Microsoft
Developer Blogs

Contextual clues.

When distributing LLM calls across PySpark workers via mapInPandas, MLflow autolog silently fails. Here is how to fix it.

The featured talks for Pure Virtual C++ 2026 are here! Join us on July 21 for a free, one-day virtual conference for the whole C++ community.

Oops, I didn't realize that I was still doing that.

Building automated pipelines with your SQL database projects enables you to build a rich CI/CD ecosystem to ensure that your application is being deployed with good quality code and at high confidence of success. SQL Database Projects are compatible with just about every automation...

Learn what is new in Visual Studio Code 1.127 Read the full article

Learn what's new in Visual Studio Code 1.128 (Insiders) Read the full article

Overview In September 2026, NTLM support will be removed from libcurl, which is used by Git for HTTP(S) operations. As a result, Git operations over HTTPS against Azure DevOps Server (on-premises) will stop working for customers who rely on NTLM authentication. This change is part of a...

With On-Behalf-Of authentication, SQL MCP Server lets agents access Microsoft SQL without losing the user identity behind the request. Azure SQL can audit the signed-in user who invoked the operation, not just the agent, app, or MCP server that carried it out.

This is the sixth article in a series about Agent Experience (AX): the practice of making AI coding agents work correctly with your technology. The series covers what you can and can't control in the agent stack, how to measure whether your extensions are helping or hurting, and how to...

Unlocking the door from the inside.

We’re halfway through 2026, and Microsoft SQL has not slowed down. Since SQLCon/FabCon in March (where we released a ton of things, and those updates can be found in this udpates video), we shipped a wave of updates across SQL Server, Azure SQL, and SQL database in Fabric, with...

GitHub Copilot is now a first-class, native option in JetBrains AI Assistant agent picker(read more). You can select it directly from the chat interface, no extra configuration needed, and immediately put Copilot to work on real coding tasks without ever leaving AI...

June celebrates the announcement of upcoming SharePoint Copilot Apps, ships the quality-focused SPFx 1.23.2 release, and shares the roadmap for the AI era - shaped by your feedback.

Data API builder (DAB) 2.0 adds compound paths for REST endpoints, giving developers more control over how their API surface is organized. Instead of mirroring database topology, endpoints can now reflect simple names, business areas, or schema ownership.

A practical tour of the Model Context Protocol tools for .NET build diagnostics - the full Binlog MCP toolset, how those tools run inside a GitHub Actions workflow, and what the evaluation data says about the efficiency gains.

The June update includes a Copilot Usage window refresh with proactive alerts as you approach your limits, MCP servers now get a trust check before they run anything new.

MSIX supports making a package available to all users; the formal term is provisioning. Provisioning a package family makes it available to all users, whereas registration makes a package available to a single user. Per-User vs All Users Traditional installers often provide a...

Mailbox requirement set 1.16 is now generally available for Outlook add-ins. This release reflects our continued investment in closing the gap between COM/VSTO and web add-ins, with a focus on message and information security. Mailbox 1.16 introduces APIs and platform updates that...

Made it to another midpoint.

Finding an illicit place to hide data.

We're excited to release React Native Windows 0.84.0, aligned with React Native 0.84.1. React Native Windows v0.84 delivers input-handling improvements such as standard click events and imperative focus, theme-aware defaults and robust hit-testing semantics. 🔥 What's New in RNW...

.NET 8 and .NET 9 will both reach end of support on November 10, 2026. Learn what this means and how to upgrade to .NET 10 (LTS).

SkiaSharp 4.148.0 is the first stable release of SkiaSharp v4. Learn what is new, why you should be excited, and join the SkiaSharp live event on June 30.

Use the WinApp CLI to add identity to and package .NET desktop applications, enabling deeper integration to Windows and easier distribution.

At Microsoft Build 2026, we introduced WSL containers, bringing Linux container development directly into Windows through the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). Containers have become a foundational part of modern development - from cloud-native applications and AI workloads to testing...

If you’re building and maintaining Visual Studio extensions, you’ve probably ended up with some sort of build and publishing workflow - whether it’s manual, scripted, or stitched together over time. This post is for extension authors who want a simple, repeatable way to build,...

The intended usage is encoded in the prefix.

Part 2 of Build your own claw and agent harness with Microsoft Agent Framework. In Part 1 we stood up a harness and gave our personal finance assistant its first abilities: a custom tool, web search, and planning. It can talk about the markets - but it can't yet touch your data, and...

Remote Event Receivers in SharePoint Online are retiring. Starting July 1, 2027, all remote event receivers will stop firing events, including those registered using Microsoft Entra applications.

