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Get the latest information, insights, and news from Microsoft.
Highlights
.NET Conf 2026 Community Days Call for Presenters Is Open
The Agentic Road to Revenue
How can I remove the Close button from my window caption?
Latest posts
Power Platform CLI ❤️ Power Platform API
Historically, Power Platform administrators and developers have automated management tasks through a mix of tools. A capability might exist in the admin center, use a different name in PowerShell, have a custom shape in a connector, or not yet be available in the command line. Each tool could be valuable, but moving between them often meant relearning commands, payloads, authentication patterns, and coverage. Last year, we shared how Power Platform is moving from a UX-first model to an API-first ecosystem. Today, we're bringing one of the clearest results of that strategy directly to the terminal: auto-generated...
std::call_once vs. std::async
Simple vs complex machinery.
Announcing Microsoft Desired State Configuration v3.3.0
This post announces the General Availability of Microsoft Desired State Configuration (DSC) v3.3.0, with new Windows resources, a registry adapter, server mode improvements, expression function updates, expanded what-if support, and experimental export filtering.
Bringing Correctly Rounded Math to Production with LLVM-libc
As we mentioned in the last cmath blog post, MSVC is using LLVM-libc for compile-time evaluation and runtime execution of math functions when is enabled. I invited LLVM-libc contributors Michael Jones and Tue Ly to write a guest blog post about how they’ve achieved what they’ve achieved. This is that blog post! I hope you enjoy it. I learned a lot from reading it, even after having spent a lot of time in this area. - Cody, Microsoft C++ Compiler Frontend Engineer Hi, I'm Michael Jones, the lead maintainer for LLVM-libc. Cody invited me and our math lead, Tue Ly, to write a guest post about LLVM-libc's math f...
Auto SR Comes to Intel Core Ultra Series-3 Processors
Today, we’re excited to announce we’re expanding the availability of Auto SR to Intel Core Ultra Series 3-based Copilot+ PCs. This builds off our previous expansion of Automatic Super Resolution (Auto SR) to support more gaming devices allowing more players to leverage Auto SR as a tool in their toolkit to better optimize games for improved experience. Download the Auto Super Resolution Package - Microsoft Apps to get started. Auto SR is designed to help games that struggle to hit playable frame rates at higher resolutions by allowing the game to render at a lower resolution, then using NPU-based upscaling ...
Build Your Own AI Agent Harness in C#, the MafClaw Live Series
I am building a complete C# agent live, from a single call around an IChatClient to a production-ready, observable, governed agent, using the Microsoft Agent Framework harness in a 4-part Microsoft Reactor series.
From Specialist Agents to Distributed Skills over MCP
Keep your domain services distributed. Move the specialist's instructions, not another model, into the orchestrator. A multi-agent system often starts with a straightforward design: one agent understands the user's request, delegates to specialist agents, and combines their answers. That was the starting point for my ski resort demo. A resort advisor calls specialists for weather, safety, ski coaching, and lift traffic. Each specialist owns its instructions and tools, and the advisor invokes it through Agent-to-Agent (A2A). It works. But it also raises a useful question: Does every specialist need its...
Investing in a more reliable Microsoft Graph PowerShell experience
We're focusing Microsoft Graph PowerShell on the platform where we can give you the most reliable, capable, and well-maintained experience: PowerShell 7.x and later. Built on modern .NET, PowerShell 7.x resolves many of the underlying assembly-loading and dependency issues that affect Windows PowerShell 5.x today. Concentrating our engineering there means faster fixes, quicker delivery of new features, and fewer platform-specific failures for you. To make that focus possible, today we're announcing that Windows PowerShell 5.x is entering a 12-month retirement period for the Microsoft Graph PowerShell modules. ...
AI Is Changing How We Code. It’s Also Changing How We Learn.
AI is changing software development at a pace no one can ignore. Developers now have powerful AI tools that can help us write code, understand unfamiliar codebases, troubleshoot problems, learn new frameworks, and get answers in seconds. That is an incredible opportunity. But as these tools become more capable, I believe something else is becoming more valuable too: learning directly from other developers. That’s one of the reasons I continue to believe so strongly in events like VSLive!. Learn from people who have done the work One of the things I value most about VSLive! is its focus on practica...
Magic statics vs. std::call_once
They sort of do the same thing, but differently.
Your AI coding agent evaluation is only as good as its sandbox
Your AI coding agent passed the eval. But did the model know the answer, or did it find it somewhere on your machine? A correct answer can still invalidate your measurement.
Important updates: GitHub Copilot support ending for JetBrains 2025.1.x
To deliver new features faster and continue improving stability and performance, the GitHub Copilot plugin will end support for JetBrains IDEs version 2025.1.x (JetBrains platform build 251). Focusing on newer IDE versions helps us bring you new capabilities more quickly and maintain a high-quality experience. Our recommendation: The minimum supported JetBrains IDE version will be 2025.2.x, but we recommend upgrading to version 2026.1 or later and update your GitHub Copilot plugin to continue receiving the latest improvements. Timeline of deprecation The GitHub Copilot plugin will discontinue support for Jet...
Introducing Foundry Dev Pack: One Command to Start Building
Foundry Dev Pack prepares your machine for Microsoft Foundry development with an all-in-one installer for the tools you need across the terminal, VS Code, and coding agents.
From Redis pressure to a healthier service
Lessons from an Azure Managed Redis migration for Copilot Studio agent flows: cache efficiency, client reliability, staged rollout, and lower costs.
PackageType: Main, Framework, Resource, Optional, Bundle
Every MSIX package is one of four package types: MSIX also supports Bundle packages. Bundles are somewhat different from those four package types: a Bundle is a container for one or more MSIX packages. Windows APIs nevertheless expose Bundle alongside the other package types when identifying packages. Each package type has its own behaviors, nuances, and rationale worthy of a dedicated discussion. We'll take a brief whirlwind tour of MSIX package types here and explore them in greater detail in future blog posts. What does imply? What does actually mean? MSIX packages have various properties and beh...
Today I will… improve test coverage
Today I want to look at how we can improve on the test coverage that we have in the Interview Coach application. This application has some unit tests in it already, but I'm sure there is room for improvement. Defining our baseline Before we start writing tests, it's a good idea to have a baseline of what our coverage is so that we can find out where the gaps are, rather than just writing tests "for the sake of writing tests". We can do this using the Analyze Code Coverage for All Tests, from either the Command Palette (CTRL + SHIFT + P) or the Tests menu. Running the analyzer, we can see where our coverage ...
Build an interview coach app with the GitHub Copilot SDK
An interview coach has to do more than ask questions. It needs to read a resume, follow up on an incomplete answer, and save enough context to give useful feedback at the end. Some of that work is conversation. Some of it requires calling an application service. The GitHub Copilot SDK lets you use the runtime behind Copilot CLI for that work inside your own application. You provide instructions and callable tools. Copilot handles the model interaction and resulting tool calls, while your application owns the interface and business workflow. For a developer building a personal assistant or an internal workflow, ...
Why do Microsoft job levels start in the high 50’s instead of starting at a sane number like 1?
It used to start at 1, but that was the old system.
Coding agents are picking Azure SQL Database
I went looking for Azure SQL Database in a recent coding agent benchmark, honestly unsure whether Microsoft SQL would show up. Armature ran a study where real coding agent CLIs (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor) were dropped into six synthetic-but-realistic repositories and asked to pick a database, then actually build with it. 356 runs were completed across three personas: vibe coder, junior developer, senior engineer. Every session is published, so you can replay the prompts, the searches, the commands, and the code. Azure SQL Database came in second! Not second behind AWS. Second behind Neon, and ahead of Amazon...
Performance Improvements in .NET 11
Take a tour through hundreds of performance improvements in .NET 11.
