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Math is hard. Let's go counting!

This release includes major library updates for Boost 1.91, Qt 6.11, and OpenCASCADE 8.0, along with 27 new ports and over 500 port updates.

Frameworks mean nothing, until they change what gets built! In this article we discuss how Git-Ape turns architecture and governance into delivery controls on Azure because, if frameworks do not shape delivery decisions, they are just decoration. Cloud teams do not have a...

This is part 2 blog of the windows 365 integration journey with Aspire. This blog focus to show how Windows 365 scaled Aspire adoption with reliability patterns and an agentic AI rollout system across 50+ repos.

Rotating in the minimum number of steps by performing cycle decomposition.

Why edge AI development is still hard  AI is no longer confined to cloud experiments. Developers are increasingly expected to deliver AI inside apps, devices, and edge systems where responsiveness, privacy, resilience, and local control are essential. But building those experiences for...

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

Learn what's new in Visual Studio Code 1.123 Read the full article

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...

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...

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...

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

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

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.

Safe, composable dataflow operators for Azure IoT Operations, built as WASM modules using the Component Model, WIT interfaces, and WASI Preview 2.

Try the latest updates to MSVC Build Tools Preview

Learn what's new in Visual Studio Code 1.120 Read the full article

PyCon US 2026

Artificial Intelligence is evolving rapidly. What began as simple prompt-and-response systems is now transforming into fully autonomous, agentic AI architectures capable of reasoning, orchestrating tools, interacting with enterprise data, and invoking external systems dynamically. While...

Process API improvements in .NET 11, including high-level APIs for starting processes, capturing output without deadlocks, handle inheritance control, lifetime management features, and a lightweight `SafeProcessHandle`-based API surface.

.NET MAUI apps on Android, iOS, and Mac Catalyst now run on CoreCLR by default in .NET 11, unifying the runtime across all of .NET.

Visual Studio now supports Agent Skills, which are reusable instruction sets that teach Copilot agents how to handle specific tasks like running a build pipeline, generating boilerplate, or following your team's coding standards. Define a skill once, and the agent applies it automatically...

Keeping things moving.

We are excited to announce general availability for the SharePoint Framework 1.23. We are rolling out new features in extensions, preview of new CLI and addressing known npm audit issues.

These skills enable your agent to take your ideas to a native Windows app in minutes! They are built around the end-to-end loop: scaffold, build, run, test, iterate. They've been optimized to know how to drive each stage, recognize common failures that get normal agents stuck in...

MSVC Build Tools v14.51 GA available in Visual Studio 2026 18.6

Find out about the new features in .NET 11 Preview 4 across the .NET runtime, SDK, libraries, ASP.NET Core, .NET MAUI, C#, Entity Framework Core, and more!

Sometimes you need to know whether the current process has package identity. Certain Windows features require it, and behaviors can differ—both technically and culturally. For example, classic Windows applications often store settings in the registry, whereas packaged applications...

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

Foundry Local 1.1 adds live transcription, embeddings, Responses API, WebGPU plugin, and download cancellation.

Compatibility, of course.

  We've been working on something new for WinUI developers: a set of open-source project and item templates for WinUI you can use directly from the command line. 🚀 With these templates, you can now create and run a new WinUI app using dotnet new, without needing to go...

April brings a wave of model arrivals — GPT-5.5, GPT-image-2, Microsoft first-party MAI models for image, voice, and transcription, Gemma 4, and Claude Opus 4.7 — alongside Foundry Local GA, Microsoft Agent Framework 1.0 GA, the Microsoft Foundry Toolkit for VS Code GA, batch evaluations for third-party agents, new tracing and monitoring capabilities, SDK updates across Python, JavaScript/TypeScript, .NET, and Java, and a reminder to register for Microsoft Build.

Many of you who have published VM Applications may have come across a difficult conundrum regarding security. To create an application version, you must upload your application package to a Storage blob, then provide the address of that Storage blob for replication to occur. The problem...

Putting the handles in a private container.

We are excited to announce the General Availability (GA) of AI_GENERATE_EMBEDDINGS and CREATE EXTERNAL MODEL in Azure SQL Database and Azure SQL Managed Instance. These two T-SQL features — CREATE EXTERNAL MODEL and AI_GENERATE_EMBEDDINGS — work together as a single,...

The Microsoft 365 Copilot Agent Evaluations tool helps developers measure and improve the quality of agents they build for Microsoft 365 Copilot.