The wait is over. Spring AI 2.0 is generally available, and Azure Cosmos DB is right there with it. With this release, Spring AI graduates into a mature, production-ready framework for building AI applications in Java, and Azure Cosmos DB ships dedicated, vendor-maintained...

A combined May and June recap. A new azd tool command group, the cross-platform azd exec runner, safer multi-layer provisioning, an interactive Ctrl+C cancel prompt, Go support for Azure Functions, self-contained extension bundles, per-tenant subscription filters, and a long list of correctness fixes for parallel Container Apps deploys and authentication.

Tying two bugs together.

How we solved the challenge of passing conversational context between independently deployed agents using the A2A protocol's embedded context pattern, keeping domain agents stateless and secure.

How the VS Code and TypeScript teams collaborated to adopt TypeScript 7 and speed up VS Code development Read the full article

Pure Virtual C++ is back for its 7th year! Join us on July 21 for a free, one-day virtual conference for the whole C++ community.

If an agent isn't doing the right thing, the obvious move is to make the docs clearer. Add a tip, spell out the correct command, describe the right approach more prominently. You do all of that, and the agent still ignores it. It does what it had already decided to do. The tip wasn't...

See how Microsoft is transforming software development with agentic workflows, AI-powered automation, and specialized agents across the engineering lifecycle.

Figuring out how it went missing.

In the previous post in the series, we covered the security decisions you make on day one. In this part, we will talk about how to give your app access to Cosmos DB data, using roles and a managed identity instead of keys. The situation You’ve built your app. It works locally. Now...

Learn what is new in Visual Studio Code 1.126 Read the full article

A roundup of what shipped in the Azure Functions MCP extension since preview: resource and prompt triggers, MCP Apps, built-in MCP authentication, structured and rich content, fluent .NET configuration APIs, and what is coming next.

This is the fifth article in a series about Agent Experience (AX): the practice of making AI coding agents work correctly with your technology. The series covers what you can and can't control in the agent stack, how to measure whether your extensions are helping or hurting, and how to...

You're asking for it to cancel, but it doesn't wait for confirmation.

C++ developers can now bring IDE-style semantic intelligence into Copilot CLI with less setup. The C++ language server plugin supports richer code navigation, diagnostics, symbol understanding, and code changes by using the same build context your compiler does. That build context...

As previously mentioned to 'install' a package, as people think of the term, Windows actually performs two separate operations: staging and registration. To oversimplify: Staging puts the package content on disk. At this point the package is present, but inert and unused. Registering...

Yes, but the name is a psychological trick.

Microsoft 365 Copilot is brilliant with words - but work isn't only words. Introducing SharePoint Copilot Apps: bring rich, interactive UX components straight into the Copilot canvas, built with any JavaScript stack your team already knows. Reuse your existing SPFx investments across Copilot, SharePoint, and Teams - no new platform, no infrastructure, no lock-in.

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

Part 1 of Build your own claw and agent harness with Microsoft Agent Framework. In the overview we said a "claw" is really just an agent harness: a loop around a model, wired up with tools, planning, memory, and more. In this first post we stand up that loop and give our personal...

What does it take to build your own "claw" - a capable, CLI-style agent that can plan, use tools, remember things, and safely act on your behalf? Coding agents and assistants like these can feel like magic, but underneath they are an agent harness: a loop around a language model wired up...

You open a fresh chat, type "What framework should I use for a web app?", and the model says "React." You screenshot it, share it, and write "Claude prefers React." It gets engagement. People nod along. A few reply with their own results. And now we have a consensus: Claude prefers React....

Starting in Word and expanding to nearly every other word processor, and even things that aren't word processors.

Deep Agents is an agent harness built on LangGraph, for agents that need to work through a task over many steps instead of a single LLM call. The agent runs tools, looks at the results, and uses that to pick the next one, keeping a todo list as it goes. On top of that loop the harness...

We are announcing the deprecation of the Azure DevOps issuer in workload identity federation (WIF) service connections, with planned retirement on July 1, 2027. The Azure DevOps issuer uses the https://vstoken.dev.azure.com prefix in federated credentials. This change is part of...

本次更新为 GitHub Copilot for JetBrains IDEs 带来了对来自 GitHub 的组织和企业级 agent 的支持，让你可以在 Copilot CLI 会话中排队和引导消息，引入了全新的 agent 调试日志摘要视图，并将 Claude 作为 agent...

A special kind of HMODULE.

When 100% of our prototype outputs were valid JSON but 0% met the data contract, we discovered the LLM was doing work that software should own. A field classification exercise and 4-pass pipeline brought schema compliance from 0% to 100%.