C++ in the Age of AI: Visual Studio at CppCon 2026
At CppCon 2026, we shared how Visual Studio is evolving to help you work more effectively with large C++ codebases, improve build and runtime performance, adopt the latest language features, and incorporate AI into your existing workflows. This post is a companion reading guide for our session, C++ in the Age of AI: How Visual Studio Is Evolving, with links to learn more about the features and improvements we discussed. We will update this post with the YouTube video once the recording of the talk is available. What's new in Visual Studio 2026 These two release roundups provide the most complete overview of ...
Intelligent Terminal 0.2.2572: Faster, Smoother, and More Reliable
We're back with Intelligent Terminal v0.2.2572, and this one is all about making things faster, easier to use, more reliable, and more polished. This release lands over 60 fixes and improvements as well as API key support for local models, automatic approval for supported agents, and native slash commands your agent brings with it. You can grab the update from the Microsoft Store, via , or by heading to the release page on GitHub. Let's dive in! Faster, lighter, snappier We went after the parts of the product you feel every day: API key support for local models Plenty of endpoints need an API key, and ...
Share your .NET story with the community
Share how your team uses .NET to solve real problems and help us bring more community stories to .NET Conf 2026 and other .NET channels.
Why didn’t ReadDirectoryChangesW provide a way to correlate the two sides of a rename operation?
Perhaps it wasn't necessary, or perhaps it didn't occur to them that this a problem.
What’s New for C++ Developers in Visual Studio 2026 (18.7 – 18.10)
Over the past few months, we have continued shipping monthly Visual Studio 2026 releases, delivering improvements across all stages of the development cycle. In this blog post, we'll recap everything that changed from version 18.7 through 18.10 (released this month) that is relevant for C++ developers. This includes new tools for maintaining and navigating C++ projects, along with Git, GitHub Copilot, and debugging improvements that support the way large native codebases are built. Some headlines include the GitHub Copilot modernization experience (now generally available) to guide you through MSVC upgrades, a...
MulticloudDB SDK: Cross-cloud portability in the coding agent era
Building cross-cloud solutions with best-of-breed cloud-native databases means learning multiple SDKs, translating queries, handling different errors, and testing across providers. The Multicloud DB SDK for Java lets you share that work across Azure Cosmos DB, Amazon DynamoDB, and Google Cloud Spanner. You (or your coding agent) write CRUD and query logic against one Java API, with provider selection and connection settings in configuration. We demonstrated one application running unchanged across two providers at Azure Cosmos DB Conf 2026 on April 28, 2026, in MultiCloudDB: Write Once. Run Anywhere.. The SDK is...
Microsoft at CppCon 2026
Microsoft will be at CppCon 2026 in Aurora, Colorado, which is taking place from September 14 through 18. Join us for talks from Microsoft speakers and colleagues across the C++ community and visit the Microsoft booth Monday through Thursday to meet the team and discuss the tools, technologies, and challenges that matter to you. If you can't make it, you can still watch the talks later on YouTube. Survey Whether you are going to the conference or not, we also invite you to take our annual CppCon survey at aka.ms/cppcon/survey. Your feedback can help us improve our C++ developer tools and focus on solving the mo...
Building a Japanese LLM Evaluation Pipeline: Lessons from a Two-Day Hackathon
ISE hackathon produced a reusable Japanese LLM evaluation pipeline with multi-turn, facet-based scoring, cross-provider model support, and publication-ready benchmarking outputs.
How can I remove the Close button from my window caption?
Not through normal means.
MSVC C++23: constexpr cmath with LLVM Libc
Proposal P0533R9 made numerous math functions in the standard library compile-time evaluable in C++23. Implementing the feature required a good bit of time and effort, but MSVC is preparing its experimental implementation for the 14.52 build tools (compiler version 19.52)! We are still refining the feature, so expect the dust to settle only when this has shipped for production. The feature is enabled with a combination of the or later and compiler options. It is initially shipping as experimental and off by default because our implementation is powered by a new math library at compile-time and runtime, which...
September Patches for Azure DevOps Server
We are releasing new patches for our self‑hosted product, Azure DevOps Server. We strongly recommend that all customers stay up to date with the latest, most secure version of Azure DevOps Server. The most recent release, Azure DevOps Server, is available on the download page. The following versions have been patched. For more details on these updates, see the release notes: ⬇️Azure DevOps Server Patch Download ✅Verifying Installation To verify that the patch is installed, run the following command on the Azure DevOps Server machine using the patch installer you downloaded: Replace with the name of the...
Announcing Azure AI Speech LLM 2607: Better Multilingual Accuracy, Easier Customization
Learn how Azure AI Speech LLM 2607 improves multilingual and mixed-language recognition, lowers latency, and simplifies domain-specific customization with enhanced phrase lists.
Use C# unions and closed hierarchies in ASP.NET Core
Learn how C# unions and closed hierarchies work with System.Text.Json across ASP.NET Core Minimal APIs, MVC, SignalR, Blazor, and OpenAPI.
Why is the x86 undefined instruction called ud2? Why 2?
It came after <CODE>ud0</CODE> and <CODE>ud1</CODE>.
MSVC Build Tools Preview updates – September 2026
The MSVC Build Tools Preview is updated regularly with the latest features and fixes from the MSVC development team. This post covers updates from the past month, currently targeting the v14.52 release. This encompasses changes across the compiler frontend, backend, linker, standard library, and related tools. Although you can acquire the MSVC Build Tools Preview through either the Visual Studio 2026 Stable Channel or Insiders Channel, Insiders gets MSVC Preview updates more quickly (roughly weekly). To check whether it is installed, make sure one or both of these components are selected in the Visual Studio In...
What’s new in Microsoft Foundry: July and August 2026
Catch up on July and August in Microsoft Foundry: stable Hosted Agent and Toolbox SDK paths, Claude tools on Azure-hosted deployments, Model Router updates, local inference improvements, and the SDK migrations worth checking before you upgrade.
Advancing trusted AI innovation with Agents and new Azure OpenAI models in Azure Government
Today, we are announcing expanded AI capabilities available across the Microsoft Azure for US Government portfolio. The Microsoft Foundry Agent Service is now available in Azure Government, giving organizations managed infrastructure on which to build, deploy, and operate AI systems that can reason over authorized information, use approved tools, and help complete multi-step work. Additionally, GPT-5.6 Sol, GPT-5.6 Terra, and GPT-5.6 Luna are now available through Microsoft Foundry in Azure Government. Together, these capabilities give public-sector organizations more choice in how they build secure, scalable AI ...
What algorithm did Windows XP use to choose your initial user picture?
It's random, really.
Your work might not need the smartest model
The smartest model can cost five times more and deliver the same result, or even a worse one. See how evaluating your own work helps you get more value from your agent budget.
Announcing .NET 11 Release Candidate 1
.NET 11 Release Candidate 1 is available with improvements across libraries, runtime, SDK, MSBuild, NuGet, C#, F#, ASP.NET Core, .NET MAUI, and Windows Forms.
.NET Conf 2026 Community Days Call for Presenters Is Open
Submit your session proposal for the community-led .NET Conf 2026 Community Days by October 6, 2026.
.NET and .NET Framework September 2026 servicing releases updates
A recap of the latest servicing updates for .NET and .NET Framework for September 2026.
Go 1.27.1-2 Microsoft build now available
A new release of the Microsoft build of Go is now available for download.
MSIX PackageVolume: How Package Storage Works
An MSIX package can be staged in several ways and locations: By far the most common is PackageVolume. We'll dig into the rest in future posts, but for now let's focus on MSIX PackageVolume. In the beginning... When MSIX first appeared in Windows 81 packages would be staged to a unique directory under . More specifically, packages were placed in a subdirectory named with the package's full name. For example: Every package has a unique package full name, and thus is staged to a unique subdirectory within its package volume. This is commonly referred to as a pkgdir. This illustrates one of MSIX's ...