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

You can track the file ID.

A Tour of the Handoff Orchestration Pattern Most multi-agent systems start out simple: a router agent receives a user request, picks the right specialist, and forwards the conversation. As long as each specialist can complete its task in one pass, that model works fine. The first...

We are excited to announce that GitHub Copilot build performance for Windows now supports project-specific builds! Available in the latest Visual Studio Insiders, you can target a single MSBuild project or CMake target instead of analyzing your entire solution. For game developers and...

These updates include improved locking for parallel builds, cross-platform PE dependency analysis, manifest support for the depend-info command, and other improvements and bug fixes.

The mailbox import and export APIs on Microsoft Graph are now generally available.

If you ever built an AI agent demo, you probably had this moment. Everything works: the agent interprets natural language, calls the right tools, and returns the right data. Then you start designing for the real users of the app. You think about data boundaries: what if someone tries to...

Microsoft Copilot Studio recently upgraded its .NET WebAssembly engine to .NET 10. The migration was straightforward, simplified deployment, and delivered another round of meaningful performance gains for end users.

Aspire 13.3 is here with the Aspireify skill, command results, browser logs, Kubernetes and AKS deployment, and more.

Azure Cosmos DB enables scalable AI-driven document processing, addressing one of the biggest barriers to operational scale in today’s enterprise AI landscape. Organizations continue to manage massive volumes of structured and unstructured content—contracts, regulatory filings,...

Otherwise, it'll get mapped back down to the 8-bit code page.

Evaluating AI agents for NL-to-SQL generation across Azure Databricks AI/BI Genie, GitHub Copilot CLI, and Microsoft Agent Framework. We achieved ~75% accuracy with schema documentation and runtime validation, while discovering that business logic errors represent a fundamental limitation requiring domain expertise.

Learn what's new in Visual Studio Code 1.119 Read the full article

Once you have your Microsoft Agent Framework (MAF) agent or workflow happily running locally on your dev machine, it's time to decide how to deploy your agent to production, monitor it, evaluate it and version it. These decisions are just as important as getting the agent running. Hosted...

Build durable AI agent workflows with the Microsoft Agent Framework. Start with in-process console apps, add durability with the Durable Task runtime, scale with parallel AI agents, and host on Azure Functions for serverless execution.

Modernization used to be something you avoided until you couldn’t anymore. A big rewrite. A long migration plan. A risky cutover. Something you’d maybe do once every few years—if you had to. That model doesn’t work anymore. The ask has changed. It’s not just “move to the...

 Today, we're thrilled to announce the public preview of Azure Cosmos DB Shell – a powerful, open-source command-line interface that revolutionizes how developers interact with their Azure Cosmos DB databases. With integrated Model Context Protocol (MCP) server support, native agentic...

Static libraries don't stand a chance.

A team was running at 100% RU utilization. Throttles were compounding into retries. P99 latency was degrading. The assumption was obvious: provision more throughput. They didn’t. Instead, they found a single logical partition absorbing more than 80% of traffic. After fixing the...

I want to speak to your manager.

VS Code is where many cross-platform and web developers already work, but getting package identity, MSIX packaging, and Windows SDK tooling often meant reaching for Visual Studio or command-line tools. The WinApp VS Code extension brings the full power of the Windows App Development...

In February, we announced how GitHub Copilot can now use C++ symbol context and CMake build configuration awareness to deliver smarter suggestions in Visual Studio Code. Today, we're excited to share new ways to further enhance your C++ development experience with Copilot and get the most...

Hello Java customers! We are happy to announce the latest April 2026 patch & security update release for the Microsoft Build of OpenJDK. Check our release notes page for details on fixes and enhancements or download and install the binaries today. The source code of our builds...

Build intelligent AI agents in .NET with the Microsoft Agent Framework. Learn how to create agents with tools, multi-turn conversations, memory, and graph-based workflows that bring together the building blocks from Parts 1 and 2.

Run SQL MCP Server on Azure App Service without containers. This walkthrough uses Data API builder to configure authentication, expose MCP, REST, and GraphQL endpoints, and deploy as code.

"Is ContosoParts.msix installed?" is a common - but misleading - question The term install is not a formal concept in MSIX. This may seem paradoxical for a deployment technology, but it makes perfect sense once you understand MSIX deployment’s core architecture. Deployment...

You don't. All files are binary at the file system level.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Recovering from death of the owner.