How AI coding models calibrate effort, token cost, and tool use on even the simplest task, and what that means for model selection and cost. Read the full article

From May 12 to June 2, 2026, builders from around the world put their Agent Academy learning to the test by designing, building, and shipping real, working AI agents with Copilot Studio. After two weeks of judging, we’re thrilled to announce the Agent Academy Hackathon winners. 🏆...

We shipped a lot at Build 2026: hosted agents, Toolboxes, Foundry IQ, Memory, Managed Compute, fine‑tuning, Frontier Tuning, and a new evaluation and optimization stack. Read as a feature list, it is a lot to hold in your head. So here is a simpler way to see it: these are the parts...

At this year’s GDC, we shared our vision for bringing console‑level GPU developer tools to Windows. As part of that announcement, we introduced DirectX Dump Files as a major step forward in GPU crash debugging on Windows. Today, we’re excited to make our DirectX Dump Files public...

Today we released PIX 2606.18-preview, available here. This PIX release coincides with the preview availability of DirectX Dump Files (.dxdmp). The PIX UI can open DirectX Dump Files directly for analysis, and the PIX API can be used to analyze them programmatically. Please visit the...

You built a skill for your technology. API references, authentication flows, SDK patterns, error handling, version info, all packed into one skill. The agent calls it, gets all that context, and generates code. The kicker? You've just wasted a lot of tokens. It already knows Models have...

It doesn't care about impersonation, says so on the tin.

Today we are excited to announce the Release Candidate of TypeScript 7.0! 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...

Learn how to use bring your own key (BYOK) in VS Code to add models from providers like Azure, Anthropic, Gemini, OpenAI, Huggingface, OpenRouter, or use a local model with Ollama, Foundry Local, and more. Read the full article

Learn what's new in Visual Studio Code 1.125 Read the full article

We're back with the first servicing release of Intelligent Terminal! This update brings auto error detection to Bash and WSL, a new /fix command for on-demand help, an on-the-fly /model picker, a customizable agent pane, and Windows 10 support, along with a round of bug fixes and...

Diagnose MSBuild build failures and performance issues with AI using the new Microsoft Binlog MCP Server - 15 specialized tools that let your AI assistant investigate binary logs.

This is the fourth article in a series about Agent Experience (AX): the practice of making AI coding agents work correctly with your technology. The series covers what you can and can't control in the agent stack, how to measure whether your extensions are helping or hurting, and how to...

Choosing the register to use to pass the desired stack allocation size.

Azure Backup for Azure Cosmos DB Public Preview Adds Immutable Backups and Long-Term Retention Picture the first few hours after a serious data incident. A production application is down. Security teams are still trying to understand what happened. Application owners need to know...

Learn how we're improving token efficiency for GitHub Copilot to reduce costs and latency for VS Code users. Read the full article

Boosting Adobe Photoshop’s Performance with MSVC and SPGO Adobe and Microsoft worked together to improve Photoshop performance and responsiveness on Windows by combining MSVC’s peak-performance build settings with Sample-based Profile-Guided Optimization (SPGO). The collaboration...

Aspire 13.4 brings more of the local development loop into VS Code: AppHost CodeLens actions, live resource state, dashboard shortcuts, typed resource command prompts, TypeScript AppHost support, and multi-language debugging.

MSIX has several core principles underlying its design and implementation. Engineers half-jokingly call these The Rules of MSIX. The Third Rule of MSIX is arguably the most important and certainly the most foundational: Package identity is unique across space and...

You shipped a new CLI: better developer experience, modern architecture, and optimized for agents. You deprecated the old one, updated the docs, and blogged about it. Developers are migrating. Then someone asks an AI coding agent to scaffold a project, and the agent... uses the old...

It was carefully designed to be trivial.

Today, we're excited to announce the general availability of the Azure Cosmos DB built-in connector for Azure Logic Apps Standard. This connector gives you a native, high-performance way to integrate Azure Cosmos DB into your Standard logic app workflows, with better throughput, lower...

Copilot CLI is becoming the default agent harness in GitHub Copilot for JetBrains, and our local harness will be deprecated. This change provides greater consistency across all GitHub Copilot surfaces and is an important step toward faster feature parity and higher-quality results in...

Themes are personal. Some of us live in dark mode, some swear by high contrast, and some of us have very strong opinions about that one shade of blue from years ago. The new themes in Visual Studio 2026 are built on Fluent, which gives us a much more consistent and accessible foundation,...

Offensive content in the eyes of a software engineer.

GitHub Copilot modernization for C++ is out of preview as of Visual Studio 2026, helping you upgrade your MSVC Build Tools with an AI-guided workflow.

