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strengthening nuget supply chain security reducing api key lifetime image

Azure DevOps Remote MCP Server is generally available

Today, we're excited to announce the general availability of the Azure DevOps MCP Server 🎉 The Azure DevOps MCP Server gives AI assistants secure, contextual access to your Azure DevOps projects so they can help you plan, build, and ship software more effectively. With the Azure...
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Pull request annotations on work item cards

It's now easier to track development progress without leaving your Kanban board. Azure Boards now displays pull request annotations directly on work item cards, making it easy to see at a glance when work is actively moving through code review. With pull request status visible directly...
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Latest posts

Aug 14, 2026
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Windows App Development CLI v0.6 – create new WinUI applications, sign packages with Azure, and more

Zachary Teutsch

Windows App Development CLI v0.6.0 has just shipped and contains a ton of new features. Much of the changes in this release focus on getting from zero to a running app faster: scaffold a fresh WinUI project with a single command, search real WinUI controls and samples without leaving the terminal, and run your app straight from a .csproj with no manual build step first. It also adds cloud-based artifact signing, sparse-package workflows, and agent-friendly UI recordings. Grab it with winget install Microsoft.WinAppCLI, or head to the repo for npm and other install options. Here's a tour of the highligh...

Aug 14, 2026
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Forcing an ARM64X executable to run as a specific architecture

Raymond Chen

You can request the target machine architecture.

Aug 14, 2026
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Git-APE SaaS Factory

davidwright,
Arnaud,
Suzanne

Agentic Platform Engineering for SaaS.  Accelerating the Path to Market with Git-APE If you are an ISV building SaaS on Azure, the first demo is usually the easy part. The harder work is turning that proof of concept into a secure, scalable, commercial-ready service that can be operated confidently in production. That gap shows up quickly. Tenant isolation, identity, entitlement, marketplace fulfilment, metering, cost controls, observability, compliance evidence, and a clean path from customer purchase to tenant provisioning all need to be designed in, not bolted on later. None of those are side quests....

Aug 14, 2026
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Go 1.26.6-1 and 1.25.13-1 Microsoft builds now available

Davis Goodin

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

Aug 13, 2026
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Clearer Build Optimization Results with GitHub Copilot

David Li

We know that slow builds are a consistent theme in feedback from C++ developers. Your feedback helped us to shape GitHub Copilot build performance for Windows, an agent that can trace your build, find bottlenecks, apply optimizations, and measure the result. When using the agent, the clearest outcome is a straightforward win. The agent changes your project, rebuilds it, and shows how your build is made faster. Sometimes, a change may make a clean rebuild slightly slower while improving the incremental builds you run throughout the day. At other times, we also observed that optimizations may help without reachi...

Aug 13, 2026
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MSVC Build Tools Preview updates – August 2026

Eric Brumer

Try the latest updates to MSVC Build Tools Preview

Aug 13, 2026
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Routing and Failover for Microsoft.Extensions.AI

Joshua Yue

Route requests across models and providers natively in Microsoft.Extensions.AI with RoutingChatClient, SemanticRoutingChatClient, and FailoverChatClient — new experimental primitives for content-based routing, failover, and custom routing policies.

Aug 13, 2026
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Your best friend: BlockOnPossibleDataLoss=True

Jerry Nixon

BlockOnPossibleDataLoss can frustrate developers, but it's one of the most important safeguards in database deployment. Here's how to keep your local development loop fast while protecting the data that matters.

Aug 13, 2026
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A little helper class for managing LPPROC_THREAD_ATTRIBUTE_LISTs

Raymond Chen

Another RAII-style wrapper.

Aug 13, 2026
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Building Agents for Teams: Managing the noise of collaboration

Lily Du

Most of us are familiar with one-to-one agent chats: private, direct interactions where rules are relatively simple. With only you and the agent, each moment has clear intent. You can ask follow-up questions, pause, or restart without worrying about how each exchange affects anyone else. Collaboration in groups works differently. Every message competes for attention, and a reply that is helpful to one individual may interrupt five others. Effective collaboration is built on countless small social judgments and gestures: deciding when to respond or stay quiet, choosing how much to say, and using the conventions...