Today I will… find hidden latency across a distributed .NET application
When a distributed application feels slow, the user sees one delay. The code behind that delay may run across a web frontend, backend services, databases, and external APIs. If you profile only the frontend while the backend is slow, the profiler can show that the frontend is healthy without revealing the actual bottleneck. This article shows how to narrow a cross-process performance problem with Visual Studio: identify the process that owns the slow operation, capture its CPU activity, inspect the report, and add a focused measurement when CPU samples cannot explain elapsed time. GitHub Copilot Profiler Agent...
A sample use of the winstart.bat file in Windows 95
For a driver that needs high resolution mode only in Windows.
The Agentic Road to Revenue
The Agentic Road to Revenue From SaaS concept to Microsoft Marketplace. Building a SaaS application is only part of becoming a commercial software provider. To sell through the Microsoft Marketplace., the application also needs tenant isolation, subscription lifecycle management, billing integration, security evidence, and a publishable Partner Centre offer. To make this journey easier we have built SaaS_Skills into GIT-APE. This article follows Contoso Azure SaaS through seven stages, from selecting an offer model and applying the SaaS Architecture Reference Design to publishing its Azure ...
Why don’t we allow stacks to be sparse, instead of forcing them to be contiguous?
Imagining how to report a memory allocation failure for a sparse page.
Azure SDK Release (August 2026)
Azure SDK releases every month. In this post, you'll find this month's highlights and release notes.
What happens if you change a window class’s GCL_CBWNDEXTRA ?
You're changing the value for future windows.
Native memory for Microsoft Agent Framework with Azure Cosmos DB
Agents are more useful when they can remember what matters beyond the current conversation. Today, we're announcing a new preview integration that gives Microsoft Agent Framework agents durable, cross-session memory backed by Azure Cosmos DB. The new Python package, , provides . Attach it to an agent once and it can automatically store conversation turns, extract durable memories, and recall relevant facts, summaries, and user profiles in later conversations. This integration was introduced by the Azure Cosmos DB team in Native Agent Memory for Microsoft Agent Framework, Powered by Azure Cosmos DB. Here, we...
SQL Decomposition in a Nutshell
Good software design principles apply inside the database too. See how decomposition, encapsulation, statelessness, and clear contracts can make complex T-SQL easier to read, test, reuse, and maintain.
Advocating for Uptime: The 6 Phases of Change
Schema changes are inevitable, but downtime doesn’t have to be. Learn a phased approach to safely evolve a production SQL schema while applications remain online.
Test what you ship: MSTest and Native AOT
MSTest source generation lets test projects use the same Native AOT and trimming deployment model as the applications they validate, while reducing reflection on the test execution path.
The case of the progress callback that never got called when progress happened
Are you talking to the right guy?
Go 1.27.1-1 and 1.26.8-1 Microsoft builds now available
A new release of the Microsoft build of Go is now available for download.
Stop alt-tabbing into the wrong Visual Studio
A user asked for per-solution color themes. It already ships, and it goes further than they asked. You run several instances of Visual Studio side by side, one per solution, and they all look identical. Same taskbar icon, same alt-tab thumbnail, same chrome. So, you land in the wrong one, start typing, and realize thirty seconds later you just edited the wrong repo. Could each solution get its own color theme? It can. It already does. And the way it works turns out to be more useful than a personal color preference. How to do it This uses the new settings experience introduced in Visua...
The perils of binding to value types in XAML
Loss of identity.
Behind SPFx Dev Skills: testing what agents know and fixing what they miss
How much guidance does an AI coding agent actually need? See how we used evaluation data to target SPFx knowledge gaps, improving results without wasting tokens on what models already know.
Servicing While In Use and ERROR_PACKAGES_IN_USE
How does MSIX service a package while it's in use? Simple: It doesn't. A core principle of MSIX servicing is: Do not service a package while it's in use. Deployment provides several ways to deal with that constraint. Options range from terminating applications to deferring servicing until the package is no longer in use. How hard can it be? 'Servicing a package' means any deployment activity modifying software, including update, remove, repair and other operations. Altering installed software can be highly disruptive if the software is in use. Executables and DLLs may be mapped into running processes. File...
Today I will… review GitHub PRs
Today I will show you how we can tackle one of the most common tasks when working in a development team or managing an open-source project, and that is working with Pull Requests. While we're going to be using the GitHub tooling within Visual Studio for this, the approach would be very similar with Azure DevOps. Getting our PRs Start by opening the pull requests for your repository. Select Git → GitHub → View Pull Requests. You can also search for the command in the Command Palette with Ctrl+Shift+P. From here, Visual Studio will load all the PRs in the repo and group them to the ones that are assigned to m...
Microspeak: Funded / unfunded
People are our most valuable asset.
Enterprise Live Migrations is now in public preview
Move Azure DevOps repositories to GitHub Enterprise Cloud with data residency while minimizing disruption 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. We know that making this move at enterprise scale isn’t always straightforward. Critical repositories can’t simply be taken offline for days, and large migrations often require complex coordination and extended development freezes. ELM is designed to make these migrations more predictable, with minimal disruption to deve...
Power Azure SRE Agent with the tools it needs
Use Azure Connector Namespace to host MCP servers and give Azure SRE Agent access to the operational tools it needs without managing the server infrastructure yourself.
Bacpac and Dacpac, the similarities and differences
When you need to move an entire database or move the objects in a database, bacpac and dacpac files often come up because of all of the tooling options to interact with them. Bacpac and dacpac files share some core similarities as well as some major differences in how they're used in SqlPackage and other SQL tools, but their flexibility can create a bit of confusion. In this post, we are going to discuss exactly what makes bacpac specifically important, as well as explore the options that a dacpac is capable of. A bacpac is primarily a portable copy of schema and data whose model is limited to the Azure SQL Data...
AWE does not require PAE, though PAE makes it much more useful
All dressed up with nowhere to go.
Only believe what you can validate: a verification framework for agentic AI
How to read this article This article picks up where my January piece left off. My catch phrase is still the same: "only believe what you can validate". This article is about validation. If you are new to agentic AI (in modernization contexts), I would highly recommend reading The Realities of Application Modernization with Agentic AI first. Start there, then come back. The problem with "looks good to me" I have had a version of the same conversation many times over the last months. I work with a customer on an agentic application modernization. In this concrete example we are facing one of 150 COBOL module...
Try the new SqlClient and Retry connections natively
Microsoft.Data.SqlClient includes configurable retry logic for SqlConnection and SqlCommand, giving .NET applications built-in resilience for transient SQL Server failures without requiring Polly.
On forcing all derived classes to implement a specific non-virtual method, part 2
Explicitly denying that you implement the method.
SharePoint Framework (SPFx) roadmap update – August 2026
SPFx 1.24 Beta 3 is now available, React 18 support is coming in 1.24, and a new Copilot Components preview program opens for customers and partners.
Azure Developer CLI (azd) – August 2026
Welcome to the August 2026 edition of the Azure Developer CLI () release blog. This post covers releases 1.30.0, 1.31.0, 1.31.1, 1.31.2, and 1.32.0. To share your feedback and questions, join the August release discussion on GitHub. Highlights: New features 🔌 Extensions The extension framework reached general availability this month. Read more in The Azure Developer CLI extension framework is generally available. 📦 Container deployment Breaking changes 🪲 Bugs fixed Provisioning and deployment Pipelines and update...
How Uno Platform uses .NET, MCP, and AI to build high quality apps
How Uno Platform built two Model Context Protocol servers in C# so AI agents can ground themselves in real documentation and then see and drive a running cross-platform .NET app.
