Browse All Posts (156)

Christina Warren recaps developer news from Microsoft Build and GitHub, including updates to the GitHub Copilot desktop app (cloud and local sandboxes) and the general availability of Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5 model for Copilot, plus a quick look at GitHub Universe and an open source project spotlight.

John Savill rounds up a week of Azure platform changes and retirements, spanning compute/storage updates, database and identity improvements, monitoring changes, and several developer-facing AI items including GitHub Copilot Agent Mode in SSMS and Azure AI Foundry agent licensing and model availability.

Allison outlines when GitHub Actions will start enforcing minimum versions for self-hosted runners, including the registration baseline, the ongoing 30-day update requirement, and the brownout schedule leading up to full enforcement for GitHub Enterprise Cloud and Data Residency tenants.

Visual Studio Code shares a quick walkthrough of three MCP servers they use daily in VS Code—GitHub, Playwright, and Microsoft Learn—to extend GitHub Copilot Agent mode for PR review, real-browser testing, and pulling up-to-date documentation as context.

RohitMadhavKrishnan introduces ArchAngel, an educational AI coding assistant designed to bring a team’s engineering standards directly into the IDE, so junior developers get constructive feedback while they write code. The post outlines the core idea, a reference architecture, and the Microsoft-centric stack used to ground guidance in “golden repos.”

BhaktiRath95 walks through common failure modes when running AI/ML inference workloads on Azure Container Apps, including slow model startup, probe timeouts, OOM kills, and GPU initialization problems. The post provides concrete probe settings, Python/FastAPI patterns, and Log Analytics queries to diagnose and fix issues methodically.

Bruno Capuano and Tommaso Stocchi walk through building distributed multi-agent applications using .NET Aspire and Microsoft Agent Framework (MAF), focusing on how multiple agents coordinate across services and exchange context. The session connects these patterns to Foundry-oriented scenarios and demonstrates them with a ski resort example.

Daniel Roth and guests walk through recent Razor editor and tooling improvements aimed at making ASP.NET Core development faster and more reliable, with demos showing how the updates reduce friction in day-to-day workflows.

John Savill gives a fast-paced rundown of key announcements from Microsoft Build 2026, highlighting notable platform updates across Azure, AI, and identity/security topics such as Entra and passkeys.

Allison announces GitHub Enterprise Server (GHES) 3.21 general availability, highlighting updates for enterprise admins including organization custom properties for targeting rulesets, GitHub Projects hierarchy view, a new REST API version with breaking changes, GitHub Actions workflow page performance improvements, secret scanning governance updates, and multi-disk storage configuration.

Gloridel Morales announces the June 2026 patch releases for Azure DevOps Server, with direct download links, release notes references, and a quick command you can run on the server to verify whether the patch is installed.

Natalie Guevara summarizes GitHub’s May 2026 availability incidents and the reliability work underway, including moving parts of the monolith to Azure, isolating database domains, and hardening GitHub Actions and Copilot services against cascading failures.

Visual Studio Code highlights new Integrated Browser improvements in VS Code, including saving browser favorites, taking full-page or region screenshots, and using browser content as context for GitHub Copilot and agent workflows.

Dirk Brinkmann shows how to turn Azure Savings Plan recommendations into defensible, hour-by-hour data by exporting the underlying PAYG usage series and alternative commitment levels from the Azure Cost Management Benefit Recommendations API, using a companion PowerShell script that outputs CSV, Markdown, and JSON files.

Allison announces an update to GitHub Actions where pull requests opened by github-actions[bot] can run CI/CD workflows after a user with write access approves them, reducing the risk of merging untested bot changes while keeping a security gate for workflows that can access sensitive data.

MichalBar introduces a preview redesign of Microsoft Fabric Real-Time Dashboards tile editing, adding Copilot-assisted visual authoring alongside a more code-friendly KQL workflow. The post walks through creating a visual from a prompt or query, iterating with history, and testing parameterized queries directly in the editor.

viviandiec announces general availability of OpenTelemetry (OTel) Guest OS metrics for Azure VMs and Arc-enabled Servers, plus an updated Azure Monitor VM experience. The post explains what metrics are available, how OTel compares to Log Analytics-based metrics, and how to use PromQL and Grafana dashboards for troubleshooting at scale.

Allison explains an update to GitHub AI usage reports so GitHub AI Credits usage is reflected in the standard report fields, including what to use going forward and what changed for data since June 1.

GitHub hosts a Rubber Duck Thursdays session focused on coding, coworking, and discussing takeaways from Microsoft Build.

Waldek Mastykarz explains how AI coding agents can silently scaffold outdated Node.js projects when they run npx without pinning versions, due to npm’s engine-aware manifest selection. The post breaks down why this happens and gives practical steps to make agent-driven scaffolding more predictable.

