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Aspire 135 Image Aug 18 2026 03 59 09 PM image

Azure Cosmos DB in the Agentic Era: Data Tools for Developers and AI Agents

Anthropic's 2026 Agentic Coding Trends Report captures an important tension in how developers use AI. Engineers report using AI in roughly 60% of their work, yet say they can fully delegate only 0–20% of their tasks. AI is becoming a constant collaborator, but it still needs setup,...
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Today I will... Modernize a .NET application

Today I will modernize a .NET Framework application to .NET 10 using the GitHub Copilot modernization tooling built-in to Visual Studio.   The tooling helps us upgrade applications running on legacy versions of .NET and also migrate them to Azure. Today we're going to focus on...
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Aug 27, 2026
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SharePoint Framework (SPFx) roadmap update – August 2026

Vesa Juvonen

SPFx 1.24 Beta 3 is now available, React 18 support is coming in 1.24, and a new Copilot Components preview program opens for customers and partners.

Aug 27, 2026
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Azure Developer CLI (azd) – August 2026

Kristen,
Jeffrey

Welcome to the August 2026 edition of the Azure Developer CLI () release blog. This post covers releases 1.30.0, 1.31.0, 1.31.1, 1.31.2, and 1.32.0. To share your feedback and questions, join the August release discussion on GitHub. Highlights: New features 🔌 Extensions The extension framework reached general availability this month. Read more in The Azure Developer CLI extension framework is generally available. 📦 Container deployment Breaking changes 🪲 Bugs fixed Provisioning and deployment Pipelines and update...

Aug 27, 2026
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How Uno Platform uses .NET, MCP, and AI to build high quality apps

Sam Basu

How Uno Platform built two Model Context Protocol servers in C# so AI agents can ground themselves in real documentation and then see and drive a running cross-platform .NET app.

Aug 27, 2026
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Agent Harness: Making your claw production-ready

Wes Steyn

Part 4 of Build your own claw and agent harness with Microsoft Agent Framework. Over the last three parts our personal finance assistant grew from a single tool into a genuinely capable agent: it plans, reads your portfolio, asks before it trades, remembers what matters, loads skills on demand, reorganizes files with a shell, computes with CodeAct, and fans research out to background agents. It works on your machine. But "works on my machine" isn't the same as ready to run for other people. This final part closes that gap along four axes: To get there we make one structural change. Up t...

Aug 27, 2026
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VSLive! @ Microsoft HQ: Developer Takeaways and Must-Watch Sessions

James Rempt

VSLive! @ Microsoft HQ 2026 was one of the most energizing VSLive! events I’ve attended. What stood out was the level of engagement over five days of learning and conversation from July 27 through July 31. Developers came ready to dig into the future of Visual Studio, .NET, and AI-assisted software development, and many Microsoft engineers and product managers were there to have those conversations directly.  If you weren’t able to join us in Redmond, there’s still plenty you can take away from the event. The Microsoft-led sessions were recorded, so you can catch up on many of the topics that generated som...

Aug 27, 2026
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On forcing all derived classes to implement a specific non-virtual method, part 1

Raymond Chen

Don't implement a stub. Just don't implement it at all.

Aug 27, 2026
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Azure DevOps in the GitHub Copilot App

Dan Hellem

The Azure DevOps plugin is now available for the GitHub Copilot app, allowing you to view and manage Azure DevOps pull requests and work items directly in the Copilot app. What you can do The initial release supports: You can find your assigned work, make changes, and complete pull requests without leaving the GitHub Copilot app. Get started Open the GitHub Copilot app and select Customize. From the Editor's picks tab, find and install the Azure DevOps plugin. Once the plugin is installed, start a new session from chat or select New session from the plugin card under Editor's picks. Sign in and ent...

Aug 26, 2026
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I Need My CI/CD Pipeline to Access Cosmos DB Without Using a Secret

Iria,
Sudhanshu

In the last post we walked through why RBAC broke your app and how to fix it. Your app is now running on a managed identity, keys are off, and everything is green. Then your build pipeline runs, and it needs to seed test data. Suddenly you're staring at a secret in your CI settings and wondering if you just undid all that work. As we continue this security series, let's get your pipeline to Cosmos DB with no secret anywhere.  The situation  You did the hard part. Your app uses , you assigned a data plane role, and you set . Passwordless, done.  Then you look at your CI/CD pipeline and find this sitting in yo...