Agent Harness: Making your claw production-ready
Part 4 of Build your own claw and agent harness with Microsoft Agent Framework. Over the last three parts our personal finance assistant grew from a single tool into a genuinely capable agent: it plans, reads your portfolio, asks before it trades, remembers what matters, loads skills on demand, reorganizes files with a shell, computes with CodeAct, and fans research out to background agents. It works on your machine. But "works on my machine" isn't the same as ready to run for other people. This final part closes that gap along four axes: To get there we make one structural change. Up t...
VSLive! @ Microsoft HQ: Developer Takeaways and Must-Watch Sessions
VSLive! @ Microsoft HQ 2026 was one of the most energizing VSLive! events I’ve attended. What stood out was the level of engagement over five days of learning and conversation from July 27 through July 31. Developers came ready to dig into the future of Visual Studio, .NET, and AI-assisted software development, and many Microsoft engineers and product managers were there to have those conversations directly. If you weren’t able to join us in Redmond, there’s still plenty you can take away from the event. The Microsoft-led sessions were recorded, so you can catch up on many of the topics that generated som...
On forcing all derived classes to implement a specific non-virtual method, part 1
Don't implement a stub. Just don't implement it at all.
Azure DevOps in the GitHub Copilot App
The Azure DevOps plugin is now available for the GitHub Copilot app, allowing you to view and manage Azure DevOps pull requests and work items directly in the Copilot app. What you can do The initial release supports: You can find your assigned work, make changes, and complete pull requests without leaving the GitHub Copilot app. Get started Open the GitHub Copilot app and select Customize. From the Editor's picks tab, find and install the Azure DevOps plugin. Once the plugin is installed, start a new session from chat or select New session from the plugin card under Editor's picks. Sign in and ent...
I Need My CI/CD Pipeline to Access Cosmos DB Without Using a Secret
In the last post we walked through why RBAC broke your app and how to fix it. Your app is now running on a managed identity, keys are off, and everything is green. Then your build pipeline runs, and it needs to seed test data. Suddenly you're staring at a secret in your CI settings and wondering if you just undid all that work. As we continue this security series, let's get your pipeline to Cosmos DB with no secret anywhere. The situation You did the hard part. Your app uses , you assigned a data plane role, and you set . Passwordless, done. Then you look at your CI/CD pipeline and find this sitting in yo...
The Visual Studio Debugger Agentic Workflow Gets a Test-Driven Upgrade
A few months ago, we introduced a new guided agentic workflow in the Visual Studio Debugger Agent designed to help you move from a bug report to a verified fix without spending your morning guessing where to begin. If you missed that announcement, check out Stop Hunting Bugs: Meet the New Visual Studio Debugger Agent to see how the Agent builds a hypothesis, guides the debugger, investigates your application at runtime, and validates the final change. Today, we’re building on that experience with a new Test-Driven Investigation workflow. The Debugger Agent can now create or identify a focused test, debug th...
Introducing agent and workflow channels
An agent or workflow is only useful when people and other systems can reach it through the interfaces and channels they already use. That might be an OpenAI Responses client, Telegram, another agent using A2A, or an MCP client. As a builder of agents and workflow, you need control over which channels you expose it to and how it behaves. To help, we're introducing channels in Microsoft Agent Framework for agents and workflows in Python. Choose the channels your application needs The new packages are organized around a small shared hosting core and a set of channel-specific integrations: ...
Copilot Code Reviews for Azure Repos (public preview)
Today, we’re announcing the public preview of GitHub Copilot Code Review for Azure Repos, making the feature available to all Azure DevOps customers using the service. There’s no longer a need to sign up for early access. Customers can now enable Copilot Code Review for their Azure Repos repositories and start using it. With the public preview, we’re also introducing several improvements we’ve made over the past couple of months based on what we’ve learned during the technical preview. Before getting started, be sure to read the official documentation for details on how Copilot Code Review works, how to enable ...
In the product end game, every change carries significant risk, episode 2
The smallest perturbation.
.NET Conf 2026 – Save the Date
.NET Conf returns November 10-12, 2026, with three days of sessions, community, and the launch of .NET 11.
What Kind of Packaged Process Is It?
As previously discussed, we can divide processes into the two broad categories of packaged vs unpackaged, based on if the process HAS or LACKS package identity. Packaged processes can be divided into three broad categories: All three have package identity, but they make different tradeoffs between compatibility and modern packaged behavior. RuntimeBehavior Packages specify how an application process is created and runs via multiple properties in . The RuntimeBehavior attribute clearly expresses this: is a Universal app. It was first introduced in Windows 81. New lingo appeared with it, initially ref...
Start here: Azure SQL Foundations series
Most developers I talk to aren't asking whether Azure SQL Database can handle their next app. They're asking where to start when it comes to modernization, migration, and AI in the database. If you're reading this, you're probably in a similar boat: you've got an existing schema or databases, a scaling question you haven't had to answer yet, and a growing list of AI features you're expected to have an opinion about. That's why we built the path we kept describing in calls, with customers, and in the community. The Azure SQL Database Foundations series are four videos that take you from your first Hyperscal...
Visual Studio August Update – Work Smarter Across Models and Branches
Tune Copilot model thinking effort, share custom agents across your organization, track usage, and simplify complex Git workflows with worktrees and submodule support.
Try Azure SRE Agent with no always-on charges
We are happy to announce a 30-day trial experience for Azure SRE Agent. New customers can create and configure the SRE Agent at their own pace, with no charges for setup time or keeping agents ready. During the trial, you can connect your agents to telemetry, source code, incident management platforms, and other operational tools, and pay only for the Azure Agent Units (AAUs) consumed when your agents perform work. We are also excited to share the GA of Azure SRE Agent VNet integration and the Public Preview of Live Reports. With VNet support, the agent operates under your existing network controls, so it can ...
Why didn’t the Windows Entertainment Pack just run the MS-DOS version inside an emulator?
It wouldn't be a <I>Windows</I> Entertainment Pack then, would it?
PowerToys 0.101 is here: Window Hopper, Insider updates, and Command Palette compact mode
We're back with a fresh PowerToys release! PowerToys 0.101 introduces Window Hopper for quickly moving between windows from the same app, a redesigned update experience with Stable and Insider channels, and compact mode for Command Palette. This release also continues our WinUI 3 modernization, brings on-device Phi Silica transformations to Advanced Paste, and adds a big set of improvements across PowerDisplay and Shortcut Guide. Grab the update by checking for updates in PowerToys or by heading to the release page. Let's dive in! 🪟 Meet Window Hopper If you regularly have several windows open from the same a...
Unlocking the Power of AI for Every Developer in Visual Studio with Bring your Own Model
The best AI in Visual Studio is the AI you can bring with you. Developers don't work in a single-model world anymore. You might reach for one model for everyday coding, another for a domain-specific problem, and an approved model for work that must stay within your organization's governance boundaries. So, the question we hear most often isn't which model is best. It's, can I use mine? We're bringing Bring Your Own Model (BYOM) in Preview to Visual Studio, making it available and enabled by default across Community, Professional, and Enterprise SKUs. This Preview focuses on the developer experience available t...
Java OpenJDK August 2026 Critical Patch Update
Hello Java customers! We are happy to announce the latest August 2026 critical patch update release for the Microsoft Build of OpenJDK. Check our release notes page for details on fixes and enhancements or download and install the binaries today. The source code of our builds are now available on GitHub for further inspection: Microsoft Build of OpenJDK specific updates OpenJDK 25 OpenJDK 21 OpenJDK 17 OpenJDK 11 Summary of Upstream Updates OpenJDK Vulnerability Advisory August 2026 OpenJDK 25 OpenJDK 21 OpenJDK 17 ...
