Browse All Blogs (89)

Rob Bos shares a curated set of GitHub governance references he regularly sends to teams, covering enterprise platform baselines, GitHub Actions supply-chain controls, GitHub Advanced Security rollout and triage practices, and GitHub Copilot governance topics like premium requests, extension governance, and MCP-related security notes.

Hidde de Smet breaks down why spec-driven development can either reduce risk or quietly add “delivery debt”, especially in regulated environments. He outlines six common process cost centers, a three-lane model (full/light/no-spec), and a small set of KPIs to tell when structure is paying off.

DevClass reports on GitHub briefly offering to mail a CD-ROM copy of a public repository via a Microsoft Form, then pulling the offer after confusion and ridicule. The piece highlights how the stunt intersected with developer concerns about GitHub reliability, repo sizes, and long-term access to source code.

Andrew Lock explains how .NET 11 improves System.Diagnostics.Process output handling to avoid stdout/stderr deadlocks, and introduces new APIs for capturing text, lines, and bytes from child processes with simpler sync and async patterns.

John Edward explains how Azure’s “Agentic Agents” can support resilient cloud operations across migration planning, observability, and continuous optimization. The article focuses on turning telemetry into actionable guidance, reducing alert fatigue, improving root-cause analysis, and driving cost, performance, security, and sustainability improvements in Azure environments.

John Edward explains how to get more out of Windows Terminal on Windows 11, focusing on practical workflow improvements like profiles, tabs, split panes, the command palette, and keyboard shortcuts, plus common setups for PowerShell, WSL, Git, and Azure CLI.

Randy Pagels shares three practical habits for getting more reliable results from GitHub Copilot: start with intent, ask for multiple options, and explicitly review assumptions before accepting generated code.

John Edward outlines an end-to-end approach for building a ServiceNow-focused AI assistant in Microsoft Copilot Studio, aimed at ticket auditing, SLA risk monitoring, and engineer performance reporting. The guide covers a layered architecture, ServiceNow REST API integration via Power Platform custom connectors, and practical security considerations for enterprise deployment.

DevClass reports on renewed community criticism of Microsoft’s .NET support lifecycle, arguing that the three-year LTS window is too short for enterprise upgrade and adoption cycles and can leave only a one-year window to move between LTS releases.

Andrew Lock explains the new C# “closed class hierarchies” feature in .NET 11 preview 5, showing how it restricts inheritance to a single assembly and why that matters for safer switch expressions. He also covers how to enable the preview feature and what limitations to expect.

Rick Strahl explains why inheriting ASP.NET Core MVC controllers with attribute routes can trigger ambiguous route matches (500 errors), and shows two practical fixes: using abstract base controllers to avoid duplicate route registration, or suppressing base-controller action descriptors with a custom IActionDescriptorProvider.

Rick Strahl explains why inheriting ASP.NET Core MVC controllers that use attribute routing can lead to 500 errors and ambiguous route matches, especially when the base controller lives in a referenced library. He breaks down the root cause (duplicate routes) and shows practical fixes for library and app authors.

John Edward explains how to combine a Copilot Studio agent with Power Automate to draft emails and route them through a human approval step before sending, creating a practical “human-in-the-loop” workflow for safer, more consistent business communication.

John Edward explains what an Agent Optimizer is in Azure AI Foundry Agent Service and why it matters for building reliable AI agents. The article breaks down how optimization works in practice—evaluating performance, refining instructions, improving workflows, and learning from feedback—to increase accuracy, efficiency, and user satisfaction.

Hidde de Smet explains how MCP’s Enterprise-Managed Authorization changes MCP authentication from per-server OAuth consent to policy-driven sign-in via an identity provider, with VS Code 1.123 preview support for Entra ID, Okta, and Auth0 and governance controls that pair with GitHub Copilot’s MCP registry policies.

Thomas Maurer explains what Azure Local Small Form Factor (SFF) is and why it matters for edge scenarios, then outlines an end-to-end deployment flow: provisioning a device as an Azure resource, installing the Azure Local OS, registering it with Azure Arc, and running container workloads with Docker and K3s.

John Edward explains what “agentic AI” means in the Microsoft ecosystem, focusing on how goal-driven agents plan tasks, call tools, and maintain memory. The article maps those concepts to Azure AI Foundry, Semantic Kernel, and Microsoft Graph, with concrete enterprise workflow examples.

DevClass reports on Vercel’s Ship event announcements, focusing on the new open source eve agent framework and enterprise controls like Passport for bringing AI-built apps and agents under centralized identity and policy, including OpenID Connect support for providers such as Okta and Microsoft Entra ID.

Tim D'haeyer explains how to replace BizTalk-style code-table mapping during migrations by using an Azure Function that enriches XML documents via XPath-driven rules and SQL lookups, keeping Azure Logic Apps focused on orchestration instead of complex transformation logic.

Andrew Lock explains the new StringBuilder.MoveChunks() API in .NET 11 preview 5, showing how it can avoid large ToString() allocations by transferring a StringBuilder’s internal buffers. He also digs into the implementation details and why this matters for Roslyn source generators and SourceText creation.