  Hey WinUI developers! If you’re new around here, WinUI Gallery is the go-to app for exploring WinUI 3 controls, samples, design guidance, and handy tools — all in one place. Today, we’re excited to announce WinUI 3 Gallery 2.9, our first release built on Windows App...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Please, not everybody, everything all at once.

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

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

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

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

SPFx is powering the future of Microsoft 365 with AI driven portals and deep integrations across SharePoint and Microsoft 365. The April 2026 update shares new features and the roadmap for the next evolution built for the AI era. This is a transparent community driven journey that we shape together.

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

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

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

A pot of tokens.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But maybe it's not worth it.

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

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

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

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

Modern AI agents often aren't bottlenecked by model quality, they are bottlenecked by orchestration overhead. When an agent chains together many small tool calls, each step typically requires a new model turn, driving up latency and token usage. With CodeAct support in Agent...

Inadvertently destroying a staircase while standing on it.

Key insights from the EDA and Ground Truth journey for solving well identity resolution in the Energy industry—challenges that extend to any entity matching problem across distributed systems.

The 2026 ISO C++ developer survey is now open: 2026 Annual C++ Developer Survey "Lite" : Standard C++ It takes about 10 minutes and directly informs the standardization committee and tooling vendors so the C++ ecosystem can continue evolving the right way. Please share your feedback...

We recently brought C++ code understanding tools to GitHub Copilot in Visual Studio and VS Code. These tools provide precise, semantic understanding of your C++ code to GitHub Copilot using the same IntelliSense engine that powers code navigation in the IDE. Until now, these capabilities...

Learn what's new in Visual Studio Code 1.117 Read the full article

Hooks are one of the most popular features in azd, and now you can write them in Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, or .NET, not just Bash and PowerShell. What's new? The Azure Developer CLI (azd) hook system now supports four more languages beyond Bash and PowerShell. You can write hook...

Today we released PIX version 2604.27004-preview, which can be downloaded here. This release has initial support for the new D3D12 features, notably Batched Asynchronous Command List APIs, that was released in a preview DirectX Agility SDK today. Please visit this blog post for more...

AI apps and agentic workloads expose inefficiencies in your data layer faster than any previous generation of apps. You’re storing embeddings, serving low-latency retrieval, handling bursty traffic from chat and orchestration, and often operating across regions. Done right, Azure Cosmos...

Available in Public Preview Today   Toolbox is a new way to curate, configure, and reuse tools across all of your AI agents without rewiring them every time from Foundry.  Today, teams build agents across different frameworks and runtimes. Each agent often wires tools directly,...

When we launched Microsoft Agent Framework last October, we made a promise: building production-grade AI agents should feel as natural and structured as building any other software. Today, we’re delivering on that promise — with the v1.0 release of Microsoft Agent Framework and the...

Agents are already transforming how developers solve problems. Whether it's a coding agent that refactors your repo overnight, a research agent that synthesizes hundreds of documents into a brief, or an ops agent that monitors and remediates infrastructure — the pattern is clear....

With just a single improvement in the REST API of Azure DevOps, we achieved a massive reduction in CPU usage and execution time when managing Git policies: 2x less CPU and 10-15x faster execution! This change is already available to all users of Azure DevOps, and it's time to share a bit...

The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is quickly becoming a common way for AI agents to discover and use tools. It provides a consistent interface to databases, APIs, file systems, and third-party services, which makes it easier to plug capabilities into agent workflows. However, MCP...

Windows App Development CLI v0.3 is here! This release brings some of our best features yet including a full run-and-debug experience outside Visual Studio and built-in UI Automation from the command line. With v0.3, we've unlocked a whole class of agentic and automation scenarios....

So-called "fractal page mapping".

We're excited to announce the public preview of the highly anticipated Actual Result (AR) feature for manual testing in Azure Test Plans! This feature has been one of the top requests of the community, and we're thrilled to make it available for you. Why use the Actual Result...

~1,900 lines of Python. Zero dependencies. Saves you an hour a day. GitHub → · pip install auto-memory Now give Copilot CLI enhanced context recall. Point it at deploy/install.md and let it cook. 🍳 Are you tired of using the slash /compact command every 10 min? The...

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

This post is the first in a 3-part series: Foundations (this post) Start shipping (context engineering, MCP servers, orchestration) App modernization (Java, .NET, PHP, microservices) Bookmark this post for quick reference as you start exploring Agentic DevOps. It will be...

