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A data-driven framework we use in enterprise deployments to decide between vector-only keyword and hybrid search, based on five measurable evaluation criteria.

9 min read · June 3, 2026 · Sebastian Kohlmeier    Shipping an AI agent is the easy part. Keeping it accurate, safe, and accountable in production is where teams get stuck. Agents are non-deterministic. Their behavior shifts as models update, tools change, and traffic...

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

For the past decade, Azure DevOps has powered software development at Microsoft, supporting some of our largest repositories and most complex engineering workflows across Azure Repos, Boards, and Pipelines. Software development is being reshaped by AI, and where code lives now have a...

Learn how new Document Translation capabilities in Azure Translator, available in Foundry Tools, help developers translate images, PDFs, Office files, DITA, XLIFF, and future LLM-powered document workflows.

Microsoft Agent Framework at BUILD 2026: Agent Harness, Hosted Agents, CodeAct, and more BUILD 2026 is underway, and the Microsoft Agent Framework team have a round-up of exciting announcements! Microsoft Agent Framework (MAF) is our open-source SDK and runtime for building AI agents...

Microsoft Foundry Managed Compute is a new GPU platform-as-a-service for hosting open-source and custom AI models behind the same endpoint, SDKs, and bill as frontier models.

With hosted agents, we made it straightforward to build and deploy agents on Foundry. You write your logic, run azd deploy, and your agent is live. But “live” and “production-ready” aren’t the same thing. The gap shows up quickly. Your customer support agent handles...

Memory has always mattered for personalization and continuity. But as customers move agents from demos into production, another requirement becomes just as important: reliability.   Enterprise teams need agents that not only remember facts, but also apply what they have learned to...

Tooling doesn’t break at a small scale—it breaks when teams move to production. AI adoption accelerates, so does the number of tools available to them. Discovering, managing and securing the right tools has quickly become one of the biggest challenges in building production-grade...

The past year was about building agents. The next year is about putting them to work.  Organizations have moved quickly from experimenting with AI agents to building ones that perform complex business processes and execute long-running tasks. But the bottleneck has shifted. The...

We've seen this before.

Azure Content Understanding (CU) in Foundry Tools is Microsoft's comprehensive content AI service. It ingests diverse data types — documents, audio, images, and video — and extracts the most critical information to power well-grounded, reliable generative AI and agentic solutions....

At Microsoft Build, we are sharing how Microsoft Marketplace brings development, distribution, and monetization together— so apps and agents move beyond prototyping into real-world usage at scale. Microsoft Marketplace connects tens of thousands of cloud and AI solutions built by...

azure-functions-skills gives GitHub Copilot CLI, Claude Code, Codex CLI, and VS Code the skills, MCP configuration, hooks, and instructions needed to create, diagnose, deploy, and validate Azure Functions projects end-to-end.

AI applications built on Azure Cosmos DB depend on embeddings for grounded results. Keeping them in sync with your data is the hard part: it means building and operating a separate data pipeline to track changes, call an embedding model, and write the results back to Azure Cosmos DB. In...

Today we are open-sourcing OmniVec, a platform for building and operating the embedding pipelines that keep the vector representation of your operational data in sync as it changes. You register data sources, embedding model(s), vector stores (destination), and OmniVec does the rest:...

We are excited to announce the general availability of service-managed failovers in Azure DocumentDB, eliminating the need for human intervention to recover from a regional outage. Running a production database means planning for the unlikely. Regional outages are rare, but when they...

Feedback from developers using Azure DocumentDB consistently pointed to one small but still impactful item on their wish list: provisioning a free tier cluster took a few minutes. For a developer just getting started, or an agentic workflow spinning up ephemeral clusters to validate a...

Modern applications don't just write data and move on. They react to it. A new order triggers an inventory update. A profile change syncs to a search index. A deleted record kicks off a compliance workflow. Azure Cosmos DB's change feed makes this possible by giving you a real-time stream...

We're excited to announce the general availability of Change Partition Key in Azure Cosmos DB for NoSQL, now with online copy support. You can repartition containers directly in the Azure portal with near-zero downtime and without stopping writes to the source container. Why Partition...