From dotnet run to Foundry Hosted Agent in 3 lines of C#
You built an agent with Microsoft Agent Framework and it works great on your machine. Now what? Turns out deploying it to production takes 1 NuGet package, 3 lines of C#, and 2 commands. Let's do it.
Explore new features available in C# 15 preview
C# 15 ships with .NET 11. It adds union types, closed hierarchies, a preview of the updated unsafe model, and a few smaller changes that remove everyday ceremony.
Powering Memory in Foundry Agent Service, with Azure Cosmos DB
Move from a locally composed memory-enabled agent to a deployed Foundry Agent Service agent, with keyless Azure infrastructure and an interactive browser sample. In Native Agent Memory for Microsoft Agent Framework, Powered by Azure Cosmos DB, we introduced : a Microsoft Agent Framework context provider that extracts useful information from conversations, stores it in Azure Cosmos DB, and retrieves it before later agent runs. That article used a locally composed Agent Framework agent and . It was a useful way to isolate the memory concepts: one provider, two lifecycle hooks, and a stable u...
Comparing the two holograms on the Windows 95 box
Filling in with your imagination.
Today I will… Modernize a .NET application
Today I will modernize a .NET Framework application to .NET 10 using the GitHub Copilot modernization tooling built-in to Visual Studio. The tooling helps us upgrade applications running on legacy versions of .NET and also migrate them to Azure. Today we're going to focus on the upgrade portion. And, the tooling will do all the work for us! But it doesn't do everything at once, and that's good. It introduces checkpoints into the .NET upgrade process to tell us what it has been up to we can then guide it towards the outcome we want. And at each of those checkpoints it creates a markdown file t...
Reducing C++ template bloat by factoring out the type-dependent portions of the function, practical exam
Applying our principles.
Reducing C++ template bloat by factoring out the type-dependent portions of the function
Looking for consolidation points.
Go 1.27.0-1 Microsoft build now available
A new release of the Microsoft build of Go is now available for download.
Go 1.26.7-1 and 1.25.14-1 Microsoft builds now available
A new release of the Microsoft build of Go is now available for download.
Outgrowing SQL Server Express? Upgrade to Azure SQL Database Free Tier in 3 Steps
If you’ve been building local prototypes, internal tools, web backends, or lightweight services on SQL Server Express, you know the routine: it’s free, familiar, and gets the job done – until you hit hardware limits or spend weekends manual backup scripts and handling OS patches. Learn how to upgrade from SQL Server Express to Azure SQL Database free tier in 3 simple steps. Whether you're running SQL Server 2022 (or older) and hitting the hard 10 GB storage wall, or using SQL Server 2025 and realizing 50 GB of disk space doesn't solve the strict 1.4 GB memory bottleneck, staying on Express limits your applica...
MSSQL Extension for VS Code: SQL Formatter, Azure SQL Database Provisioning, and More
Writing and maintaining SQL is easier when you can eliminate repetitive steps and keep your scripts cleanly formatted. With the MSSQL extension for VS Code v1.45, we're introducing the Public Preview of the SQL Formatter alongside the General Availability of Azure SQL Database Provisioning and Shortcuts Configuration. You can now apply consistent T-SQL formatting across your projects, create free tier cloud databases with automated post-deployment actions, and streamline frequently used commands and queries directly inside Visual Studio Code. What's new in MSSQL extension for VS Code v1.45 Here's a summary of t...
On wrapping a callable in a lambda that just calls it with the same parameters
Just use the callable directly.
Aspire 13.5: Fresh pixels and better workflows
Aspire 13.5 refreshes the dashboard and aspire.dev, expands the Interaction Service, adds cross-scope Azure references and Kubernetes persistent volumes, and brings live terminals into the AppHost.
Announcing AppxManifest IntelliSense Support in the WinApp VS Code Extension
The WinApp VS Code extension exists to make Windows app development feel at home in VS Code. It brings the Windows App Development CLI right into the editor, so you can initialize, run, debug, define the identity of, package, and sign Windows apps built with .NET, WPF, WinUI, C++, Electron, Rust, Tauri, or Flutter, all without switching tools. Get it now: Install the WinApp extension from the VS Code Marketplace. We're excited to announce the release of v0.3.0. This release brings schema-aware IntelliSense to your manifest files, adds workspace search to the commands that require a file or folder, and i...
Azure Cosmos DB in the Agentic Era: Data Tools for Developers and AI Agents
Anthropic's 2026 Agentic Coding Trends Report captures an important tension in how developers use AI. Engineers report using AI in roughly 60% of their work, yet say they can fully delegate only 0–20% of their tasks. AI is becoming a constant collaborator, but it still needs setup, supervision, validation, and human judgment. That gap is especially relevant when an agent starts working with a database. Database requests often sound easy. “Show me the failed orders from last week.” “Why is this query expensive?” “Does this container have the field I need?” For a developer, answering those question...
The Two Hybrid Searches in Microsoft SQL
Hybrid search is usually described as combining keyword search with vector search. Microsoft SQL does that, for sure, but we do quite a bit more right out of the box. SQL dynamically evaluates queries and switches between kNN and ANN vector search based on cost and selectivity. These two types of hybrid search, work together, ensuring your semantic queries return the best possible results to your apps and agents. Text search In 1998, Microsoft Research Cambridge welcomed Stephen Robertson, one of the principal architects of BM25, or Best Matching 25, the relevance-ranking algorithm that became foundational to m...
What’s a PFN?
What's a PFN? MSIX introduced Package identity in Windows 8. While the familiar package identity "5-tuple" was functional, it wasn't especially convenient to pass through APIs or embed in resources such as files, registry keys, URLs, or XML documents. To address this, Windows defined an opaque string representation known as a Package Moniker. Windows called a related identifier derived from a package's Name and Publisher the Package Family Moniker. These were commonly abbreviated as PM and PFM. As development progressed, Windows quite sensibly required new APIs to pass through API Design Review. The review tea...
Why did the Microsoft Entertainment Pack for Windows have a special sticker announcing that it also had Tetris?
A contingency plan.
Apple Silicon and Xcode 27 images available in pay-as-you-go (preview)
Apple developers can now build and test their applications natively on Apple Silicon in Azure Pipelines. New arm64 macOS agents are available in public preview through the pay-as-you-go GitHub-hosted Agents pool. Starting with Apple Silicon, Azure Pipelines is bringing over some of the agent sizes already available in GitHub Actions. The preview includes the following macOS images: Running workloads directly on Apple Silicon avoids the overhead and compatibility limitations of emulating arm64 on Intel hardware. It also lets teams validate applications against the same architecture used by current Apple device...
From single call to agents: five new Claude capabilities now available in Microsoft Foundry
Structured outputs, web search, web fetch, MCP connector, and tool search are now available for Claude models hosted on Azure in Microsoft Foundry, turning a model endpoint into a production agent platform.
How do functions like alloca allocate memory from the stack?
The usual probing.
Beyond Vector Indexes: Azure SQL Brings Optimizer Intelligence to Vector Search
Why production AI retrieval depends on more than vector index performance. It's easy to think of AI retrieval as a vector search problem. For many developers, the first conversation starts with vector index benchmarks: How many queries per second can it handle? What's the latency? What's the recall? How well does it scale? Those metrics are critical, but production AI retrieval rarely consists of vector similarity alone. Equally important is what happens when vector search becomes part of a real application workload, one that includes filters, joins, security policies, ranking logic, and live operational d...
Windows App Development CLI v0.6 – create new WinUI applications, sign packages with Azure, and more
Windows App Development CLI v0.6.0 has just shipped and contains a ton of new features. Much of the changes in this release focus on getting from zero to a running app faster: scaffold a fresh WinUI project with a single command, search real WinUI controls and samples without leaving the terminal, and run your app straight from a .csproj with no manual build step first. It also adds cloud-based artifact signing, sparse-package workflows, and agent-friendly UI recordings. Grab it with winget install Microsoft.WinAppCLI, or head to the repo for npm and other install options. Here's a tour of the highligh...
