Browse All Posts (111)

Microsoft Defender Security Research Team reports on a dependency confusion campaign using 33 malicious npm packages that execute an obfuscated postinstall payload to fingerprint developer and build environments, and shares concrete mitigations plus Microsoft Defender detections and hunting queries to find related activity.

lily-ma announces a public preview update to the Azure Functions MCP extension: a new MCP prompt trigger that completes support for MCP’s core server primitives (tools, resources, and prompts). The post explains what MCP prompts are, shows Python examples, and links to quickstarts and docs.

Allison announces an update to the GitHub Copilot usage metrics REST API that adds AI adoption cohorts, helping enterprises and organizations understand not just who is using Copilot, but which Copilot surfaces they’re engaging with and how usage evolves over time.

GitHub shares a weekly “The Download” roundup covering Microsoft Build 2026 session picks, ecosystem news (Anthropic, Deno 2.8, Bun’s Rust move), Microsoft’s Azure Linux 4.0 release, and the general availability of GitHub Copilot Remote Control for taking local sessions on the go.

Reynald Adolphe and Vijay Upadya introduce Chronicle, an experimental VS Code feature that stores your GitHub Copilot Chat history locally in SQLite so you can query past sessions, generate standup-style summaries, and get feedback on how you prompt.

leereilly highlights four AI-focused open source projects featured in the Open Source Zone at Microsoft Build 2026, with a quick overview of what each project does and why developers might want to check them out in person or online.

stclarke introduces Data Formulator 0.7, an open-source, AI-powered workspace for enterprise data analytics that focuses on governed data connectivity, context-aware agents, and iterative visualization refinement across long-running analysis workflows.

Rob Lefferts summarizes why Microsoft Defender for Endpoint was named a Leader in the 2026 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Endpoint Protection, highlighting recent product capabilities like attack disruption with predictive shielding, custom telemetry collection for advanced hunting, simplified onboarding for Windows and Linux, and sovereign-ready data controls.

mamathews rounds up May 2026 community picks from Microsoft MVPs and Fabric Super Users, spanning Power BI/VertiPaq performance, Fabric lakehouse design choices, Fabric Data Factory foundations with ADLS, NLP embeddings in Fabric, capacity cost optimization, Logic Apps-based capacity scheduling, and SharePoint list mirroring into Fabric.

John Edward explains where Microsoft Copilot Studio sits in the Power Platform, and how it connects conversational AI to apps, workflows, data, and analytics through tools like Power Apps, Power Automate, Dataverse, and Power BI.

The Visual Studio Code Team shares what’s new in VS Code 1.123, with updates to the Agents experience and chat workflows, including handing off chat sessions to the Agents window, sending attachment-only chat requests, and improvements to Copilot Cloud task rendering.

Ayushman Bhattacharya explains how Pollinations.ai runs open source maintenance at scale, focusing on the practical systems they use to bring in contributors and keep work moving. The session covers contributor workflows, AI-assisted PR review, app submission pipelines, and how maintainers structure day-to-day work.

Liam Hampton demonstrates how to use third-party coding agents (Claude and Codex) inside Visual Studio Code via GitHub Copilot’s agent tooling, including when to choose local vs. remote execution and a short end-to-end demo workflow.

Jesse Houwing shows how to automate GitHub Copilot AI Credits budgeting by assigning per-user budgets based on Microsoft Entra ID group membership, using a GitHub Actions workflow and a PowerShell script that calls the GitHub enterprise billing API via the GitHub CLI.

John Savill shares a quick weekly Azure update covering what’s new across the Azure platform, aimed at keeping practitioners current on recent changes and announcements.

Hidde de Smet lays out a practical KPI scorecard for teams adopting AI coding agents under usage-based billing, using GitHub Copilot’s AI Credits model as the concrete example. It focuses on measuring speed, quality, reliability, and spend together, with a rollout plan and data sources you can wire into a weekly dashboard.

Fokko at Work demos selected new features in Visual Studio Code 1.122, focusing on GitHub Copilot updates like BYOK without GitHub login, the Agents window, and the built-in browser with device emulation, with notes on how enterprise policies and pricing plans can affect availability.

aakarshdhawan walks through building a React + TypeScript single-page app with Vite and deploying the compiled output to Microsoft Power Pages using the Power Platform CLI, including routing gotchas, activation steps, Dataverse Web API usage, and key security considerations around permissions and web roles.

paggarwal introduces Engineering Squad, an open-source multi-agent framework that turns plain-text requirements into user stories, technical design, production code, and automated tests using Azure OpenAI and Foundry Local, with a self-correcting review loop and traceable run artifacts.

yuvmaz breaks down the MegaTrain paper’s approach to training 100B+ parameter LLMs on a single GPU by treating GPU memory as a cache and streaming layers from host memory/NVMe. The post connects the technique to Azure NC-series VM choices, storage throughput, PCIe constraints, and cost/performance trade-offs.

