Microsoft
Developer Blogs

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 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.

Removing The Monkey Work of Migration; in this post we show how Git-Ape analyses an AWS deployment repo and generates an Azure-native replacement, with design critique built in. This post walks through a real migration workflow: start with an AWS deployment repo and end with an...

Reviewed by Sumit Sarabhai Fetching a million rows from SQL Server into a Polars DataFrame used to mean a million Python objects, a million GC allocations, and then throwing it all away to build a DataFrame. Not anymore. mssql-python now supports fetching SQL Server data...

Python developers can now build Teams-native apps and agents using the same SDK surface that powers modern Teams experiences across our TypeScript and .NET stacks 

As part of moving to general availability (GA) for Entra Agent ID, agent identity objects will only accept dynamic membership groups and unified (Microsoft 365) groups as group-type sponsors.

We've shipped the new Run dialog - and we want to say thanks. As the team behind Windows Terminal and PowerToys, we're excited to bring this to Windows 11, and your feedback helped shape it! Run has been rebuilt from the ground up: Modern design: A refreshed look that matches Fluent...

Build AI Agents and RAG Applications with the New LangChain + LangGraph Connector for Azure Cosmos DB Building AI agents and RAG applications today means stitching together half a dozen services, a vector database, a chat history store, a checkpointer for agent state, a semantic cache, a...

Recovering from death of the owner.

  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 3 Gallery 2.9, our first release built on Windows App...

The Azure Developer CLI (azd) shipped five releases in April 2026. The biggest theme this month is multi-language hook support: write azd hooks in Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, or .NET alongside the existing Bash and PowerShell options. Here's what's in versions 1.23.14, 1.23.15,...

Dataverse gives developers a powerful platform for building enterprise applications — but getting from zero to a connected, working environment has always involved multiple tools, authentication flows, and configuration steps. The Dataverse plugin was built to accelerate that journey by...

TypeScript 7 Beta Now Enabled by Default in Visual Studio 2026 18.6 Insiders 3 In Visual Studio 2026 18.6 Insiders 3 we have updated the built-in TypeScript SDK to TypeScript 7 Beta (native preview). The TypeScript SDK provides the compiler and language service used for TypeScript and...

Learn how we built ConferencePulse, an AI-powered conference assistant, using .NET's composable AI stack including Microsoft.Extensions.AI, DataIngestion, VectorData, Model Context Protocol, and Microsoft Agent Framework.

We previously introduced Automatic Super Resolution (Auto SR) on select Windows 11 Copilot+ PCs, to make games look sharper and play smoother. Today, we're excited to give Xbox Insiders the opportunity to help us test and refine this feature on the ROG Xbox Ally X for docked play, where...

Let the exclusive acquisition have a fair chance against shared acquisitions.

A security-first architecture that propagates SharePoint document permissions into downstream AI systems, using Microsoft Entra ID object IDs (GUIDs) for safe, query-time filtering in Azure AI Search, RAG pipelines, and Copilot extensions.

Learn what's new in Visual Studio Code 1.118 Read the full article

Learn how to use a coding agent to register and agent with Teams.

Introduction Managing access to Azure resources often means dealing with two separate permission models: one for management operations and another for data access. For Azure Cosmos DB customers, this split can increase complexity, slow down onboarding, and create confusion around...

Introduction: Transforming Customer Intelligence in Banking Every day, people interact with their bank across mobile apps, branches, call centers, ATMs, chatbots, and partner ecosystems. Each touchpoint holds a piece of the customer story but rarely the whole picture. For many...

This post announces the General Availability of Microsoft Desired State Configuration (DSC) v3.2.0, with new Windows resources, Bicep gRPC integration, WhatIf support, expression language improvements, and adapter enhancements.

Learn how to govern MCP tool calls in .NET with the Agent Governance Toolkit—policy-based access control, security scanning, and response sanitization to reduce risk in AI agent systems.

VSTest is removing its Newtonsoft.Json dependency in .NET 11 and Visual Studio 18.8. Here's who is affected and how to fix it.

We’re excited to announce the General Availability (GA) of Single Sign-On (SSO) from Native Apps to Embedded Web Views for Microsoft Entra External ID (EEID) Native Authentication. This release marks a major milestone in delivering end-to-end seamless authentication experiences for...