Forcing an ARM64X executable to run as a specific architecture
You can request the target machine architecture.
Git-APE SaaS Factory
Agentic Platform Engineering for SaaS. Accelerating the Path to Market with Git-APE If you are an ISV building SaaS on Azure, the first demo is usually the easy part. The harder work is turning that proof of concept into a secure, scalable, commercial-ready service that can be operated confidently in production. That gap shows up quickly. Tenant isolation, identity, entitlement, marketplace fulfilment, metering, cost controls, observability, compliance evidence, and a clean path from customer purchase to tenant provisioning all need to be designed in, not bolted on later. None of those are side quests....
Go 1.26.6-1 and 1.25.13-1 Microsoft builds now available
A new release of the Microsoft build of Go including security fixes is now available for download.
Clearer Build Optimization Results with GitHub Copilot
We know that slow builds are a consistent theme in feedback from C++ developers. Your feedback helped us to shape GitHub Copilot build performance for Windows, an agent that can trace your build, find bottlenecks, apply optimizations, and measure the result. When using the agent, the clearest outcome is a straightforward win. The agent changes your project, rebuilds it, and shows how your build is made faster. Sometimes, a change may make a clean rebuild slightly slower while improving the incremental builds you run throughout the day. At other times, we also observed that optimizations may help without reachi...
MSVC Build Tools Preview updates – August 2026
Try the latest updates to MSVC Build Tools Preview
Routing and Failover for Microsoft.Extensions.AI
Route requests across models and providers natively in Microsoft.Extensions.AI with RoutingChatClient, SemanticRoutingChatClient, and FailoverChatClient — new experimental primitives for content-based routing, failover, and custom routing policies.
Your best friend: BlockOnPossibleDataLoss=True
BlockOnPossibleDataLoss can frustrate developers, but it's one of the most important safeguards in database deployment. Here's how to keep your local development loop fast while protecting the data that matters.
A little helper class for managing LPPROC_THREAD_ATTRIBUTE_LIST s
Another RAII-style wrapper.
Building Agents for Teams: Managing the noise of collaboration
Most of us are familiar with one-to-one agent chats: private, direct interactions where rules are relatively simple. With only you and the agent, each moment has clear intent. You can ask follow-up questions, pause, or restart without worrying about how each exchange affects anyone else. Collaboration in groups works differently. Every message competes for attention, and a reply that is helpful to one individual may interrupt five others. Effective collaboration is built on countless small social judgments and gestures: deciding when to respond or stay quiet, choosing how much to say, and using the conventions...
From Sync APIs to support for the GPT-5 model series and agentic workflows: What’s new in Azure Content Understanding – August 2026
Enterprise content is no longer just something people read. AI apps and agents are only as useful as the information they can understand, yet much of the world’s enterprise knowledge is locked in documents, forms, tables, images, audio, and video. The latest Azure Content Understanding updates help developers turn that content into structured, grounded data with less custom processing. This release brings broader support for the GPT-5 model series, lower token usage, improved confidence scoring, new synchronous APIs for Read and Layout, advanced contextualization for higher-quality extraction, new tax-focused pre...
Azure Content Understanding GPT-5 Series Guide: Model Selection, Grounding Improvements, and Confidence Enhancements
Enterprise content is no longer just something people consume. As organizations increasingly rely on AI to extract and act on information from documents, images, audio, and video, Azure Content Understanding is expanding support for the GPT-5 series and improving grounding and confidence to deliver greater flexibility, efficiency, and quality. This expanded model catalog enables organizations to choose the right level of intelligence for each workload, helping reduce costs for high-volume processing while preserving access to advanced reasoning capabilities where needed. It also provides optimized pipelines tu...
Instructions Hygiene – What Frontier Models Still Need You to Say
Get the most out of the latest models by providing the right level of instructions
The comments that go into code versus those that go into the pull request description
Understanding the temporal relevance.
What’s New in vcpkg (Jul 2026)
These updates include major SBOM improvements in vcpkg-tool, 302 updated ports including multiple major library upgrades, and other minor improvements and bug fixes.
Azure Developer CLI extension framework is GA: build dev workflows for apps using Azure
What parts of building and shipping on Azure still take too many steps? Maybe you want a command that starts a project with your organization’s approved architecture and infrastructure. Maybe you need to connect deployments to an internal service catalog, run security checks before provisioning, or guide developers through a process that currently lives across scripts and documentation. When we first introduced the azd extension framework, we invited developers to think about that wish list. The framework was still taking shape in beta, and we wanted to learn which workflows developers and platform teams ne...
August Patches for Azure DevOps Server
We are releasing new patches for our self‑hosted product, Azure DevOps Server. We strongly recommend that all customers stay up to date with the latest, most secure version of Azure DevOps Server. The most recent release, Azure DevOps Server, is available on the download page. The following versions have been patched. For more details on these updates, see the release notes: ⬇️Azure DevOps Server Patch Download ✅Verifying Installation To verify that the patch is installed, run the following command on the Azure DevOps Server machine using the patch installer you downloaded: Replace with the name of the...
.NET 11 Preview 7 is now available!
Find out about the new features in .NET 11 Preview 7 across libraries, runtime, SDK, C#, ASP.NET Core, .NET MAUI, Entity Framework Core, F#, and Windows Forms.
.NET and .NET Framework August 2026 servicing releases updates
A recap of the latest servicing updates for .NET and .NET Framework for August 2026.
Today I will… manage Git Submodules without leaving the IDE
If you've worked with Git submodules for any length of time, you probably have a love-hate relationship with them. They're genuinely useful for pulling a shared library, an SDK, or common build scripts into your project. But actually working with them usually means tabbing over to a terminal and trying to remember whether it's this time all while a perfectly good IDE sits right in front of you, shrugging. That's the part we wanted to fix. Starting in Visual Studio 18.9, Git submodules are a first-class part of the IDE no more bouncing out to the command line just to keep your dependencies in order. It's been one...
Remove and Package Lifetime
MSIX uses a Garbage Collection (GC) design for staged package lifetime and destaging. Throughout this article: Package Core Principles A staged package can't be destaged while any references to it exist. This is a direct consequence of MSIX's core architectural principles: Consequently, removing a package's payload from disk is not a direct result of a single API call. Instead, package payloads are automatically destaged when they are no longer needed. Even then, destaging may not occur immediately. Some actions that remove a reference don't directly trigger Deployment activity. In these cases,...
The little-known winstart.bat batch file
It had been there long before Windows 95, but nobody remembered.
Build Locally, Ship to Cloud for $0: Azure SQL for Modern App Developers
As app developers, our primary focus is building great user experiences, designing APIs, and shipping features quickly. What we don't want is database friction—wasting hours configuring local DB instances, writing verbose migration scripts by hand, or worrying about unexpected cloud bills while prototyping. Today, we are making database development fast, intelligent, and completely free. By combining the Azure SQL Database container for local offline development, AI Agent Skills to automate your ORM and data layer, and the Azure SQL Database Free Tier, you can build locally and ship to production in minutes fo...
Intelligent Terminal 0.2 is here with local model support
We're back, and this is our first minor version bump: 0.1 to 0.2! It's our biggest release yet. This update adds support for local models, lets you run a different agent in each tab with , brings OpenCode into the built-in agent lineup, runs your agent inside WSL where your work actually lives, and makes the Agent Pane richer to navigate and easier to read. It also sharpens Autofix and fixes a long list of reliability issues. You can grab the update from the Microsoft Store, via , or by heading to the release page on GitHub. Let's dive in! Local model support is here! We've heard you: one of the most common ...