Aug 12, 2026
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From Sync APIs to support for the GPT-5 model series and agentic workflows: What’s new in Azure Content Understanding – August 2026

Peyton,
Krishnakumar,
Joe

Enterprise content is no longer just something people read. AI apps and agents are only as useful as the information they can understand, yet much of the world’s enterprise knowledge is locked in documents, forms, tables, images, audio, and video. The latest Azure Content Understanding updates help developers turn that content into structured, grounded data with less custom processing. This release brings broader support for the GPT-5 model series, lower token usage, improved confidence scoring, new synchronous APIs for Read and Layout, advanced contextualization for higher-quality extraction, new tax-focused pre...

Aug 12, 2026
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Azure Content Understanding GPT-5 Series Guide: Model Selection, Grounding Improvements, and Confidence Enhancements

Joe,
Krishnakumar

Enterprise content is no longer just something people consume. As organizations increasingly rely on AI to extract and act on information from documents, images, audio, and video, Azure Content Understanding is expanding support for the GPT-5 series and improving grounding and confidence to deliver greater flexibility, efficiency, and quality. This expanded model catalog enables organizations to choose the right level of intelligence for each workload, helping reduce costs for high-volume processing while preserving access to advanced reasoning capabilities where needed. It also provides optimized pipelines tu...

Aug 12, 2026
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Instructions Hygiene – What Frontier Models Still Need You to Say

Wendy Breiding (SHE/HER)

Get the most out of the latest models by providing the right level of instructions

Aug 12, 2026
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The comments that go into code versus those that go into the pull request description

Raymond Chen

Understanding the temporal relevance.

Aug 11, 2026
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What’s New in vcpkg (Jul 2026)

Augustin Popa

These updates include major SBOM improvements in vcpkg-tool, 302 updated ports including multiple major library upgrades, and other minor improvements and bug fixes.

Aug 11, 2026
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Azure Developer CLI extension framework is GA: build dev workflows for apps using Azure

Kristen Womack

What parts of building and shipping on Azure still take too many steps? Maybe you want a command that starts a project with your organization’s approved architecture and infrastructure. Maybe you need to connect deployments to an internal service catalog, run security checks before provisioning, or guide developers through a process that currently lives across scripts and documentation. When we first introduced the azd extension framework, we invited developers to think about that wish list. The framework was still taking shape in beta, and we wanted to learn which workflows developers and platform teams ne...

Aug 11, 2026
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August Patches for Azure DevOps Server

Gloridel Morales

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 following versions have been patched. For more details on these updates, see the release notes: ⬇️Azure DevOps Server Patch Download ✅Verifying Installation To verify that the patch is installed, run the following command on the Azure DevOps Server machine using the patch installer you downloaded: Replace with the name of the...

Aug 11, 2026
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.NET 11 Preview 7 is now available!

.NET Team

Find out about the new features in .NET 11 Preview 7 across libraries, runtime, SDK, C#, ASP.NET Core, .NET MAUI, Entity Framework Core, F#, and Windows Forms.

Aug 11, 2026
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.NET and .NET Framework August 2026 servicing releases updates

Rahul,
Tara

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

Aug 11, 2026
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Today I will… manage Git Submodules without leaving the IDE

Harshada Hole

If you've worked with Git submodules for any length of time, you probably have a love-hate relationship with them. They're genuinely useful for pulling a shared library, an SDK, or common build scripts into your project. But actually working with them usually means tabbing over to a terminal and trying to remember whether it's this time all while a perfectly good IDE sits right in front of you, shrugging. That's the part we wanted to fix. Starting in Visual Studio 18.9, Git submodules are a first-class part of the IDE no more bouncing out to the command line just to keep your dependencies in order. It's been one...

Aug 11, 2026
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Remove and Package Lifetime

Howard Kapustein

MSIX uses a Garbage Collection (GC) design for staged package lifetime and destaging. Throughout this article: Package Core Principles A staged package can't be destaged while any references to it exist. This is a direct consequence of MSIX's core architectural principles: Consequently, removing a package's payload from disk is not a direct result of a single API call. Instead, package payloads are automatically destaged when they are no longer needed. Even then, destaging may not occur immediately. Some actions that remove a reference don't directly trigger Deployment activity. In these cases,...

Aug 11, 2026
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The little-known winstart.bat batch file

Raymond Chen

It had been there long before Windows 95, but nobody remembered.