Real-time, event-driven applications are now the expectation, not the exception. Teams want dashboards that update the instant something happens, microservices that react the moment data lands, and pipelines that move changes downstream without polling a database on a timer. Since Change...

We are excited to announce the general availability of graceful failovers in Azure DocumentDB. Not every region switch is because of availability loss. Whether you're migrating your primary workload to a different Azure region or proactively moving ahead of a forecasted...

Today, we are excited to announce the General Availability of Per Partition Automatic Failover (PPAF) for Azure Cosmos DB NoSQL API. PPAF is a significant advancement in how Azure Cosmos DB delivers availability and resilience for mission-critical workloads running on single-write-region...

Today, we are excited to announce the public preview of the Azure Cosmos DB Migration Assistant for RDBMS to NoSQL, now available in the Azure Cosmos DB extension for Visual Studio Code. 📈 Modernize with confidence Why migrate from RDBMS to Azure Cosmos DB? Modernizing...

Since we introduced the Azure Cosmos DB MCP Toolkit at Ignite 2025 in preview, the response has been clear: developers want a straightforward way to connect AI agents to their production databases. Customers asked for stability, broader embedding provider support, and a smoother path from...

The Azure Cosmos DB vNext emulator is generally available today. It ships as a Docker image that runs on Linux, macOS, and Windows, on both x64 and ARM64 architectures, giving you a local Cosmos DB instance you can develop and test against. Use it for inner-loop development on your...

Today we’re thrilled to announce the public preview of Semantic Reranker in Azure Cosmos DB for NoSQL,a new AI-powered capability that improves the relevancy of your search results with just a few lines of code. If you’ve ever run a vector, full-text, or hybrid search and wished the...

Have you ever needed to evolve your read patterns without losing efficiency? Maybe your app started with one access pattern, but now you need three, and the queries that don't hit your partition key are getting slower and more expensive every month. We built global secondary indexes...

Developers are moving quickly to build AI-powered experiences, but there is a gap between what an agent can say and what it can actually do. To be useful, an agent needs secure access to live systems, real data, and the same operational context developers already rely on. That is why we...

Today we’re thrilled to announce the public preview of two new toolkits for Azure Cosmos DB: the Agent Memory Toolkit and the Agentic Retrieval Toolkit. If you’re building AI agents and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) apps, these toolkits are designed to take you from prototype...

In our previous post, we introduced the private preview of Safe Key Rotation, a feature that helps Azure Cosmos DB customers avoid service disruptions during key rotations. By showing when each account key was last used, it helps teams make informed decisions before rotating keys...

Today, we're thrilled to announce the public preview of the Azure Cosmos DB Cost Estimator, a new sizing and pricing experience that takes developers from a blank page to a defensible monthly cost estimate in minutes.  Sizing an Azure Cosmos DB workload has always been one of...

In modern cloud-native applications, correctness is often hardest to maintain at the exact moment a workflow crosses boundaries. A checkout flow writes an order in one place; decrements inventory in another and emits an audit event somewhere else. A money movement workflow debits one...

The Problem Every Developer Knows Too Well You're building a feature. You know exactly what data you need all orders from the last week over $500, grouped by region. The logic is clear in your head. But between you and that data sits a query language, a documentation tab (or three),...

Back in January, we shipped the Azure Cosmos DB Agent kit in preview with 45 rules and a hypothesis: if we package Azure Cosmos DB expertise into a format that AI coding agents understand, developers will stop making the same expensive mistakes. That hypothesis held up. What surprised us...

Work IQ provides a workplace intelligence layer that enables agents to access and reason over organizational data, context, and tools, continuously building a semantic understanding across Microsoft 365 and external systems with built-in, permission-aware governance. 

At Microsoft Build 2026, we're announcing new investments to help your agents become teammates in everyday work, from new interaction patterns to streamlined tooling. 

We are happy to share that online migration in the Azure DocumentDB Migration extension for VS Code is now Generally Available. Back in November 2025, we launched the Public Preview and since then, many customers have put it through its paces with all kinds of MongoDB workloads. Based on...