How can I perform a CopyFile in unbuffered mode?
Try one of the fancier alternatives to <CODE>CopyFile</CODE>.
I Enabled RBAC and Everything Broke. What Did I Do Wrong?
We covered the roles your Azure Cosmos DB app needs in our previous post. Now let’s look at what happens after you’ve assigned those roles, switched identities, disabled keys and suddenly staring at a . As we continue this security series, we’ll walk through the most common causes, how to diagnose them, and how to get back to green quickly. The situation You did everything right. You gave your app a managed identity, assigned a data role, switched your code over to , and turned off key-based auth like all the good security guidance told you to. Then you deploy, and every single call comes back with this: Res...
Creating a fake agile wrapper that is technically agile but is not useful outside its home apartment, part 5
Cheating with <CODE>std::unique_ptr</CODE>.
Test reporting in Microsoft.Testing.Platform: from red build to root cause
Microsoft.Testing.Platform brings failures into GitHub Actions and Azure DevOps, uses pipeline history to separate regressions from flakes, and preserves usable reports when a test host crashes.
Announcing the preview of the Work IQ Developer Tools
Software is shifting from apps built for people to agents that can reason over context and act on someone's behalf. Microsoft 365 Copilot put that shift in front of hundreds of millions of users, and Work IQ gave agents a production-ready intelligence layer to build on. What's been missing is the path in between: getting from an idea to a production agent running in front of customers. Today we're announcing the developer preview of Work IQ Developer Tools (WIQD), the agentic experience for Microsoft 365 Copilot extensibility that takes any plugin (skills, connectors, declarative agents) from an empty folder t...
Creating a fake agile wrapper that is technically agile but is not useful outside its home apartment, part 4
Moving things around if possible.
Pull request annotations on work item cards
It's now easier to track development progress without leaving your Kanban board. Azure Boards now displays pull request annotations directly on work item cards, making it easy to see at a glance when work is actively moving through code review. With pull request status visible directly on the board, your team can quickly understand the state of development without opening a work item or switching to Azure Repos. Whether you're in a stand-up, planning your next sprint, or simply reviewing the board, you can immediately identify which work items have active pull requests. If you prefer a cleaner board, you can ...
You can now use the Azure DevOps Service Connection instead of a PAT or Build Session token
We're excited to announce the Azure DevOps service connection, a new way to access Azure DevOps from your pipelines using a Microsoft Entra workload identity (a service principal or managed identity) instead of a Personal Access Token (PAT) or session token. This post walks through what it is, how to set it up, and the many places you can use it, including several capabilities we've added based on your feedback. Why use an Azure DevOps service connection? Using an Azure DevOps service connection improves the security of your pipelines in several ways: Because the connection authenticates as a Microsoft ...
Creating a fake agile wrapper that is technically agile but is not useful outside its home apartment, part 3
Forcing an object into the global interface table.
Azure DevOps Remote MCP Server is generally available
Today, we're excited to announce the general availability of the Azure DevOps MCP Server 🎉 The Azure DevOps MCP Server gives AI assistants secure, contextual access to your Azure DevOps projects so they can help you plan, build, and ship software more effectively. With the Azure DevOps remote MCP Server, you can get started without installing or hosting anything yourself. Simply connect your AI assistant directly to the Azure DevOps hosted endpoint by using streamable HTTP transport and start working with your projects in minutes. Getting Started Getting started in simple. Depending on the tools that you are u...
Beyond Chat: live Speech-to-Text with Foundry Local and C#
Build a live speech-to-text app in C# with Foundry Local, a compact Nemotron model, and local model lifecycle management.
Build Production-Ready Agents with the GitHub Copilot Harness and Agent Framework
Developers increasingly want to build agents that can reason about code, modify files, execute commands, interact with developer tools, and work across entire repositories. While GitHub Copilot already provides a powerful coding harness for these scenarios, developers often need additional capabilities such as observability, middleware, approval workflows, enterprise governance, and integration with broader agent ecosystems. The GitHub Copilot integration in Microsoft Agent Framework brings these worlds together. You can now use GitHub Copilot's agentic harness as the execution engine for your agents while conti...
Remove Is Not Uninstall
Just as There is no Install – it’s ‘Stage’ and ‘Register’ explained that Install is not truly an installation operation in MSIX, Remove is similarly not an uninstall operation. This can be surprising - sometimes even alarming - to developers coming from traditional installer technologies such as MSI, where uninstalling software typically implies: In MSIX, that model simply does not exist. Remove = Deregister + (Maybe) Destage From MSIX Deployment's perspective, a package lifecycle consists of four fundamental operations: There's a symmetry here. Stage and Register do the work necessary to make ...
Build Azure Skills Faster with Cloud Academy, a Visual Studio Subscriber Benefit
If you've been looking for a practical way to build Azure skills, Cloud Academy (a QA company) gives Visual Studio subscribers hands-on learning that fits into busy schedules. Whether you're new to Azure, expanding your cloud expertise, working towards certifications or preparing for more advanced projects, this benefit helps you learn by doing. What you'll find in Cloud Academy The Cloud Academy benefit gives Visual Studio subscribers a flexible learning experience that adapts to different learning styles and schedules, providing: With the Cloud Academy benef...
Creating a fake agile wrapper that is technically agile but is not useful outside its home apartment, part 2
Using a reference stored in the global interface table.
Building an operations assistant on Azure that waits for approval before it acts
Grounding an assistant in runbooks is straightforward. The harder part begins when the model proposes an action that requires authorization. An operations assistant needs stronger controls as soon as it can act. Answering "which runbook covers this alert" is a search problem. Opening an incident from that same conversation is a control-plane problem, and that is where a helpful prototype quietly turns into something you would not want on call. I built a deliberately narrow reference app to sit on that boundary and see what breaks. It runs on Azure Container Apps, retrieves Markdown runbooks thro...
Strengthening NuGet Supply Chain Security: Reducing API Key Lifetime
NuGet API key durations will be reduced to 30 days starting August 17th. This change will significantly strengthen the integrity of the NuGet supply chain.
Creating a fake agile wrapper that is technically agile but is not useful outside its home apartment, part 1
Looking for a COM reference that is between strong and weak.
From generated code to trusted code with a unit-test agent
Meet the open-source polyglot testing agent that learns from a repository, writes unit tests, and checks that they build and pass.
Making an agile version of a Windows Runtime delegate in C++/WinRT, part 10
What failure of the context callback means.
A deep dive into Power Pages Enhanced Authorization
Dataverse Native Authorization Model for Power Pages How mapped identities, security roles, and record filters move external-user authorization closer to the data. We’re introducing a major update to the Power Pages security model: authorization for external users is now enforced natively in Dataverse. Customers can opt in to this feature as they transition to the new model. This architecture moves Power Pages authorization closer to the data by translating Power Pages concepts into Dataverse-native security constructs. Instead of relying on Power Pages at runtime to reconstruct authorization for every request...
Introducing WPA MCP: Early Preview of AI-assisted trace analysis in Windows Performance Analyzer
Windows Performance Analyzer (WPA) is one of the most powerful tools available for understanding system performance on Windows. It helps engineers investigate Event Tracing for Windows (ETW) traces across CPU, memory, disk, networking, scheduling, input, and many other areas of the operating system. That power also comes with complexity. A single trace can contain a huge amount of data, and finding the right signal often requires knowing which WPA tables to open, which columns matter, how to filter the right time range, and how to connect multiple pieces of evidence into a root cause. We are working on WPA ...