The Agent-Ready Database: Security, Backup, and MCP Part 4 of 4 – The Multi-Model Database Series This is the final post in a four-part series on multi-model databases in SQL Server 2025 and Azure SQL - exploring how the optimizer, storage engine, and security layer treat each data...

We are releasing .NET 10.0.7 as an out-of-band security update to address CVE-2026-40372.

Today we are absolutely thrilled to announce the release of TypeScript 7.0 Beta! If you haven't been following TypeScript 7.0's development, this release is significant in that it is built on a completely new foundation. Over the past year, we have been porting the existing TypeScript...

Protecting sensitive data is a foundational requirement for modern applications. As organizations scale their use of Azure Cosmos DB across teams, environments, and workloads, controlling who can see sensitive information becomes increasingly important. Today, we are excited to...

Aspire 13.2 keeps the JavaScript story moving with Bun for Vite, more predictable containers, and small but meaningful fixes across debugging and builds.

Somehow xor became the most popular version.

This update brings a set of improvements and changes across both local and remote Azure DevOps MCP Servers. Here’s a summary of what’s changed. Query work items with WIQL We’ve introduced a new wit_query_by_wiql tool that enables users to construct and run work item WIQL queries....

The Azure Developer CLI (azd) now integrates with GitHub Copilot for AI-assisted project scaffolding and intelligent deployment error troubleshooting, helping you resolve common Azure errors like MissingSubscriptionRegistration, SkuNotAvailable, and StorageAccountAlreadyTaken without leaving the terminal.

The C# Dev Kit team replaced C++ Node.js addons with C# and Native AOT, removing a dependency on Python. This post walks through building a Node.js native addon entirely in C# using N-API, LibraryImport, and UnmanagedCallersOnly.

You still have to use aligned accesses, even though the pixels might not be aligned.

How to build an observable MCP Server with discoverable tools and agents.

Preallocating memory to avoid quadratic behavior.

Legacy codebases frequently contain hardcoded logic and complex build scripts that depend on specific filesystem structures, making them notoriously difficult to modernize in isolated environments. Docker Sandbox addresses this challenge through a bidirectional workspace sync that...

April 2026 brings three major Reinforcement Fine-Tuning updates: Global Training for o4-mini with lower per-token rates across 12+ regions, new GPT-4.1 model graders for richer reward signals, and a comprehensive RFT best practices guide to help you ship specialized models faster.

Aspire 13.2 brings detached mode to the CLI. Run your AppHost in the background, free your terminal, and let coding agents start, inspect, and manage your app without blocking.

In March 2026, developers came together at VS Live! Las Vegas for a full week of technical learning, hands-on exploration, and a lot of great conversations about where software development is headed next. From AI-assisted development to modern .NET, cloud-native apps, and developer...

Trespassing on system messages.

Learn what's new in Visual Studio Code 1.116 Read the full article

Azure MCP tools now ship built into Visual Studio 2022 — no extension required Azure MCP tools are now built into Visual Studio 2022 as part of the Azure development workload — no separate extension to find, install, or update. You can enable over 230 tools across 45 Azure services...

.NET MAUI 11 adds pin clustering to the Map control, automatically grouping nearby pins into cluster markers. Learn how to enable clustering, create separate clustering groups, and handle cluster taps on Android and iOS.

We’ve all been there: a bug report lands in your inbox with a title like "App crashes sometimes" and zero reproduction steps. Your morning, which was supposed to be spent building new features, is now a forensic investigation. You’re setting scattershot breakpoints, staring at...

We're shipping two major capabilities that change how security teams enable and act on application security in Azure DevOps: CodeQL default setup makes it possible to enable code scanning across your organization without configuring a single pipeline, and a new combined alerts experience...

Maybe it didn't really exit.

AI agents are quickly moving from experiments to production‑critical components of modern applications. But while many teams know how to build agents, far fewer are confident they’re hosting them on the right foundation. Most organizations start by deploying agents the same way...

Practices, Principles, and Strategic Direction Software delivery has entered a new phase. AI agents are no longer confined to autocomplete suggestions in the editor. They are opening pull requests, generating code across multiple files, proposing infrastructure changes, responding to...

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

Find out about the new features in .NET 11 Preview 3 across the .NET runtime, SDK, libraries, ASP.NET Core, .NET MAUI, C#, Entity Framework Core, container images, and more!