Aug 26, 2026
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The Visual Studio Debugger Agentic Workflow Gets a Test-Driven Upgrade

Harshada Hole

A few months ago, we introduced a new guided agentic workflow in the Visual Studio Debugger Agent designed to help you move from a bug report to a verified fix without spending your morning guessing where to begin.   If you missed that announcement, check out  Stop Hunting Bugs: Meet the New Visual Studio Debugger Agent to see how the Agent builds a hypothesis, guides the debugger, investigates your application at runtime, and validates the final change.  Today, we’re building on that experience with a new Test-Driven Investigation workflow. The Debugger Agent can now create or identify a focused test, debug th...

Aug 26, 2026
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Introducing agent and workflow channels

Eduard van Valkenburg

An agent or workflow is only useful when people and other systems can reach it through the interfaces and channels they already use. That might be an OpenAI Responses client, Telegram, another agent using A2A, or an MCP client. As a builder of agents and workflow, you need control over which channels you expose it to and how it behaves. To help, we're introducing channels in Microsoft Agent Framework for agents and workflows in Python. Choose the channels your application needs The new packages are organized around a small shared hosting core and a set of channel-specific integrations: ...

Aug 26, 2026
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Copilot Code Reviews for Azure Repos (public preview)

Dan Hellem

Today, we’re announcing the public preview of GitHub Copilot Code Review for Azure Repos, making the feature available to all Azure DevOps customers using the service. There’s no longer a need to sign up for early access. Customers can now enable Copilot Code Review for their Azure Repos repositories and start using it. With the public preview, we’re also introducing several improvements we’ve made over the past couple of months based on what we’ve learned during the technical preview. Before getting started, be sure to read the official documentation for details on how Copilot Code Review works, how to enable ...

Aug 26, 2026
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In the product end game, every change carries significant risk, episode 2

Raymond Chen

The smallest perturbation.

Aug 25, 2026
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.NET Conf 2026 – Save the Date

Jon Galloway

.NET Conf returns November 10-12, 2026, with three days of sessions, community, and the launch of .NET 11.

Aug 25, 2026
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What Kind of Packaged Process Is It?

Howard Kapustein

As previously discussed, we can divide processes into the two broad categories of packaged vs unpackaged, based on if the process HAS or LACKS package identity. Packaged processes can be divided into three broad categories: All three have package identity, but they make different tradeoffs between compatibility and modern packaged behavior. RuntimeBehavior Packages specify how an application process is created and runs via multiple properties in . The RuntimeBehavior attribute clearly expresses this: is a Universal app. It was first introduced in Windows 81. New lingo appeared with it, initially ref...

Aug 25, 2026
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Start here: Azure SQL Foundations series

Anna Hoffman

Most developers I talk to aren't asking whether Azure SQL Database can handle their next app. They're asking where to start when it comes to modernization, migration, and AI in the database. If you're reading this, you're probably in a similar boat: you've got an existing schema or databases, a scaling question you haven't had to answer yet, and a growing list of AI features you're expected to have an opinion about. That's why we built the path we kept describing in calls, with customers, and in the community. The Azure SQL Database Foundations series are four videos that take you from your first Hyperscal...

Aug 25, 2026
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Visual Studio August Update — Work Smarter Across Models and Branches

Mark Downie

Tune Copilot model thinking effort, share custom agents across your organization, track usage, and simplify complex Git workflows with worktrees and submodule support.

Aug 25, 2026
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Try Azure SRE Agent with no always-on charges

Nir Mashkowski

We are happy to announce a 30-day trial experience for Azure SRE Agent. New customers can create and configure the SRE Agent at their own pace, with no charges for setup time or keeping agents ready. During the trial, you can connect your agents to telemetry, source code, incident management platforms, and other operational tools, and pay only for the Azure Agent Units (AAUs) consumed when your agents perform work. We are also excited to share the GA of Azure SRE Agent VNet integration and the Public Preview of Live Reports. With VNet support, the agent operates under your existing network controls, so it can ...

Aug 25, 2026
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Why didn’t the Windows Entertainment Pack just run the MS-DOS version inside an emulator?

Raymond Chen

It wouldn't be a <I>Windows</I> Entertainment Pack then, would it?

Aug 25, 2026
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PowerToys 0.101 is here: Window Hopper, Insider updates, and Command Palette compact mode

Niels Laute

We're back with a fresh PowerToys release! PowerToys 0.101 introduces Window Hopper for quickly moving between windows from the same app, a redesigned update experience with Stable and Insider channels, and compact mode for Command Palette. This release also continues our WinUI 3 modernization, brings on-device Phi Silica transformations to Advanced Paste, and adds a big set of improvements across PowerDisplay and Shortcut Guide. Grab the update by checking for updates in PowerToys or by heading to the release page. Let's dive in! 🪟 Meet Window Hopper If you regularly have several windows open from the same a...

