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Pure Virtual C++ 2026 is streaming now — watch five featured sessions live with Q&A, plus a full on-demand playlist, all free.

If you’ve ever opened an ETL trace with hundreds of data tables and wondered “where do I even start?” This post is for you. We’re releasing an early preview of the ETW MCP, a Model Context Protocol server that lets GitHub Copilot, or any MCP-aware AI assistant, read, query, and...

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...

Package identity exists for one primary purpose: To provide software with a stable and unambiguous way to identify a package. This is a considerable improvement over the historical tendency to assign UUIDs and GUIDs to nearly everything - including things that humans were expected to...

Short-circuiting the easiest case.

Most changes you think will improve AI agent behavior won't. We tested a dozen hypotheses on a real project upgrade scenario and the majority failed. Learn how to emulate documentation, API, and MCP server changes locally so you can validate what works before shipping anything to production.

At Pure Virtual C++ 2026, we build a C++ console app from an empty folder using CMake, MSVC, and GitHub Copilot CLI. This walkthrough shows a practical prompt sequence for dependency selection, reproducible builds, and controlled updates.

The on-demand sessions for Pure Virtual C++ 2026 are available now on YouTube. Watch seven talks on SPGO, vcpkg + Copilot CLI, CMake Tools, PackageReference, MSVC upgrades, and C++23/26 status — then join us live tomorrow.

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, package, and sign Windows apps built with .NET, WPF, WinUI, C++, Electron, Rust, Tauri, or...

Often in applications, we write database queries. And often, the same query is executed again and again. To make queries against large tables faster, we can add an index. This is a general improvement for anyone accessing the table. However, there is a specially designed index called a...

If you use the Azure Cosmos DB vNext emulator, you probably know the local development loop: start the emulator, connect to it, create some resources, load test data, run queries, and inspect the results. Each step is straightforward, but together they add setup work before you can test...

The easy case is easy.

Slow builds are a consistent theme of feedback from C++ developers. We built GitHub Copilot build performance for Windows so you can leverage Copilot to optimize your project’s build times. This workflow will find optimizations that bring your build times down. At first, we only...

It's fixed, but the fix isn't getting there.

Your agent skill calls an API. The moment you start evaluating it, every run either costs money or mutates production data. Learn how to mock APIs transparently so you can run evals without changing your skill or hitting real endpoints.

A multimodal LLM enrichment pipeline that extracts structured metadata from visual assets, constrains output to predefined values to minimize hallucinations, and uses a ground truth evaluation template to measure quality—all as a plug-and-play module.

Meet the speakers behind Pure Virtual C++ 2026. In the final part, Victor Ciura maps the real challenges and promising directions for C++/Rust interop.

Unified manifest support for Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook makes it possible for developers to build a single app that works across Microsoft 365 apps, creating a more consistent experience for users and a simpler deployment model for IT admins.

Learn why SET NOCOUNT ON improves stored procedure efficiency, reduces unnecessary messages, and matters to .NET developers.

A free, open-source, hands-on course that walks you through modernizing a real legacy ASP.NET application all the way to .NET 10 using the GitHub Copilot modernization agent, step by step.

Learn how to build long-running MCP tools on Azure Functions using Durable Functions. This post explains why synchronous tool calls break down for long-running work, introduces the MCP Tasks extension, and walks through a sample pattern that works with existing request/response clients today.

Organizations are increasingly looking for greater control over extensions within development environments. Driven by security, compliance, and internal governance requirements, teams want more visibility into how developers discover and acquire extensions. To address these needs,...

Inferring the code's history.

Try the latest updates to MSVC Build Tools Preview

Learn what is new in Visual Studio Code 1.129. Read the full article

The MSSQL extension for VS Code v1.44 continues to improve the SQL development experience with features that help you work faster and customize your workflow. In this release, we're introducing the Public Preview of Shortcuts Configuration and an Enhanced Results Grid experience....

Your Python agents can now pick up reusable bundles of domain expertise (instructions, reference material, and scripts that load only when a task calls for them) through a stable, production-ready API. Agent Skills for Python in Microsoft Agent Framework is stable and shipping: the...