production, monitor it, evaluate it and version it. These decisions are just as important as getting the agent running. Hosted...

Build durable AI agent workflows with the Microsoft Agent Framework. Start with in-process console apps, add durability with the Durable Task runtime, scale with parallel AI agents, and host on Azure Functions for serverless execution.

Modernization used to be something you avoided until you couldn’t anymore. A big rewrite. A long migration plan. A risky cutover. Something you’d maybe do once every few years—if you had to. That model doesn’t work anymore. The ask has changed. It’s not just “move to the...

 Today, we're thrilled to announce the public preview of Azure Cosmos DB Shell – a powerful, open-source command-line interface that revolutionizes how developers interact with their Azure Cosmos DB databases. With integrated Model Context Protocol (MCP) server support, native agentic...

Static libraries don't stand a chance.

A team was running at 100% RU utilization. Throttles were compounding into retries. P99 latency was degrading. The assumption was obvious: provision more throughput. They didn’t. Instead, they found a single logical partition absorbing more than 80% of traffic. After fixing the...

I want to speak to your manager.

VS Code is where many cross-platform and web developers already work, but getting package identity, MSIX packaging, and Windows SDK tooling often meant reaching for Visual Studio or command-line tools. The WinApp VS Code extension brings the full power of the Windows App Development...

In February, we announced how GitHub Copilot can now use C++ symbol context and CMake build configuration awareness to deliver smarter suggestions in Visual Studio Code. Today, we're excited to share new ways to further enhance your C++ development experience with Copilot and get the most...

Hello Java customers! We are happy to announce the latest April 2026 patch & security update release for the Microsoft Build of OpenJDK. Check our release notes page for details on fixes and enhancements or download and install the binaries today. The source code of our builds...

Build intelligent AI agents in .NET with the Microsoft Agent Framework. Learn how to create agents with tools, multi-turn conversations, memory, and graph-based workflows that bring together the building blocks from Parts 1 and 2.

Run SQL MCP Server on Azure App Service without containers. This walkthrough uses Data API builder to configure authentication, expose MCP, REST, and GraphQL endpoints, and deploy as code.

"Is ContosoParts.msix installed?" is a common - but misleading - question The term install is not a formal concept in MSIX. This may seem paradoxical for a deployment technology, but it makes perfect sense once you understand MSIX deployment’s core architecture. Deployment...

You don't. All files are binary at the file system level.