John Edward introduces the GitHub Copilot Desktop App and explains how it extends Copilot beyond the IDE into a standalone workspace for understanding repositories, planning work, and getting AI help across day-to-day development tasks.

Rick Strahl breaks down three practical ways to ship a Windows app that works as both a GUI and a CLI, using his WebPackageViewer tool as the example and calling out the real-world trade-offs around console attachment, prompt glitches, and console-window flashing.

DevClass reports on upcoming npm 12 default changes that stop install-time scripts from running automatically, aiming to reduce a major supply-chain attack surface on developer machines and CI runners. The piece explains the new flags, breaking-change impact, and how teams can prepare using npm 11.x settings.

DevClass reports on Checkmarx survey findings that many developers believe AI-generated code contains more vulnerabilities, yet some still ship it to production. The piece connects AI-assisted development, open source supply-chain risk, and security process gaps to higher breach frequency.

John Edward explains why AI apps are moving from single “copilot” assistants to multi-agent systems, and how Semantic Kernel can be used to orchestrate specialized agents that collaborate via tools, memory, and coordination patterns—along with the practical engineering challenges this introduces.

Thomas Maurer explains Azure Local Simplified Machine Provisioning, a new workflow for provisioning physical Azure Local nodes with minimal on-site work while keeping configuration and control centralized in Azure.

Jesse Houwing explains how to connect Azure Pipelines to GitHub Enterprise Cloud with data residency (ghe.com) by manually installing the Azure Pipelines GitHub App, then creating a service connection and rewiring existing pipelines to use the new GitHub repo as their source.

John Edward shares a practical list of 25 project ideas for building custom AI agents with Microsoft Copilot Studio, ranging from personal productivity assistants to customer support, onboarding, IT help desk, and document review bots.

John Edward explains how Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) works and how Azure AI Search fits into a production-ready RAG architecture, covering indexing, semantic and vector search, embeddings, chunking strategies, and practical steps to build a basic retrieval + generation workflow.

Hidde de Smet shows how to add fast local guardrails for Azure Terraform by running fmt, validate, tflint, Trivy, and terraform-docs on every git commit. The post includes a working pre-commit config, Azure-specific lint rules, and an MCP-based workflow to keep generated HCL current and policy-aligned.

John Edward explains how Microsoft Fabric OneLake in Azure acts as a single, organization-wide data lake and why it matters for modern enterprise analytics architecture, including reducing data silos, supporting lakehouse patterns, and improving governance and AI readiness.

Thomas Maurer explains how Azure Local multi-rack deployments extend Azure-consistent management from small clusters to datacenter-scale footprints, including the core architecture (SAN-backed disaggregated design), minimum rack layout, and how operations are handled through familiar Azure tooling like the portal, CLI, and ARM/Bicep.

Rick Strahl walks through an edge-case but practical .NET Framework/WPF tool that packages a static documentation website into a single Windows EXE, then unpacks and renders it offline using WebView2. He covers the packaging approach, ILRepack-based single-file builds, embedding native dependencies, and the SmartScreen/code-signing trade-offs.

Thomas Maurer explains how LAPS for Azure Arc extends Windows LAPS so teams can centrally audit and enforce local admin password rotation across Azure VMs and Arc-enabled servers, with Azure Policy-based compliance reporting that works in hybrid and regulated environments.

John Edward outlines practical ALM and environment strategy guidance for Microsoft Copilot Studio, focusing on how to run copilots like enterprise applications with multi-environment setups, solution-based development, source control, CI/CD pipelines, configuration management, governance, and ongoing monitoring.

Hidde de Smet compares the GitHub Copilot App and the VS Code Agents Window, focusing on how each surface supports agent-first workflows: isolated sessions, worktrees, review/CI loops, and customization via MCP and instruction files. It includes a practical “which one should you use?” decision guide for day-to-day development vs delegated work.

DevClass rounds up Microsoft Build announcements that matter to developers, including new Windows sandboxing for AI agents (MXC), an Arm-based Surface RTX Spark Dev Box, GitHub Enterprise Local for connected or air-gapped environments, Azure Linux updates, and Microsoft-maintained Coreutils for Windows.

John Edward explains how to design multi-agent architectures in Microsoft Copilot Studio, using an orchestrator copilot plus specialized agents (IT, HR, sales, analytics). The article covers communication options (Power Automate, Dataverse, REST APIs), governance and security considerations, and practical scaling guidance like monitoring, shared knowledge sources, and independent versioning.

DevClass reports on .NET Aspire 13.4, highlighting the general availability of the TypeScript AppHost and new integrations that broaden Aspire beyond C#-only workflows. The piece also covers deployment targets (including Azure and Kubernetes), the Aspire dashboard’s OpenTelemetry-based observability, and notable Kubernetes-related improvements.

John Edward walks through creating a first AI agent in Microsoft Copilot Studio, from defining the agent and connecting knowledge sources to enabling generative answers, testing conversations, and publishing to channels like Teams and websites.