Browse All News (706)

Allison announces expanded GitHub Copilot app reporting in the Copilot usage metrics API, adding user attribution and rollups across features, models, and languages, plus token and code activity breakdowns to help enterprises compare Copilot surfaces consistently.

Allison announces npm publish-time malware scanning and explains how it can delay package availability, when publishes may be held or blocked, and how maintainers can declare dual-use security functionality using new package metadata and a required DISCLOSURE file.

fredguis outlines upcoming OneLake Security changes for Microsoft Fabric SQL analytics endpoints, focusing on enterprise-friendly access control. The update improves nested group resolution, shortcut-backed table behavior in hub-and-spoke lakehouse setups, more consistent column-level security with group-based access, and broader service principal support for automated and app-owned data products.

Jeff Handley announces MCP C# SDK v2.0, which implements the 2026-07-28 MCP specification revision. The post explains the new stateless-first HTTP transport, standardized routing headers, and Multi Round-Trip Requests (MRTR) for interactive tools, plus what stays backward compatible and what changes for Tasks and other extensions.

Allison announces that Grok 4.5 (xAI’s reasoning model) is rolling out in GitHub Copilot, highlighting its large context window, multimodal inputs, and suitability for agentic, multi-step coding workflows. The post also covers where you can select the model and how admins enable it for Business and Enterprise.

Mark Downie introduces the Visual Studio July update, centered on a new Agent (Preview) in Copilot Chat built on the GitHub Copilot SDK. The post also covers built-in .NET and Azure skills, org-level Copilot custom instructions, attaching Git branches as chat context, and improved MSVC toolset discovery for reproducible C++ builds.

Greg Ose summarizes the security changes GitHub and npm shipped over recent months to break common supply chain attack paths, focusing on preventing workflow compromise, reducing credential exposure, slowing malicious propagation, and improving incident response options for enterprises.

aonelakeuser outlines summer updates to OneLake security in Microsoft Fabric, including broader engine coverage (Eventhouse and Fabric Graph), a simplified column-level security UI, faster Secure tab performance, a redesigned SQL Analytics Endpoint sync model, and generally available OneLake security APIs.

Alex Pysanets announces the general availability of Commit Search in Azure DevOps, a new way to find commits by searching commit message text across projects and repositories, with filters for project, repo, author, and branch plus sorting by time or relevance.

Allison announces an update to Dependabot malware alerts: GitHub Advisory Database now ingests malware advisories from the OpenSSF malicious-packages repository, expanding detection coverage across more ecosystems and surfacing matches as Dependabot alerts in your repos and orgs.

Allison announces a new GitHub Actions protection that automatically holds certain workflow runs flagged as potentially malicious until a collaborator with write access reviews and approves them via an authenticated web session.

Sergey Menshykh explains how .NET agents can discover and load Agent Skills directly from a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server using the Microsoft Agent Framework, so teams can publish skills centrally and have agents pull them on demand without redeploying.

Allison announces updates to GitHub Copilot for JetBrains, including configurable OpenTelemetry export for agent workflows, tighter controls for model behavior (token limits, enabling/disabling built-in models), and support for MCP servers and custom agents in Claude agent flows, plus Copilot CLI and UX improvements.

Santhosh_Ravin1 explains how Microsoft Fabric Spark’s Native Execution Engine now accelerates CSV reads with a native, SIMD-optimized reader, improving common data engineering workloads without requiring code changes.

Allison announces a new dedicated policy for the GitHub Copilot app, letting enterprises and organizations control access independently from Copilot CLI. The update keeps existing guardrails in place by routing changes through isolated workspaces and pull requests, so reviews, checks, and audit history still apply.

Burke Holland shares a practical GitHub Copilot “harness” workflow for building features end-to-end: pick a Copilot surface, enable more autonomy safely, prototype and plan in the same session, implement with Autopilot, then iterate and run a Rubber Duck review to catch blind spots.

AmirJafari announces updates to Fabric data agents in Microsoft Foundry, focusing on simpler MCP-based connectivity, OneLake Catalog discovery, support for attaching multiple data agents to a single Foundry agent, and improved production troubleshooting via Foundry Observability traces and logs.

Satya Nadella announces MAI-Cyber-1-Flash, a cybersecurity-focused model aimed at finding difficult vulnerabilities in large codebases, and describes how it pairs with MDASH to reduce cost while maintaining strong results. He also introduces Project Perception, an agentic security offering built around real-world signals and security workflows.

Allison announces that enterprise managed settings now apply to the GitHub Copilot app and Copilot cloud agent, letting enterprise owners enforce a single managed-settings.json policy across more Copilot clients, including controls for plugins, marketplaces, and approval-prompt bypass behavior.