Aug 10, 2026
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Build Locally, Ship to Cloud for $0: Azure SQL for Modern App Developers

Vandana,
Andrew

As app developers, our primary focus is building great user experiences, designing APIs, and shipping features quickly. What we don't want is database friction—wasting hours configuring local DB instances, writing verbose migration scripts by hand, or worrying about unexpected cloud bills while prototyping. Today, we are making database development fast, intelligent, and completely free. By combining the Azure SQL Developer Container for local offline development, AI Agent Skills to automate your ORM and data layer, and the Azure SQL Database Free Tier, you can build locally and ship to production in minutes f...

Aug 10, 2026
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Intelligent Terminal 0.2 is here with local model support

Hamza Usmani

We're back, and this is our first minor version bump: 0.1 to 0.2! It's our biggest release yet. This update adds support for local models, lets you run a different agent in each tab with , brings OpenCode into the built-in agent lineup, runs your agent inside WSL where your work actually lives, and makes the Agent Pane richer to navigate and easier to read. It also sharpens Autofix and fixes a long list of reliability issues. You can grab the update from the Microsoft Store, via , or by heading to the release page on GitHub. Let's dive in! Local model support is here! We've heard you: one of the most common ...

Aug 10, 2026
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How can I perform a Copy­File in unbuffered mode?

Raymond Chen

Try one of the fancier alternatives to <CODE>Copy­File</CODE>.

Aug 10, 2026
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I Enabled RBAC and Everything Broke. What Did I Do Wrong?

Sudhanshu,
Iria

We covered the roles your Azure Cosmos DB app needs in our previous post. Now let’s look at what happens after you’ve assigned those roles, switched identities, disabled keys and suddenly staring at a . As we continue this security series, we’ll walk through the most common causes, how to diagnose them, and how to get back to green quickly. The situation You did everything right. You gave your app a managed identity, assigned a data role, switched your code over to , and turned off key-based auth like all the good security guidance told you to. Then you deploy, and every single call comes back with this: Res...

Aug 7, 2026
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Creating a fake agile wrapper that is technically agile but is not useful outside its home apartment, part 5

Raymond Chen

Cheating with <CODE>std::unique_ptr</CODE>.

Aug 6, 2026
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Test reporting in Microsoft.Testing.Platform: from red build to root cause

Amaury Levé

Microsoft.Testing.Platform brings failures into GitHub Actions and Azure DevOps, uses pipeline history to separate regressions from flakes, and preserves usable reports when a test host crashes.

Aug 6, 2026
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Announcing the preview of the Work IQ Developer Tools

Sébastien Levert

Software is shifting from apps built for people to agents that can reason over context and act on someone's behalf. Microsoft 365 Copilot put that shift in front of hundreds of millions of users, and Work IQ gave agents a production-ready intelligence layer to build on. What's been missing is the path in between: getting from an idea to a production agent running in front of customers. Today we're announcing the developer preview of Work IQ Developer Tools (WIQD), the agentic experience for Microsoft 365 Copilot extensibility that takes any plugin (skills, connectors, declarative agents) from an empty folder t...

Aug 6, 2026
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Creating a fake agile wrapper that is technically agile but is not useful outside its home apartment, part 4

Raymond Chen

Moving things around if possible.

Aug 6, 2026
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Pull request annotations on work item cards

Dan Hellem

It's now easier to track development progress without leaving your Kanban board. Azure Boards now displays pull request annotations directly on work item cards, making it easy to see at a glance when work is actively moving through code review. With pull request status visible directly on the board, your team can quickly understand the state of development without opening a work item or switching to Azure Repos. Whether you're in a stand-up, planning your next sprint, or simply reviewing the board, you can immediately identify which work items have active pull requests. If you prefer a cleaner board, you can ...

Aug 6, 2026
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You can now use the Azure DevOps Service Connection instead of a PAT or Build Session token

Eric van Wijk

We're excited to announce the Azure DevOps service connection, a new way to access Azure DevOps from your pipelines using a Microsoft Entra workload identity (a service principal or managed identity) instead of a Personal Access Token (PAT) or session token. This post walks through what it is, how to set it up, and the many places you can use it, including several capabilities we've added based on your feedback. Why use an Azure DevOps service connection? Using an Azure DevOps service connection improves the security of your pipelines in several ways: Because the connection authenticates as a Microsoft ...