Starting in Visual Studio 18.5, you can create and build Visual Studio extensions (VSIX) using an officially supported SDK-style project. This brings VSIX projects into the modern build and deployment pipeline, improving incremental build performance and making the build → deploy →...

Please, not everybody, everything all at once.

Introduction When I started writing software professionally in 2015, the tech landscape looked completely different. Tools and frameworks kept evolving since then, but the process of building software barely moved for a decade. That changed in the last couple of months. Here's what has...

As organizations move from single-agent prototypes to multi-agent production systems, the ability for agents to communicate reliably across platforms and organizational boundaries becomes essential. With the release of A2A Protocol v1.0 and updated support in the Microsoft Agent...

GitHub Copilot in Visual Studio is becoming more agentic with every release. This update brings cloud agent integration front and center, letting you start remote coding sessions without leaving the IDE.

Azure Functions lets you settle each Service Bus message on its own within a batch. Complete, abandon, dead-letter, or defer messages one by one to avoid duplicate processing and handle errors with precision.

SPFx is powering the future of Microsoft 365 with AI driven portals and deep integrations across SharePoint and Microsoft 365. The April 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.

SkiaSharp 4.0 Preview 1 is here. Learn all about the new features and how Uno Platform has stepped up as a co-maintainer.

Adding caching to your application architecture can significantly improve key performance metrics, cut latency, and reduce load across downstream systems. In this walkthrough, we highlight the latest caching best practices and incorporate these design patterns into a reusable .NET application that you can reference when adding new capabilities to your application stack.

Learn how to implement API versioning in your .NET 10 applications using OpenAPI for better API management and documentation.

A pot of tokens.

Today is the day. Azure Cosmos DB Conf 2026, in partnership with AMD, is a free virtual developer event focused on building modern, scalable applications with Azure Cosmos DB. The agenda features Microsoft engineers, product team leaders, and members of the global developer community...

We're back with a fresh PowerToys release! This month introduces Power Display for controlling your monitors from the system tray, Grab And Move for quickly moving and resizing windows, and a wave of improvements to Command Palette and the Dock, along with updates across the utility...

The April 2026 release update includes the Python Environments extension... Keep on reading to learn more!

Azure Data Studio (ADS) retired on February 6, 2025, and support ended on February 28, 2026. The recommended path forward is Visual Studio Code with the MSSQL extension. If you used ADS daily, this guide gets you productive quickly in VS Code. The focus is on importing your existing...

Overview Today, we are pleased to announce that Shader Model 6.10 and other features have been officially released with Agility SDK 1.720-preview and complementary DXC 1.10.2605.2. AgilitySDK 1.720-preview exposes the following features. There's more detail further below, including...

Welcome to the D3D12 LinAlg Matrix Preview release! Today, we are excited to announce the preview release for the D3D12 Linear Algebra APIs! This feature set unlocks comprehensive hardware acceleration for Matrix-oriented operations across various use cases. Previously, we announced...

It's bad news no matter how you slice it, but Itanium makes it even worse.

Azure MCP Server is now available as an MCP Bundle (.mcpb), enabling one-click installation into Claude Desktop and other MCP-compatible clients.

When people talk about building AI agents, they usually focus on models, tools, and prompts. In practice, one of the most important architectural decisions is much simpler: where does the conversation history live? Imagine a user asks your agent a complex question, clicks “try...

But maybe it's not worth it.

On March 31, 2026, malicious versions of the widely used JavaScript HTTP client library Axios were briefly published to the npm registry as part of a supply chain attack. The affected versions — 1.14.1 and 0.30.4 — included a hidden malicious dependency that executed during...

Ubuntu 26.04 (Resolute Raccoon) ships today with .NET 10. Here's how to install .NET 10 from the archive, use the new -resolute container tags, build Native AOT apps, and install .NET 8 and 9 from the dotnet-backports PPA.

Want to build AI agents with JavaScript that go beyond basic chat completions? Agents that reason, call tools, and pull from knowledge bases on their own? We put together a free, open source course to help you get there. LangChain.js for Beginners is 8 chapters and 70+ runnable...