Microsoft Defender Security Research Team reports on the “Mini Shai-Hulud” supply-chain campaign where typosquatted npm packages execute during install to steal cloud and CI/CD secrets. The post breaks down the two-stage payload, key indicators, and concrete hunting and mitigation steps for defenders.

Randy Pagels explains how to reduce repeated prompting by capturing team conventions in a copilot-instructions.md file so GitHub Copilot can generate code that matches your repo’s standards, architecture expectations, and preferred testing and design patterns.

AmirB announces a public preview that brings built-in CIS Benchmarks for Windows Server to Azure Policy via Machine Configuration, targeting Azure VMs and Arc-enabled machines. The post outlines what’s supported today (Windows Server 2025), how the workflow mirrors the Linux experience, and what’s coming next around remediation and broader baseline coverage.

mosiddi walks through the OWASP Top 10 risks for agentic applications (2026) and maps each risk to concrete mitigations in Microsoft’s open-source Agent Governance Toolkit (AGT), including policy-as-code enforcement, capability sandboxing, zero-trust identity, execution isolation, encrypted inter-agent comms, and tamper-evident audit trails.

Allison announces enforceable hard budget limits for GitHub Advanced Security (GHAS), letting enterprise admins cap license usage so new GHAS enablement is blocked once the limit is reached, while keeping existing budget alerts and adding license-to-cost visibility.

Allison summarizes the CodeQL 2.25.5 release, focusing on accuracy improvements to GitHub code scanning queries across C/C++, Java/Kotlin, and GitHub Actions, with several changes aimed at reducing false positives and improving detection coverage for workflow and composite action metadata.

Kayla Cinnamon demonstrates how to enable and use Remote Sessions for Copilot CLI agent sessions, so you can reconnect to the same running session from the web and the GitHub Mobile app.

GitHub introduces Project Pods, a program aimed at helping mission-driven open source nonprofits tackle stalled, high-impact work by pairing maintainers with skilled volunteer teams to coordinate and deliver larger initiatives.

dbandaru explains why Azure SRE Agent is shipping an MCP server before its interactive CLI and subprocess “agent mode”, focusing on how different callers (humans in coding agents vs remote automation agents) drive interface, schema, and response-contract design.

GitHub replays a Rubber Duck Thursdays session focused on talking through coding problems and debugging approaches in a live, conversational format.

Amanda Silver explains why open-sourcing TypeScript mattered, focusing on how community collaboration helped it evolve alongside major JavaScript frameworks like Angular, React, and Vue, and pointing viewers to the TypeScript GitHub repository.

Pieter de Bruin shows how Learn MCP Server can ground MCP-compatible coding agents in up-to-date Microsoft Learn docs, reducing failures caused by deprecated APIs. Using an Azure AI Foundry deployment example, he contrasts an agent that picks the outdated az ml path with one that queries Learn and uses az cognitiveservices successfully.

Allison announces that Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.8 is now available as a selectable model in GitHub Copilot, including details on plan availability, where you can use it (IDE and platform support), and the temporary 15× premium request multiplier ahead of usage-based billing.

mutemwamasheke announces general availability of customizable security baselines in Azure Policy Machine Configuration, covering what’s new, which standards are supported (CIS and Azure Compute baselines), and how to customize, assign, and maintain baselines across Azure and Azure Arc-enabled servers using portal workflows or policy-as-code.

Microsoft Developer explains how to add persistent memory to an AI agent using Microsoft Agent Framework, storing conversation history in SQL Server and showing how the same approach can be future-proofed with Azure SQL Database.

GitHub shows how to manage a full Git workflow directly inside Visual Studio Code using the built-in Source Control panel, including initializing a repo, staging changes, writing commit messages, and pushing to GitHub—without switching to a terminal.

Visual Studio Code shares a short clip about “Copilot Teaches”, pointing to a longer explanation of how GitHub Copilot customization works in VS Code using concepts like instructions, skills, and hooks.

Microsoft Threat Intelligence breaks down The Gentlemen ransomware, a Go-based RaaS encryptor for Windows that pairs per-file Curve25519/XChaCha20 encryption with aggressive self-propagation. The post covers execution flags, defense evasion, persistence, lateral movement techniques, and Microsoft Defender detections, hunting queries, and IOCs.

DevClass reports on a multi-hour GitHub Actions outage that surfaced an incorrect “Your account is suspended” error, why Actions downtime can block CI/CD even when developers can still code locally, and what GitHub’s incident updates said about authentication issues and follow-on data cleanup.

John Edward explains how Declarative Agents and Autonomous Agents differ in Microsoft Copilot Studio, focusing on how each approach handles control, decision-making, and multi-step work. The article maps the trade-offs (predictability vs flexibility), gives practical use cases for each agent type, and offers guidance on choosing the right model for a given workflow.