Aug 5, 2026
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Creating a fake agile wrapper that is technically agile but is not useful outside its home apartment, part 3

Raymond Chen

Forcing an object into the global interface table.

Aug 5, 2026
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Azure DevOps Remote MCP Server is generally available

Dan Hellem

Today, we're excited to announce the general availability of the Azure DevOps MCP Server 🎉 The Azure DevOps MCP Server gives AI assistants secure, contextual access to your Azure DevOps projects so they can help you plan, build, and ship software more effectively. With the Azure DevOps remote MCP Server, you can get started without installing or hosting anything yourself. Simply connect your AI assistant directly to the Azure DevOps hosted endpoint by using streamable HTTP transport and start working with your projects in minutes. Getting Started Getting started in simple. Depending on the tools that you are u...

Aug 4, 2026
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Beyond Chat: live Speech-to-Text with Foundry Local and C#

Bruno Capuano

Build a live speech-to-text app in C# with Foundry Local, a compact Nemotron model, and local model lifecycle management.

Aug 4, 2026
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Build Production-Ready Agents with the GitHub Copilot Harness and Agent Framework

Giles Odigwe

Developers increasingly want to build agents that can reason about code, modify files, execute commands, interact with developer tools, and work across entire repositories. While GitHub Copilot already provides a powerful coding harness for these scenarios, developers often need additional capabilities such as observability, middleware, approval workflows, enterprise governance, and integration with broader agent ecosystems. The GitHub Copilot integration in Microsoft Agent Framework brings these worlds together. You can now use GitHub Copilot's agentic harness as the execution engine for your agents while conti...

Aug 4, 2026
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Remove Is Not Uninstall

Howard Kapustein

Just as There is no Install – it’s ‘Stage’ and ‘Register’ explained that Install is not truly an installation operation in MSIX, Remove is similarly not an uninstall operation. This can be surprising - sometimes even alarming - to developers coming from traditional installer technologies such as MSI, where uninstalling software typically implies: In MSIX, that model simply does not exist. Remove = Deregister + (Maybe) Destage From MSIX Deployment's perspective, a package lifecycle consists of four fundamental operations: There's a symmetry here. Stage and Register do the work necessary to make ...

Aug 4, 2026
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Build Azure Skills Faster with Cloud Academy, a Visual Studio Subscriber Benefit

James Rempt

If you've been looking for a practical way to build Azure skills, Cloud Academy (a QA company) gives Visual Studio subscribers hands-on learning that fits into busy schedules.  Whether you're new to Azure, expanding your cloud expertise, working towards certifications or preparing for more advanced projects, this benefit helps you learn by doing.  What you'll find in Cloud Academy  The Cloud Academy benefit gives Visual Studio subscribers a flexible learning experience that adapts to different learning styles and schedules, providing:  With the Cloud Academy benef...

Aug 4, 2026
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Creating a fake agile wrapper that is technically agile but is not useful outside its home apartment, part 2

Raymond Chen

Using a reference stored in the global interface table.

Aug 3, 2026
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Building an operations assistant on Azure that waits for approval before it acts

Ricardo M. Martins

Grounding an assistant in runbooks is straightforward. The harder part begins when the model proposes an action that requires authorization. An operations assistant needs stronger controls as soon as it can act. Answering "which runbook covers this alert" is a search problem. Opening an incident from that same conversation is a control-plane problem, and that is where a helpful prototype quietly turns into something you would not want on call. I built a deliberately narrow reference app to sit on that boundary and see what breaks. It runs on Azure Container Apps, retrieves Markdown runbooks thro...

Aug 3, 2026
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Strengthening NuGet Supply Chain Security: Reducing API Key Lifetime

.NET Team

NuGet API key durations will be reduced to 30 days starting August 17th. This change will significantly strengthen the integrity of the NuGet supply chain.

Aug 3, 2026
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Creating a fake agile wrapper that is technically agile but is not useful outside its home apartment, part 1

Raymond Chen

Looking for a COM reference that is between strong and weak.

Jul 31, 2026
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From generated code to trusted code with a unit-test agent

Amaury Levé

Meet the open-source polyglot testing agent that learns from a repository, writes unit tests, and checks that they build and pass.