Azure Developer CLI (azd) July 2026
This is the July round-up for the Azure Developer CLI (). Five releases shipped since the last post: 1.27.0, 1.27.1, 1.28.0, 1.28.1, and 1.29.0. Below is what's new, what changed, and what we fixed, with links to the pull requests if you want to dig in. Have feedback or questions? Join the release discussion on GitHub. Highlights: 🌐 Microsoft Foundry at the AI Engineer World's Fair In Pablo Castro's (Microsoft) "On AI and Knowledge" session at the AI Engineer World's Fair, the Microsoft Foundry team showed their command-line experience built on top of the extension platform. I...
Building agent teams with Agent Framework, GitHub Copilot CLI and Squad
Microsoft Agent Framework supports creating agents that use the GitHub Copilot SDK as their backend. GitHub Copilot agents provide access to powerful coding-oriented AI capabilities, including shell command execution, file operations, URL fetching, Model Context Protocol (MCP) server integration, and can be integrated into your existing development pipeline. We recently shipped this integration to v1.0 in C# and Python - fully supported and stable. Find out more here: MS Learn | Agent Framework | GitHub Copilot Agents and check out the samples here: .NET | Python A great example of using MAF and GitHub Copi...
Making an agile version of a Windows Runtime delegate in C++/WinRT, part 9
Maybe it doesn't matter.
Azure SDK Release (July 2026)
Azure SDK releases every month. In this post, you'll find this month's highlights and release notes.
Tell your model when to think harder
Not every question deserves the same amount of thought. Renaming a variable isn't the same as debugging a memory leak, and they don't need the same level of thinking. So why should your model treat them the same way every time? Starting in Visual Studio 18.9 Insiders 2, it doesn't have to. Supported models now come with a thinking effort control, so you can dial up the reasoning when a problem is genuinely hard and dial it back down when it isn't. It's a small knob with a big payoff: better-matched answers, and more control over how many credits you spend getting them. A dial, not a switch Thinking effort is...
Making an agile version of a Windows Runtime delegate in C++/WinRT, part 8
Exceptions hiding in lambda captures.
Announcing v2.0 of the official MCP C# SDK
MCP C# SDK v2.0 implements the 2026-07-28 specification with a stateless-first protocol, standardized HTTP headers, and Multi Round-Trip Requests for interactive tools, all while staying backward compatible.
Package Integrity and Enforcement
A recent conversation started (as many interesting conversations do) with a simple question: "Why is MSIX secure?" MSIX includes multiple layers of protection designed to defend against both accidental damage and malicious tampering. But as with all good security solutions, it's not the individual elements so much as their interlocking design that makes the whole stronger than the sum of its parts. MSIX was designed around several core facets, integrated in sometimes novel ways. A packaged process can be trusted to a higher degree than most applications because Windows maintains a verifiable chain of trust fr...
Visual Studio July Update – Meet the New Agent, Powered by the GitHub Copilot SDK
There's a new Agent (Preview) in Copilot Chat, built on the same GitHub Copilot SDK that powers the GitHub Copilot CLI, that gets more done with less back-and-forth.
Find any commit in seconds: Commit Search comes to Azure DevOps
Great code has a long memory. The fix you shipped last quarter, the refactor that touched a dozen files, the one-line change that explained why something works the way it does — it's all there in your commit history. The hard part has always been finding it. Today, we're excited to announce that Commit Search is entering general availability (GA) in Azure DevOps. This is a capability our team has been building and refining for quite some time — through design, a private preview with early customers, and a careful, staged rollout — and we couldn't be happier to bring it to everyone. Why we built Commit Search C...
Making an agile version of a Windows Runtime delegate in C++/WinRT, part 7
Further explorations into exception safety.
Refactor your database with SQL projects in VS Code
SQL database projects are a fundamental tool for keeping your database in source control, tracking changes and collaborating on quickly evolving database needs. Not to be forgotten, their superpower is being able to dynamically generate deployment scripts that match the declared state and the exact environment you're deploying to. SQL project development becomes more challenging when a database needs serious changes, where the requirements of the system have evolved to the point of having to rename tables and move objects between schemas. In plain T-SQL, we can rename a table or column without having to co...
Discover Agent Skills from MCP servers in .NET
Your agents can now discover and load Agent Skills directly from a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server. Instead of shipping every skill inside your application or copying skill folders into each deployment, you point an agent at an MCP server and it pulls the skills it needs on demand. A central team can publish skills once, and every agent across your organization picks them up without a redeploy. This is available today in .NET through the package. For makers, this removes a distribution problem: you author a skill in one place and serve it to many agents. For enterprise leaders, it means domain expertise –...
Query Performance Tuning in Azure DocumentDB: A Practical Guide
Writing a query that works is easy. Writing a query that scales is a different story. As collections grow to millions of documents, queries that returned results in milliseconds during development start taking seconds or timing out entirely. The root cause is almost always the same: the database is doing far more work than it needs to. In this post, we’ll take a single, realistic query and walk through the full optimization process: running explain() to understand what’s happening under the hood, building indexes step by step, and applying the ESR rule to design a compound index that eliminates wasted scans and...
Analyze MSBuild Binary Logs with Copilot in VS Code
Meet the MSBuild Binlog Analyzer for VS Code - a Copilot-powered way to read MSBuild binary logs, explain and fix build failures with one click, compare builds, and catch regressions, backed by the Microsoft.AITools.BinlogMcp MCP server.
A new way to bring native Windows APIs to JavaScript – introducing dynamic API projections for Node.js
Electron and Node.js make it straightforward to build Windows desktop apps in JavaScript. Calling Windows Runtime APIs has been less straightforward: features such as on-device AI often required a C++ or C# bridge, manual translation of WinRT types and asynchronous behavior, and wrapper code for every exposed API. That meant another language and toolchain to build, test, and keep compatible with Electron. We're making a dynamic Windows Runtime API (WinRT) projection for Node.js available in public preview. It lets an Electron app or plain Node.js process call supported Windows Runtime APIs directly fro...
Making an agile version of a Windows Runtime delegate in C++/WinRT, part 6
Exception-safety, the invisible bug.
Java OpenJDK July 2026 Patch & Security Update
Hello Java customers! We are happy to announce the latest July 2026 patch & security update release for the Microsoft Build of OpenJDK. Check our release notes page for details on fixes and enhancements or download and install the binaries today. The source code of our builds are now available on GitHub for further inspection: Microsoft Build of OpenJDK specific updates OpenJDK 25 OpenJDK 21 OpenJDK 17 OpenJDK 11 Summary of Upstream Updates OpenJDK Vulnerability Advisory July 2026 OpenJDK 25 OpenJDK 21 ...
Making an agile version of a Windows Runtime delegate in C++/WinRT, part 5
Making sure to use the non-agile delegate non-agile-ly.
Native Agent Memory for Microsoft Agent Framework, Powered by Azure Cosmos DB
Recently we introduced the Agent Memory Toolkit and the Agentic Retrieval Toolkit for Azure Cosmos DB. The Agent Memory Toolkit gives your agents durable, Cosmos-backed memory: it stores raw conversation turns and then distills them into higher-value derived memories (thread summaries, extracted facts, and cross-thread user profiles), all searchable with vector, full-text, and hybrid search in the one database you already use. Today we're taking the next step. With the latest release of Microsoft Agent Framework, you can now drop that memory into an agent with a single object: the , shipped in the new package f...
The Microsoft 365 Copilot Agent’s Playbook: A Practical Livestream Series for Building Better Agents
Building on Microsoft 365 Copilot? Here's your playbook. Declarative agents are quickly becoming one of the most exciting ways to extend Microsoft 365 Copilot and bring organizational knowledge, workflows, and tools directly into the flow of work. But as agent capabilities grow, so does the need for practical guidance: How do you build agents that are useful, grounded, extensible, and measurable? That’s why we’re launching The Microsoft 365 Copilot Agent’s Playbook, a four-part livestream series designed to help developers, makers, and technical teams understand how modern Microsoft 365 Copilot decl...