Browse All Posts (162)

analyticanna rounds up the Microsoft SQL updates shipped in the first half of 2026 across Azure SQL, SQL Server, and SQL database in Microsoft Fabric, with links to each GA/Preview announcement. Highlights include T-SQL regex features, Entra-based logins, TDE improvements, embeddings support, and new tooling in SSMS and VS Code (including GitHub Copilot features).

Aditya Badmaraju explains which Azure service he relied on most when building AI apps, focusing on why Azure SQL can be a central component for operational data, vector search, and building grounded AI experiences.

Allison announces a change to GitHub Copilot Free and Student plans: model selection is now handled only through Copilot auto model selection, which dynamically routes each task to an appropriate model and removes manual model choice.

sbaynes explains Talos, an open-source pipeline for automated, iterative genomic reanalysis that re-checks stored sequencing results as public evidence changes, aiming to deliver more rare-disease diagnoses with a low false-positive rate and a sustainable review workload for clinical teams.

Shantanu Patankar and Azin Heidarshenas break down Azure’s MLPerf Training v6.0 run for Llama 3.1 405B, sharing what they learned scaling pretraining to 8,192 NVIDIA GB200 GPUs on Fairwater—where the time goes per step, why topology-aware parallelism mapping matters, and what actually limits scaling efficiency at extreme scale.

Aditya Badmaraju explains why Azure SQL is a core dependency when building AI applications on Azure, highlighting its role in operational data storage and enabling vector search scenarios that support grounded AI experiences.

John Savill gives a quick walkthrough of Microsoft’s Security Adoption Model resource, explaining how it’s structured and how to use it to plan and track a security adoption journey.

Waldek Mastykarz explains what goes wrong when an AI coding agent has zero training data for your internal SDK or framework, and how to design an extension strategy that replaces the model’s “closest match” assumptions with accurate concepts, API details, and workflows while keeping token costs under control.

vzisiadis walks through how to put Azure API Management (APIM) in front of MCP servers to handle authentication and authorization, from basic Entra ID token validation to interactive OAuth sign-in from VS Code, app-role based access control, and governing external MCP servers like GitHub via passthrough and tool-level blocking.

Microsoft Threat Intelligence, the Microsoft Defender Security Research Team, and the Microsoft Digital Crimes Unit break down how the StealC infostealer and Amadey loader operate, how stolen credentials get monetized, and what defenders can do to reduce risk using Microsoft Defender protections and hardening guidance.

The Visual Studio Code Team shares a brief update for VS Code 1.127, noting a change to token pricing normalization to support a legacy flat pricing payload returned by some endpoints.

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.

Daniel Roth, Javier Calvarro Nelson, and Yanislav Ivanov demonstrate how Blazor components can use WebMCP to expose UI actions to AI agents, so natural language prompts can trigger real interactions in a Blazor app.

Phil Vetter and Lee Jones describe how Exclaimer evolved its global email-signature platform on Microsoft Azure, moving from VM-based deployments to containerized microservices on AKS and adopting purpose-fit data services (Azure SQL, PostgreSQL, Cosmos DB, Data Explorer, Databricks) to improve scaling, reliability, and cost.

Allison announces an update to GitHub secret scanning: detections for Replicate secrets now include extended metadata to provide more context when a Replicate API token is found in a repository.

Efrat Nauerman announces general availability of the Azure Copilot Observability Agent in Azure Monitor and explains how it supports evidence-based incident investigations across Azure telemetry, with autonomous operations now available in public preview to reduce alert noise and triage effort while keeping humans in control.

jordanselig explains why most Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers are being deployed without real authentication, then walks through a defense-in-depth reference architecture on Azure App Service using Entra ID OAuth, managed identity, Key Vault, private networking, API Management, and monitoring to reduce common MCP attack paths.

Allison announces a public preview of new GitHub REST API endpoints for retrieving GitHub Code Quality (CodeQL) findings at the repository level, enabling integrations that can query findings programmatically and support remediation workflows.

GitHub announces updates to GitHub Copilot CLI that add a terminal UI and tighter GitHub platform workflows, including tabs for issues and pull requests, quick access to gists, and slash-command driven actions like creating PRs and assigning reviewers from the terminal.

sbaynes announces the general availability of the Azure Copilot Observability Agent and explains how it uses Azure Monitor signals to help teams move faster from detection to root-cause understanding and remediation, as cloud systems become more agentic and operationally complex.

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.

sunil_sabat explains how Microsoft Fabric Data Factory supports multi-cloud data integration and orchestration across platforms like Snowflake, Databricks, Google BigQuery, and Salesforce, and how OneLake features (Shortcuts, mirroring) and Purview lineage help teams build governed, production-ready analytics and AI data flows.

Allison announces an update that lets Dependabot read from private GitHub-hosted package registries using the built-in GITHUB_TOKEN, removing the need for personal access tokens when the package grants Actions access to the repository.

Allison announces the general availability of GitHub Copilot CLI’s redesigned terminal interface, including tabbed navigation for issues, pull requests, and gists, plus an in-terminal setup flow for MCP servers, skills, plugins, and settings, with improved accessibility features.

Kayla Cinnamon demonstrates using MAI-Code-1-Flash inside VS Code via Copilot Chat to ship a feature end to end—navigating an existing codebase, building and running the project, and validating changes with tests—while also calling out the model’s cost benefits.

jordanselig explains how the 2026-07-28 Model Context Protocol (MCP) spec removes the handshake and session header, making MCP stateless at the protocol layer and much easier to scale horizontally on Azure App Service without sticky routing or shared session stores.

Justin Garrett interviews Microsoft MVP Andrew Pruski about building “Burrito Bot,” a semantic search demo that uses SQL Server 2025 vector search to recommend restaurants based on meaning rather than keywords, covering embeddings, similarity scoring, and scaling with vector indexes and ANN techniques.

Allison announces that Dependabot has dropped support for Python 3.9 due to end-of-life status, and explains the practical impact: Dependabot may stop opening pull requests for dependency updates if your setup still relies on Python 3.9.

Rohan Malpani explains how AI is being designed into developer tools, comparing Visual Studio “skills” with VS Code agent-based workflows and showing how teams move from prototypes to production-ready, AI-assisted engineering with attention to iteration, quality, and security.

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.

kinfey explains why on-device LLM inference changes the cost and latency profile of AI features, then walks through building and benchmarking Qwen3-0.6B for a Windows NPU using WinML CLI, and wiring it into a WinUI 3 chat app with an OpenAI-compatible streaming backend.

Allison announces BYOK support in the GitHub Copilot app, letting developers run agent sessions against their own model providers (including Azure OpenAI and Microsoft Foundry) while keeping billing, quotas, and data-handling terms under their control.

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.

Learn Microsoft AI explains AgentSession in Microsoft Agent Framework, focusing on how it acts as a conversation state container to preserve context across agent runs and enable reliable multi-turn, stateful agent workflows.

GitHub introduces a beginner-friendly walkthrough of the GitHub Copilot app as a central place to manage work from idea to pull request, including using AI agents to explore issues, build features, and review changes in parallel.

Justin Bettencourt rounds up the May 2026 Azure SDK releases, including GA for the Azure SDK for Rust and the .NET Azure Batch client library, plus new Azure AI Search knowledge-base retrieval features and preview Azure AI Agent Server hosting libraries across .NET, Python, and JavaScript.

Santhosh_Ravin1 introduces Efficient Scaledown (Preview) for Microsoft Fabric Spark, explaining how remote shuffle storage and shuffle migration reduce recomputation during scale-down, improve resiliency, and cut compute costs, with concrete benchmark results and the Spark configuration needed to enable the feature.