Jul 31, 2026
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Making an agile version of a Windows Runtime delegate in C++/WinRT, part 10

Raymond Chen

What failure of the context callback means.

Jul 31, 2026
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A deep dive into Power Pages Enhanced Authorization

Gokul Narayanan

Dataverse Native Authorization Model for Power Pages How mapped identities, security roles, and record filters move external-user authorization closer to the data. We’re introducing a major update to the Power Pages security model: authorization for external users is now enforced natively in Dataverse. Customers can opt in to this feature as they transition to the new model. This architecture moves Power Pages authorization closer to the data by translating Power Pages concepts into Dataverse-native security constructs. Instead of relying on Power Pages at runtime to reconstruct authorization for every request...

Jul 30, 2026
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Introducing WPA MCP: Early Preview of AI-assisted trace analysis in Windows Performance Analyzer

Claton Hendricks

Windows Performance Analyzer (WPA) is one of the most powerful tools available for understanding system performance on Windows. It helps engineers investigate Event Tracing for Windows (ETW) traces across CPU, memory, disk, networking, scheduling, input, and many other areas of the operating system. That power also comes with complexity. A single trace can contain a huge amount of data, and finding the right signal often requires knowing which WPA tables to open, which columns matter, how to filter the right time range, and how to connect multiple pieces of evidence into a root cause. We are working on WPA ...

Jul 30, 2026
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Azure Developer CLI (azd) July 2026

Kristen Womack

This is the July round-up for the Azure Developer CLI (). Five releases shipped since the last post: 1.27.0, 1.27.1, 1.28.0, 1.28.1, and 1.29.0. Below is what's new, what changed, and what we fixed, with links to the pull requests if you want to dig in. Have feedback or questions? Join the release discussion on GitHub. Highlights: 🌐 Microsoft Foundry at the AI Engineer World's Fair In Pablo Castro's (Microsoft) "On AI and Knowledge" session at the AI Engineer World's Fair, the Microsoft Foundry team showed their command-line experience built on top of the extension platform. I...

Jul 30, 2026
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Building agent teams with Agent Framework, GitHub Copilot CLI and Squad

Shawn,
tamir

Microsoft Agent Framework supports creating agents that use the GitHub Copilot SDK as their backend. GitHub Copilot agents provide access to powerful coding-oriented AI capabilities, including shell command execution, file operations, URL fetching, Model Context Protocol (MCP) server integration, and can be integrated into your existing development pipeline. We recently shipped this integration to v1.0 in C# and Python - fully supported and stable. Find out more here: MS Learn | Agent Framework | GitHub Copilot Agents and check out the samples here: .NET | Python A great example of using MAF and GitHub Copi...

Jul 30, 2026
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Making an agile version of a Windows Runtime delegate in C++/WinRT, part 9

Raymond Chen

Maybe it doesn't matter.

Jul 29, 2026
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Azure SDK Release (July 2026)

Justin Bettencourt

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

Jul 29, 2026
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Tell your model when to think harder 

Rachel Kang (SHE/HER)

Not every question deserves the same amount of thought. Renaming a variable isn't the same as debugging a memory leak, and they don't need the same level of thinking. So why should your model treat them the same way every time? Starting in Visual Studio 18.9 Insiders 2, it doesn't have to. Supported models now come with a thinking effort control, so you can dial up the reasoning when a problem is genuinely hard and dial it back down when it isn't. It's a small knob with a big payoff: better-matched answers, and more control over how many credits you spend getting them. A dial, not a switch Thinking effort is...

Jul 29, 2026
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Making an agile version of a Windows Runtime delegate in C++/WinRT, part 8

Raymond Chen

Exceptions hiding in lambda captures.

Jul 28, 2026
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Announcing v2.0 of the official MCP C# SDK

Jeff Handley

MCP C# SDK v2.0 implements the 2026-07-28 specification with a stateless-first protocol, standardized HTTP headers, and Multi Round-Trip Requests for interactive tools, all while staying backward compatible.