The thread pool is designed for throughput, not latency.

Real-world lessons from evolving a production chatbot into a coordinator-based multi-agent architecture, including performance trade-offs for enterprise-scale agent reuse.

Try the latest updates to MSVC Build Tools Preview

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...

Migrating from the Exchange Web Services (EWS) notification framework, which supports push, pull, and streaming notification types — to the Microsoft Graph subscription model represents a fundamental transition toward a unified, stateless, and event-driven framework.

Your agent ran a scaffold command. Project generated, dependencies resolved, no errors. Everything looks fine. Except it's based on the project structure from 2020, and neither you nor the agent noticed. How npx picks the right-but-wrong version When an agent scaffolds a project or runs...

Windows App Development CLI v0.3.2 is here! This release brings MSIX bundle support for multi-architecture packaging, a smarter winapp init experience that auto-detects your projects, higher quality UI screenshots, and a handful of reliability fixes across the board. Get the update by...

Pull request integration in Visual Studio has been one of the most requested Git features. Developers have been asking for a way to open a PR, inspect the changes, discuss feedback, and finish the review without switching to the browser. The feedback on that request has played a big role...

Over the last few years, we've encouraged customers to move their repositories from Azure Repos to GitHub, where the newest AI-powered and agentic development experiences land first. Migrating isn't equally simple for everyone. A move to GitHub can range from straightforward to a...

I mean, technically I didn't do it.

From declarative agents for Microsoft 365 Copilot to fully autonomous multi-agent systems orchestrating complex workflows, developers now have the power to redefine how work gets done. If you're ready to push those boundaries, Agents League Hackathon 2026 is your stage. What is...

Learn what is new in Visual Studio Code 1.124 Read the full article

This is the third article in a series about Agent Experience (AX): the practice of making AI coding agents work correctly with your technology. The series covers what you can and can't control in the agent stack, how to measure whether your extensions are helping or hurting, and how to...

You built a dozen skills for your technology: authentication, CRUD, error handling, deployment, testing, monitoring. Then you installed a cloud platform bundle with 15 more covering diagnostics, storage, compliance, and cost optimization. A design suite. A marketing pack. Document...

Announcing the .NET Day of Agentic Modernization Livestream

AI has made software delivery faster, but speed alone does not guarantee better outcomes. As teams adopt AI-native development, the real challenge is keeping requirements, design, implementation, and validation aligned so the final result still reflects the original intent. Spec-Driven...

There is no such feature, but you can just exclude it virtually.

We're back with a fresh PowerToys release! This month introduces the brand-new Shortcut Guide, a major Command Palette update with the new Extension Gallery and multi-monitor Dock support, and a wave of improvements to Power Display. We've also upgraded PowerToys to .NET 10, improved...

Find out about the new features in .NET 11 Preview 5 across the .NET runtime, SDK, libraries, ASP.NET Core, .NET MAUI, C#, Entity Framework Core, and more!

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

Learn how Aspire, Microsoft Agent Framework, and Microsoft Foundry model, run, observe, and publish a distributed multi-agent AlpineAI ski resort demo.

In case you missed it, the Command Line blog was launched last week and has a great article (by yours truly) about our SDK design philosophy with Microsoft Agent Framework. Check it out: Inside the Microsoft Agent Framework: How we designed a layered SDK   Developers are...

"Disk space optimizations" is one of the key features of MSIX: Disk space optimizations. With MSIX there is no duplication of files across apps and Windows manages the shared files across apps. The apps are still independent of each other so updates will not impact other apps that...

🚨 ​​​​​​​Attention: We are accepting a final round of preview requests, with those organizations scheduled for enablement beginning the second week of July. Requests submitted after July 3 will not be accepted into the preview program. Over the last several...

Catch up on Microsoft Build 2026 with the vision lead-off, top developer announcements, and must-watch sessions across the Microsoft developer ecosystem.

Catch up on all the .NET sessions from Microsoft Build 2026 covering .NET 11, union types in C#, AI building blocks, the agentic web, .NET MAUI, and more!

Over the last several years, we’ve encouraged customers to move their repositories from Azure Repos to GitHub to take advantage of the latest AI-powered and agentic development experiences. For many enterprise teams, however, migrating at scale comes with real constraints. Traditional...

Generalizing the shuffle to arbitrary numbers of blocks.

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...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Learn how 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.

Edit: June 11th, 2026 - Advanced Shader Delivery has expanded the preview beyond Xbox Insiders into general availability in the Xbox PC app! Additionally, AMD has expanded ASD into their entire AMD RDNA™ architecture line. See Device Requirements section below for more details. Last...

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...