Sokuma announces the general availability of Service Level Indicators (SLIs) and Service Level Objectives (SLOs) in Azure Monitor, outlining how teams can track customer-experience reliability with SLI authoring, SLO tracking, error budgets, and burn rate–based alerting in a single Azure Monitor workflow.

Sokuma announces the general availability of Azure Monitor Metrics Export using data collection rules (DCRs), highlighting how to continuously stream platform metrics to Azure Storage, Event Hubs, or Log Analytics with multidimensional metrics support, metric-name filtering, and typical end-to-end latency of about three minutes.

MichalBar introduces the Time Series Visualization (Preview) for Microsoft Fabric Real-Time Dashboards, focusing on how to explore multivariate time series data with series search and grouping, synchronized time-range navigation, and visual customization options like adaptive scaling and linear/log axis modes.

Laurent Bugnion explains why Microsoft Build 2026 labs are a popular way for developers to learn through hands-on sessions, including tracks that cover AI, Copilot, and Microsoft Fabric. He also shares where to find the on-demand “Digital lab” sessions and how long they remain available after the event.

Allison announces a new /settings command in GitHub Copilot CLI that centralizes configuration into a schema-driven interface, supporting an interactive full-screen dialog, inline one-liners, and reset-to-default workflows with tab-completed keys and validation.

Laurent Bugnion explains why the hands-on labs at Microsoft Build 2026 are popular, highlighting practical sessions across AI, Copilot, Microsoft Fabric, and other developer topics, plus how to find and access the digital labs on demand after the event.

Allison announces two new GitHub-hosted runner images in public preview for GitHub Actions, aimed at helping teams validate CI workloads on newer platforms and toolchains before they reach general availability.

Allison announces the public preview of GitHub Agentic Workflows, a GitHub Actions capability that lets teams define reasoning-based automations in natural-language Markdown and compile them into standard Actions YAML, with built-in controls aimed at keeping agent-driven changes safe to apply.

Dan Wahlin demonstrates an “agentic journey” workflow that takes an app idea through planning, coding, infrastructure creation, and deployment to Azure, using GitHub Copilot CLI and Azure skills to handle tasks like Bicep templates, health probes, and database wiring for an app backed by Azure SQL and Microsoft Foundry.

MichalBar announces general availability of Live Refresh for Real-Time Dashboards in Microsoft Fabric, an event-driven refresh model that updates visuals when new data is ingested. The post explains how it reduces polling overhead, supports pausing/resuming during investigation, and provides configuration options like fallback refresh intervals.

Natalie Guevara explains how GitHub improved secret scanning alert quality by adding LLM-based contextual verification, reducing false positives while keeping detection coverage. The post breaks down where verification fits in the pipeline, what “better context” means in practice, and the measured impact on customer-confirmed false positive alerts.

Allison announces that GitHub Agentic Workflows can now authenticate using GitHub Actions’ built-in GITHUB_TOKEN instead of a personal access token, reducing the risk of long-lived credentials and enabling organization-level billing for Copilot CLI usage in agentic workflows.

Laura Jiang announces Copilot Autofix in limited private preview for GitHub Advanced Security for Azure DevOps, which generates suggested fixes for supported CodeQL alerts and turns them into pull requests. The post explains what’s covered in preview, how the workflow fits into existing review gates, and how usage is billed via Azure.

GitHub explains the practical difference between git merge and git rebase, focusing on how each approach affects branch integration and commit history. It frames merge as a way to preserve the full story of how work came together, and rebase as a way to keep a personal branch’s history clean and up to date.

Leah Tran introduces Visual Studio 18.7’s pull request review experience, which lets developers open PRs, browse diffs, discuss comments, and approve or merge changes from inside the IDE for both GitHub and Azure DevOps repos.

analyticanna introduces Rayfin (Preview), an open-source SDK and CLI for turning content like markdown into shareable, hosted sites deployed as first-class items in Microsoft Fabric, with stable URLs, workspace-based access control, and data captured into a SQL database in Fabric for use across OneLake workloads.

Sunita_AZ0708 explains how to run Ansys Discovery on Azure using NVads V710 v5 GPU VMs, including a reference architecture, right-sizing guidance for fractional GPUs, and validation results across fluid, thermal, and structural simulation scenarios.

Rafia Aqil explains how to diagnose and respond when Azure Databricks clusters can’t start or scale due to Azure regional VM capacity constraints, including what to send to Microsoft support, which VM families to switch to, and longer-term design choices like instance pools, serverless compute, and multi-region deployments.

ShubhamSachdeva99 explains how to switch built-in connector connections at runtime in Azure Logic Apps Standard by making the service provider action’s connectionName dynamic, enabling a single workflow to route to different SFTP/SQL/Service Bus endpoints per team or environment.

TulikaC introduces new Azure CLI commands for listing and viewing Azure App Service for Linux startup logs, making it easier to diagnose container initialization issues, runtime startup failures, warmup probe problems, and slot-specific startup behavior directly from the command line.