Jul 28, 2026
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Package Integrity and Enforcement

Howard Kapustein

A recent conversation started (as many interesting conversations do) with a simple question: "Why is MSIX secure?" MSIX includes multiple layers of protection designed to defend against both accidental damage and malicious tampering. But as with all good security solutions, it's not the individual elements so much as their interlocking design that makes the whole stronger than the sum of its parts. MSIX was designed around several core facets, integrated in sometimes novel ways. A packaged process can be trusted to a higher degree than most applications because Windows maintains a verifiable chain of trust fr...

Jul 28, 2026
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Visual Studio July Update — Meet the New Agent, Powered by the GitHub Copilot SDK

Mark Downie

There's a new Agent (Preview) in Copilot Chat, built on the same GitHub Copilot SDK that powers the GitHub Copilot CLI, that gets more done with less back-and-forth.

Jul 28, 2026
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Find any commit in seconds: Commit Search comes to Azure DevOps

Alex Pysanets

Great code has a long memory. The fix you shipped last quarter, the refactor that touched a dozen files, the one-line change that explained why something works the way it does — it's all there in your commit history. The hard part has always been finding it. Today, we're excited to announce that Commit Search is entering general availability (GA) in Azure DevOps. This is a capability our team has been building and refining for quite some time — through design, a private preview with early customers, and a careful, staged rollout — and we couldn't be happier to bring it to everyone. Why we built Commit Search C...

Jul 28, 2026
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Making an agile version of a Windows Runtime delegate in C++/WinRT, part 7

Raymond Chen

Further explorations into exception safety.

Jul 28, 2026
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Refactor your database with SQL projects in VS Code

Drew Skwiers-Koballa

SQL database projects are a fundamental tool for keeping your database in source control, tracking changes and collaborating on quickly evolving database needs. Not to be forgotten, their superpower is being able to dynamically generate deployment scripts that match the declared state and the exact environment you're deploying to. SQL project development becomes more challenging when a database needs serious changes, where the requirements of the system have evolved to the point of having to rename tables and move objects between schemas. In plain T-SQL, we can rename a table or column without having to co...

Jul 28, 2026
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Discover Agent Skills from MCP servers in .NET

Sergey Menshykh

Your agents can now discover and load Agent Skills directly from a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server. Instead of shipping every skill inside your application or copying skill folders into each deployment, you point an agent at an MCP server and it pulls the skills it needs on demand. A central team can publish skills once, and every agent across your organization picks them up without a redeploy. This is available today in .NET through the package. For makers, this removes a distribution problem: you author a skill in one place and serve it to many agents. For enterprise leaders, it means domain expertise –...

Jul 27, 2026
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Query Performance Tuning in Azure DocumentDB: A Practical Guide

Patty,
Marcelo

Writing a query that works is easy. Writing a query that scales is a different story. As collections grow to millions of documents, queries that returned results in milliseconds during development start taking seconds or timing out entirely. The root cause is almost always the same: the database is doing far more work than it needs to. In this post, we’ll take a single, realistic query and walk through the full optimization process: running explain() to understand what’s happening under the hood, building indexes step by step, and applying the ESR rule to design a compound index that eliminates wasted scans and...

Jul 27, 2026
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Analyze MSBuild Binary Logs with Copilot in VS Code

Yuliia,
Jan

Meet the MSBuild Binlog Analyzer for VS Code - a Copilot-powered way to read MSBuild binary logs, explain and fix build failures with one click, compare builds, and catch regressions, backed by the Microsoft.AITools.BinlogMcp MCP server.

Jul 27, 2026
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A new way to bring native Windows APIs to JavaScript – introducing dynamic API projections for Node.js

Leilei Zhang

Electron and Node.js make it straightforward to build Windows desktop apps in JavaScript. Calling Windows Runtime APIs has been less straightforward: features such as on-device AI often required a C++ or C# bridge, manual translation of WinRT types and asynchronous behavior, and wrapper code for every exposed API. That meant another language and toolchain to build, test, and keep compatible with Electron. We're making a dynamic Windows Runtime API (WinRT) projection for Node.js available in public preview. It lets an Electron app or plain Node.js process call supported Windows Runtime APIs directly fro...

Jul 27, 2026
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Making an agile version of a Windows Runtime delegate in C++/WinRT, part 6

Raymond Chen

Exception-safety, the invisible bug.