Microsoft Build 2026 has officially started and we’re excited to announce new capabilities for Azure Cosmos DB! We’ve launched new features to help developers build AI-powered applications and agents more easily, improve application resilience, and accelerate developer...

AI is changing how software gets planned, built, and reviewed. As teams adopt agentic development, the platform underneath those workflows matters more. They need tools that bring planning, coding, security, and collaboration together—and can keep pace with how development is...

We're announcing the private preview of Frontier Tuning, a new approach to making AI work the way your business does by applying reinforcement learning inside your compliance boundary with your own data, processes, and conventions. 

Learn a practical model lifecycle for Microsoft Foundry: select the right model, evaluate quality, optimize cost, operate safely, and improve as production needs change.

Microsoft Build kicks off today in San Francisco, June 2 and 3. If you cannot make it in person, the sessions are streaming online for free, and I want to walk you through what we are announcing for Visual Studio this week. One idea tie most of it together. Code is an asset, not just...

Learn how Microsoft Foundry helps developers build, deploy, and operate production-ready agents with Agent Framework, Toolboxes, hosted agents, Microsoft 365 distribution, observability, and agent optimization.

Learn how Foundry IQ helps developers ground agents with unified enterprise knowledge, serverless retrieval, improved agentic retrieval quality, and production-ready security.

Learn how Microsoft helps developers build trustworthy AI agents with open evaluations, portable runtime controls, production observability, and security workflows that work across frameworks.

Your healthcare app needs "La médica" not "El médico." Your legal documents need precise terminology, not generic translations. When domain-specific language matters, generic LLM translation falls short. Azure Translator's adaptive translation lets you teach the model your...

Today we're announcing Intelligent Terminal version 0.1, an open-source experimental fork of Windows Terminal with native agent integration. Get started Install from the Microsoft Store: Intelligent Terminal on the Microsoft Store Install via WinGet: winget install...

Ship multilingual features in hours, not months Your translation workflow probably looks like this: one vendor for real-time chat, another for document translation, a custom LLM integration for nuanced content, and a spreadsheet tracking which system handles what. Azure Translator's...

Microsoft Build 2026 brings a major set of Microsoft Foundry updates for developers building agents: hosted runtimes, Toolboxes, memory, Voice Live, Foundry IQ, new models, managed compute, and trust, evaluation, and observability tools.

A few weeks ago, we announced the public preview refresh of hosted agents in Foundry Agent Service — a fundamentally re-imagined agent runtime built for operationalizing production-grade AI agents in enterprise systems. Today at Microsoft Build, we are excited to share several updates...

The MSSQL extension for VS Code v1.43 expands what’s possible inside Visual Studio Code with the General Availability of Schema Designer with GitHub Copilot, Data API builder, and SQL Notebooks. We’re also introducing the Public Preview of Azure SQL Database provisioning, giving...

Moving in a straight line, in a different way.

A key phase in installing a package is staging the package: var packageUri = new Uri("C:\\Packages\\ContosoParts-v1.2.3.4-x64.msix"); var options = new StagePackageOptions(); var packageManager = new PackageManager(); var result = await packageManager.StagePackageByUriAsync(packageUri,...

Aspire 13.4 is here with TypeScript apphost GA, typed resource commands with results, server-side CLI log and telemetry search, more mature Kubernetes and AKS deployment, and more.

Modern this and that.

BUILD 2026 begins on Tuesday, June 2, and there will be tons of exciting announcements from the Microsoft Agent Framework team, Microsoft Foundry, and all things Microsoft AI. If you're traveling to San Francisco for BUILD, be sure to stop by the Microsoft Foundry booths to chat with...

May ships trace-based evaluation for any agent on any cloud, Grok 4.3 and DeepSeek V4 in the model catalog, GPT-5 Reinforcement Fine-Tuning at gated GA, three Microsoft Research on-device agent models, Managed VNET at GA, project-level cost attribution, Content Understanding improvements reaching GA, Foundry Local 1.1 and 1.2 with live audio and vision, and azure-ai-projects 2.2.0 with skills, toolboxes, external agents, and model weight registry — plus a guide to Microsoft Foundry sessions at Microsoft Build.

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.