Yuliia Kovalova and Jan Krivanek introduce the MSBuild Binlog Analyzer for VS Code, a preview extension that uses GitHub Copilot Chat plus an MCP server to explain build failures, pinpoint performance bottlenecks, compare builds, and spot regressions directly from MSBuild .binlog files.

mayurjain explains how the OpenAI Assistants API retirement on August 26, 2026 affects programmatic integrations with Microsoft Fabric Data Agents, and why Microsoft recommends moving to the Data Agent Model Context Protocol (MCP) endpoint instead of rebuilding directly on OpenAI’s Responses API.

robece-msft introduces the fundamentals of event-driven architecture in Microsoft Fabric, focusing on Real-Time Hub and how Fabric’s event capabilities help workloads react to meaningful business signals in real time.

sbaynes introduces MAI-Cyber-1-Flash, Microsoft’s compact cyber-focused model used inside MDASH to handle most security tasks at lower token cost, while reserving larger models for harder cases. The post also outlines Project Perception’s agentic security workflows and the safety, governance, and enterprise controls built into deployment.

Ram Shankar Siva Kumar announces Microsoft’s External Red Team Alliance (EXTRA), a global effort to expand AI red teaming beyond internal teams by funding academic research and building an external network of specialists to test frontier AI systems across languages, regions, and domains.

Christopher Harrison introduces the GitHub Copilot app and shows how it supports real-world development workflows with project-scoped agent sessions, Quick Chat for parallel threads, interactive canvases for visual iteration, and Agent Merge to help move pull requests through CI and review.

Shireesh Thota summarizes what customers say they value most in Microsoft’s database portfolio, and ties that feedback to recent and upcoming investments across SQL Server, Azure SQL Database, Azure Database for PostgreSQL, and Azure Cosmos DB—especially around reliability, scalability, and AI-ready capabilities like vector search and RAG.

Allison announces that Anthropic’s Claude Opus 5 is now selectable in GitHub Copilot, highlighting its strengths on long-running, multi-step coding tasks and agentic workflows, plus where it’s available, how admins enable it for Business/Enterprise, and how usage-based billing applies.

Allison announces general availability of Copilot cloud agent for Linear, letting teams assign Linear issues to Copilot to produce draft pull requests, run work in an ephemeral environment backed by GitHub Actions, and report progress back into Linear with configurable models, branches, and custom agents.

arindamc explains how to build a real-time “row-to-intelligent-action” pipeline in Microsoft Fabric that captures shopping-cart signals via CDC, reshapes them into analytics-ready rows, and enriches each micro-batch with AI in a Spark Structured Streaming notebook to drive timely actions.

Allison announces that GitHub MCP Server already supports the upcoming stateless MCP specification, outlining protocol changes (like removing sessions and initialize) and what GitHub changed internally to stay compatible while improving scalability and verification.

sbaynes announces two new Microsoft in-house model variants—MAI-Image-2.5-Pro and MAI-Voice-2-Flash—now in public preview, and explains where they’re already running in production across Microsoft products and Azure, including pricing, performance claims, and developer entry points via Azure AI Foundry.

Allison announces a GitHub Mobile improvement that lets you use the Copilot cloud coding agent to investigate and fix failing GitHub Actions checks directly from a pull request, creating a follow-up PR for you to review and merge.

Steve Sweetman explains how AT&T built and scaled its telecom-focused OTel 2.0 models using Microsoft Foundry Managed Compute, combining open models from Hugging Face with AMD and NVIDIA GPU capacity to process around one trillion tokens while optimizing for cost, performance, and deployment speed.

Allison announces a public preview update for GitHub Projects and GitHub Issues: multi-select fields, allowing a single field to store multiple values and enabling filtering, grouping, and searching across project views.

Peter Ibekwe announces Agent Framework Declarative Workflows 1.0 for both Python and .NET, showing how to define multi-agent orchestration in YAML (branching, state, handoffs, and human approvals) and then load and run it as a standard runtime workflow.

HARMEETGILL announces the general availability of OneLake resource instance rules in Microsoft Fabric, explaining how workspace admins can allow secure service-to-service access from specific Azure resource instances (like Databricks or Azure SQL) without relying on broad IP allowlists or private networking everywhere.

Carlin Cherry explains why Dependabot now applies a default three-day cooldown before opening non-security version update pull requests, aiming to reduce exposure to fast-moving supply chain attacks where malicious package releases are discovered and removed within hours.

Allison announces a public preview for GitHub Issues agent automation controls, adding approvals, confidence ratings, and rationale so teams can review or auto-apply agent-driven changes like labeling, assigning, and closing issues.

Microsoft Threat Intelligence and the Microsoft Defender Security Research Team summarize Q2 2026 email and Teams threat trends, including the post-disruption decline of Tycoon2FA-linked phishing, shifts in QR code and CAPTCHA-gated lures, and notable BEC and malware-delivery campaigns, plus concrete Defender configuration and response guidance.

Andrea Griffiths breaks down what GitHub Copilot subscriptions pay for beyond raw model API calls, including the developer workflow surfaces Copilot connects, how GitHub AI Credits are metered, and when direct API access (or BYOK) makes more sense for teams building their own agent systems.