Jul 24, 2026
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Java OpenJDK July 2026 Patch & Security Update

Josh Martin-Jaffe

Hello Java customers! We are happy to announce the latest July 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 are now available on GitHub for further inspection: Microsoft Build of OpenJDK specific updates OpenJDK 25 OpenJDK 21 OpenJDK 17 OpenJDK 11 Summary of Upstream Updates OpenJDK Vulnerability Advisory July 2026 OpenJDK 25 OpenJDK 21 ...

Jul 24, 2026
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Making an agile version of a Windows Runtime delegate in C++/WinRT, part 5

Raymond Chen

Making sure to use the non-agile delegate non-agile-ly.

Jul 24, 2026
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Native Agent Memory for Microsoft Agent Framework, Powered by Azure Cosmos DB

Theo van Kraay

Recently we introduced the Agent Memory Toolkit and the Agentic Retrieval Toolkit for Azure Cosmos DB. The Agent Memory Toolkit gives your agents durable, Cosmos-backed memory: it stores raw conversation turns and then distills them into higher-value derived memories (thread summaries, extracted facts, and cross-thread user profiles), all searchable with vector, full-text, and hybrid search in the one database you already use. Today we're taking the next step. With the latest release of Microsoft Agent Framework, you can now drop that memory into an agent with a single object: the , shipped in the new  package f...

Jul 23, 2026
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The Microsoft 365 Copilot Agent’s Playbook: A Practical Livestream Series for Building Better Agents

Shavonna Jackson

Building on Microsoft 365 Copilot? Here's your playbook. Declarative agents are quickly becoming one of the most exciting ways to extend Microsoft 365 Copilot and bring organizational knowledge, workflows, and tools directly into the flow of work. But as agent capabilities grow, so does the need for practical guidance: How do you build agents that are useful, grounded, extensible, and measurable? That’s why we’re launching The Microsoft 365 Copilot Agent’s Playbook, a four-part livestream series designed to help developers, makers, and technical teams understand how modern Microsoft 365 Copilot decl...

Jul 23, 2026
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Move Agent Orchestration/Workflows out of Code with Agent Framework Declarative Workflows 1.0

Peter Ibekwe

Most multi-agent apps wire every flow in application code: the sequence of steps, branching, and handoffs between agents all live inside the program, making the orchestration harder to review, version, and change. Declarative workflows make that orchestration explicit. In YAML, you define how agents coordinate, how state changes, where execution branches, and when people step in. Agent Framework loads the definition into a standard workflow you can run, stream, and compose with code. Today, declarative workflows reach 1.0 across both Agent Framework SDKs. Python's package is now 1.0.0, joining th...

Jul 23, 2026
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Build locally, ship to Azure: meet Azure SQL Developer

Carlos,
Vandana

Big news: Azure SQL Developer is here, in private preview. It's the Azure SQL Database engine, on your laptop, in a container. Build against the exact engine you run in the cloud. Ship the same code to Azure. Change one line, the connection string, and you're in production. Free for local dev and CI. No subscription. No credit card. No catch. Run it yourself, or hand it to an AI agent and watch it go.  The inner-loop problem If you build apps on a cloud database, you know the friction. To develop and test locally, you either point your app at a shared cloud instance, with slow round trips, noisy neighbors, and ...

Jul 23, 2026
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Making an agile version of a Windows Runtime delegate in C++/WinRT, part 4

Raymond Chen

Optimizing the context check.

Jul 23, 2026
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Smarter Spring Development in Eclipse with GitHub Copilot

Hang,
Sheng,
martinlippert

How the Spring Tools MCP Server and GitHub Copilot together make Spring Development more efficient. Introduction If you write Spring Boot applications in Eclipse, you already know that Spring Tools for Eclipse brings best-in-class tooling right into your IDE, including quick navigation and visualization of core Spring elements in your projects, live information from running Spring Boot applications, Spring specific auto completion, validations and quick fixes, request mapping overviews, and much more. In addition to that, if you have the GitHub Copilot plugin for Eclipse installed, you have a powerful AI codi...

Jul 22, 2026
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Pure Virtual C++ 2026 Is a Wrap

Marian Luparu

Pure Virtual C++ 2026 is a wrap. Every featured and on-demand session is now available on YouTube — catch up on C++/Rust interop, AI-driven tooling, build performance, and more.