Aug 24, 2026
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Unlocking the Power of AI for Every Developer in Visual Studio with Bring your Own Model

Tanmayee Kamath

The best AI in Visual Studio is the AI you can bring with you. Developers don't work in a single-model world anymore. You might reach for one model for everyday coding, another for a domain-specific problem, and an approved model for work that must stay within your organization's governance boundaries. So, the question we hear most often isn't which model is best. It's, can I use mine? We're bringing Bring Your Own Model (BYOM) in Preview to Visual Studio, making it available and enabled by default across Community, Professional, and Enterprise SKUs. This Preview focuses on the developer experience available t...

Aug 24, 2026
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Java OpenJDK August 2026 Critical Patch Update

Luigi Montoya

Hello Java customers! We are happy to announce the latest August 2026 critical patch 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 August 2026 OpenJDK 25 OpenJDK 21 OpenJDK 17 ...

Aug 24, 2026
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From dotnet run to Foundry Hosted Agent in 3 lines of C#

Bruno Capuano

You built an agent with Microsoft Agent Framework and it works great on your machine. Now what? Turns out deploying it to production takes 1 NuGet package, 3 lines of C#, and 2 commands. Let's do it.

Aug 24, 2026
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Explore new features available in C# 15 preview

Bill Wagner

C# 15 ships with .NET 11. It adds union types, closed hierarchies, a preview of the updated unsafe model, and a few smaller changes that remove everyday ceremony.

Aug 24, 2026
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Powering Memory in Foundry Agent Service, with Azure Cosmos DB

Theo van Kraay

Move from a locally composed memory-enabled agent to a deployed Foundry Agent Service agent, with keyless Azure infrastructure and an interactive browser sample. In Native Agent Memory for Microsoft Agent Framework, Powered by Azure Cosmos DB, we introduced : a Microsoft Agent Framework context provider that extracts useful information from conversations, stores it in Azure Cosmos DB, and retrieves it before later agent runs. That article used a locally composed Agent Framework agent and . It was a useful way to isolate the memory concepts: one provider, two lifecycle hooks, and a stable u...

Aug 24, 2026
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Comparing the two holograms on the Windows 95 box

Raymond Chen

Filling in with your imagination.

Aug 21, 2026
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Today I will… Modernize a .NET application

Matt,
Pablo

Today I will modernize a .NET Framework application to .NET 10 using the GitHub Copilot modernization tooling built-in to Visual Studio.   The tooling helps us upgrade applications running on legacy versions of .NET and also migrate them to Azure. Today we're going to focus on the upgrade portion.   And, the tooling will do all the work for us! But it doesn't do everything at once, and that's good. It introduces checkpoints into the .NET upgrade process to tell us what it has been up to we can then guide it towards the outcome we want. And at each of those checkpoints it creates a markdown file t...

Aug 21, 2026
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Reducing C++ template bloat by factoring out the type-dependent portions of the function, practical exam

Raymond Chen

Applying our principles.

Aug 20, 2026
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Reducing C++ template bloat by factoring out the type-dependent portions of the function

Raymond Chen

Looking for consolidation points.

Aug 20, 2026
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Go 1.27.0-1 Microsoft build now available

Davis Goodin

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

Aug 20, 2026
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Go 1.26.7-1 and 1.25.14-1 Microsoft builds now available

Davis Goodin

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

Aug 19, 2026
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Outgrowing SQL Server Express? Upgrade to Azure SQL Database Free Tier in 3 Steps

Vandana,
Amit

If you’ve been building local prototypes, internal tools, web backends, or lightweight services on SQL Server Express, you know the routine: it’s free, familiar, and gets the job done – until you hit hardware limits or spend weekends manual backup scripts and handling OS patches. Learn how to upgrade from SQL Server Express to Azure SQL Database free tier in 3 simple steps. Whether you're running SQL Server 2022 (or older) and hitting the hard 10 GB storage wall, or using SQL Server 2025 and realizing 50 GB of disk space doesn't solve the strict 1.4 GB memory bottleneck, staying on Express limits your applica...

Aug 19, 2026
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MSSQL Extension for VS Code: SQL Formatter, Azure SQL Database Provisioning, and More

Yo-Lei Chen

Writing and maintaining SQL is easier when you can eliminate repetitive steps and keep your scripts cleanly formatted. With the MSSQL extension for VS Code v1.45, we're introducing the Public Preview of the SQL Formatter alongside the General Availability of Azure SQL Database Provisioning and Shortcuts Configuration. You can now apply consistent T-SQL formatting across your projects, create free tier cloud databases with automated post-deployment actions, and streamline frequently used commands and queries directly inside Visual Studio Code. What's new in MSSQL extension for VS Code v1.45 Here's a summary of t...

Aug 19, 2026
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On wrapping a callable in a lambda that just calls it with the same parameters

Raymond Chen

Just use the callable directly.

Aug 18, 2026
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Aspire 13.5: Fresh pixels and better workflows

Maddy Montaquila

Aspire 13.5 refreshes the dashboard and aspire.dev, expands the Interaction Service, adds cross-scope Azure references and Kubernetes persistent volumes, and brings live terminals into the AppHost.

Aug 18, 2026
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Announcing AppxManifest IntelliSense Support in the WinApp VS Code Extension

Chiara Mooney

The WinApp VS Code extension exists to make Windows app development feel at home in VS Code. It brings the Windows App Development CLI right into the editor, so you can initialize, run, debug, define the identity of, package, and sign Windows apps built with .NET, WPF, WinUI, C++, Electron, Rust, Tauri, or Flutter, all without switching tools. Get it now: Install the WinApp extension from the VS Code Marketplace. We're excited to announce the release of v0.3.0. This release brings schema-aware IntelliSense to your manifest files, adds workspace search to the commands that require a file or folder, and i...

Aug 18, 2026
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Azure Cosmos DB in the Agentic Era: Data Tools for Developers and AI Agents

Sajeetharan Sinnathurai

Anthropic's 2026 Agentic Coding Trends Report captures an important tension in how developers use AI. Engineers report using AI in roughly 60% of their work, yet say they can fully delegate only 0–20% of their tasks. AI is becoming a constant collaborator, but it still needs setup, supervision, validation, and human judgment. That gap is especially relevant when an agent starts working with a database. Database requests often sound easy.  “Show me the failed orders from last week.” “Why is this query expensive?” “Does this container have the field I need?” For a developer, answering those question...

Aug 18, 2026
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The Two Hybrid Searches in Microsoft SQL

Jerry Nixon

Hybrid search is usually described as combining keyword search with vector search. Microsoft SQL does that, for sure, but we do quite a bit more right out of the box. SQL dynamically evaluates queries and switches between kNN and ANN vector search based on cost and selectivity. These two types of hybrid search, work together, ensuring your semantic queries return the best possible results to your apps and agents. Text search In 1998, Microsoft Research Cambridge welcomed Stephen Robertson, one of the principal architects of BM25, or Best Matching 25, the relevance-ranking algorithm that became foundational to m...

Aug 18, 2026
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What’s a PFN?

Howard Kapustein

What's a PFN? MSIX introduced Package identity in Windows 8. While the familiar package identity "5-tuple" was functional, it wasn't especially convenient to pass through APIs or embed in resources such as files, registry keys, URLs, or XML documents. To address this, Windows defined an opaque string representation known as a Package Moniker. Windows called a related identifier derived from a package's Name and Publisher the Package Family Moniker. These were commonly abbreviated as PM and PFM. As development progressed, Windows quite sensibly required new APIs to pass through API Design Review. The review tea...

Aug 18, 2026
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Apple Silicon and Xcode 27 images available in pay-as-you-go (preview)

Eric van Wijk

Apple developers can now build and test their applications natively on Apple Silicon in Azure Pipelines. New arm64 macOS agents are available in public preview through the pay-as-you-go GitHub-hosted Agents pool. Starting with Apple Silicon, Azure Pipelines is bringing over some of the agent sizes already available in GitHub Actions. The preview includes the following macOS images: Running workloads directly on Apple Silicon avoids the overhead and compatibility limitations of emulating arm64 on Intel hardware. It also lets teams validate applications against the same architecture used by current Apple device...

Aug 17, 2026
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From single call to agents: five new Claude capabilities now available in Microsoft Foundry

Haoran Cheng

Structured outputs, web search, web fetch, MCP connector, and tool search are now available for Claude models hosted on Azure in Microsoft Foundry, turning a model endpoint into a production agent platform.

Aug 17, 2026
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How do functions like alloca allocate memory from the stack?

Raymond Chen

The usual probing.

Aug 17, 2026
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Beyond Vector Indexes: Azure SQL Brings Optimizer Intelligence to Vector Search

Pooja Kamath

Why production AI retrieval depends on more than vector index performance.  It's easy to think of AI retrieval as a vector search problem. For many developers, the first conversation starts with vector index benchmarks: How many queries per second can it handle? What's the latency? What's the recall? How well does it scale? Those metrics are critical, but production AI retrieval rarely consists of vector similarity alone. Equally important is what happens when vector search becomes part of a real application workload, one that includes filters, joins, security policies, ranking logic, and live operational d...

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.