Browse All Posts (104)

John Savill explains the Azure Health Model, why “resource health” is hard in cloud environments, and how to reason about service and dependency health. The video includes a walkthrough-style demo and closes with practical takeaways for understanding and communicating Azure service health.

Visual Studio Code highlights the CodeSnap extension for VS Code, showing how it helps developers create cleaner, more shareable screenshots of code quickly.

Waldek Mastykarz explains why AI coding agent eval scores can drift between machines even when you think you’ve pinned the inputs. He breaks down the “hidden variables” that leak into the agent’s context—OS, shells, file paths, LSP diagnostics, and tool updates—and how to control and document them.

Evan Mattson announces the 1.0 release of Microsoft Agent Framework’s orchestration patterns across both Python and .NET, explaining what’s now stable (sequential, concurrent, group chat, handoff, and magentic) and why higher-level orchestration builders matter for multi-agent apps.

The Visual Studio Code Team shares the early release notes for VS Code 1.129 (Insiders), including links to the commit log and closed issues so developers can track what’s landing as the milestone evolves.

Allison announces new GitHub Copilot usage metrics API fields that let enterprises and organizations compare pull request review speed and review-cycle counts across AI adoption phases, helping teams measure how Copilot adoption correlates with code review throughput.

Allison announces that Kimi K2.7 Code is now available to GitHub Copilot Business and Copilot Enterprise customers, including how admins can enable it and what to consider before turning on an open-weight model.

Visual Studio Code shows how VS Code Tasks can help you quickly rerun common project commands by defining them once and triggering them from the editor.

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.

Burke Holland introduces Kimi K2.7 Code by Moonshot AI as the first open-weight model available in the GitHub Copilot model picker, and shows how to enable it and evaluate its agentic coding performance using a full product requirements document.

bogdanc shares hands-on benchmark results for GPU-accelerated query execution in Microsoft Fabric Data Warehouse, including a transparent TPC-H methodology, single-user latency numbers, and high-concurrency throughput/latency comparisons against CPU execution on an F64 capacity.

Allison announces that GitHub Enterprise Cloud admins can now set per-user AI credit budgets for cost centers directly in the billing UI, matching controls that previously required the REST API.

Allison announces generally available extended metadata checks for GitHub secret scanning, adding richer context (like owner, creation/expiry dates, and org/project details) plus multipart validity checks for secret types that require supplementary metadata to validate.

Gaurav Bhardwaj shares a practical guide to keeping GitHub Copilot costs predictable under usage-based billing, focusing on token drivers, model selection, and workflow habits that reduce waste without giving up the benefits of AI-assisted development.

Allison announces a generally available GitHub rulesets option that lets you restrict which users, teams, and apps can dismiss pull request reviews, helping teams control when approvals can be cleared before merging.

Allison announces that the GitHub Copilot app is now available across all Copilot plans, enabling agent-driven development from a desktop app on macOS, Windows, and Linux, with support for signing in via GitHub or running sessions using your own model provider key.

Allison announces that the Copilot Billing Preview app will be retired on August 3, 2026, and points teams to GitHub’s built-in billing settings for tracking GitHub Copilot spend, budgets, and AI usage details.

Waldek Mastykarz tests whether replacing traditional CLI flags with a single --json payload actually helps AI agents, and finds the opposite: args are more reliable across models and shells, and dramatically cheaper in token cost due to fewer retries and fewer shell-escaping failures.

Sergey Menshykh announces the stable release of Agent Skills for .NET in Microsoft Agent Framework, describing an open format for packaging reusable domain expertise (instructions, resources, and scripts) that agents load on demand, plus the governance controls needed to run skills safely in production.

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.

YossiY introduces Log Analytics Export Job (public preview), a new Azure Monitor capability for exporting historical Log Analytics data to Azure Blob Storage using a KQL query and time range, producing gzip-compressed Parquet output and supporting resilient, retryable execution.

Nick Brady’s June 2026 digest covers the biggest Microsoft Foundry updates: Claude reaching general availability, new agent distribution into Microsoft 365 Copilot and Teams, and major improvements across Toolboxes, Routines, Memory, observability, and Foundry Local deployments.

hcamposu introduces Logic Apps Standard Local Functions and explains when workflow-scoped .NET code belongs inside the same Logic Apps project instead of being split into a separate Azure Functions app, with practical guidance on scenarios, runtime behavior, and deployment implications.

Sunita_AZ0708 documents a validated reference architecture for running Siemens Teamcenter on Azure Virtual Machines while using Oracle Exadata Database Service (Oracle Database@Azure) for the database tier, including identity integration, private cross-cloud networking, backup/recovery validation, and performance test results.

Visual Studio Code introduces VS Code Learn, a hands-on learning hub with short videos, guided exercises, and practical examples aimed at helping developers get more out of the editor, including content that touches on AI, agents, and day-to-day developer productivity.

JowoMSFT recaps the top community questions from a Rayfin AMA, covering how Fabric Apps can combine analytics with operational workflows, connect to Fabric data sources and external systems, and support AI-driven experiences while keeping governance, authentication, and row-level security in place.

ArshadAliTMMBA introduces Fabric Runtime Release Channels in Microsoft Fabric, explaining how the new default and early access channels let teams validate Spark runtime changes ahead of time, reduce surprise production breakages, and track exactly what runtime and VHD version their workloads are running.

Microsoft Security Team summarizes five takeaways from Frost & Sullivan’s 2025 Frost Radar on CSPM, focusing on how posture management is shifting from periodic compliance checks to continuous, risk-based governance across CNAPP platforms, with implications for DevSecOps, SOC workflows, and multicloud environments.

rusteinberg explains how Microsoft Fabric sensitivity labels (defined in Microsoft Purview) can do more than enforce access control: they can also act as guidance signals for AI skills and agents, helping them choose the right data sources and avoid mixing sensitive and non-sensitive contexts in answers.

WSilveira’s July 2026 Logic Apps Aviators newsletter rounds up key Azure Integration Services updates and community posts, including the Logic Apps Standard move toward Azure Functions out-of-proc hosting for .NET 10, dynamic connection names, MCP server management in API Management, and agentic Logic Apps 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 Savill recaps the major Microsoft AI updates from June 2026, spanning new model availability on Azure, Azure AI Foundry capabilities (agents, evaluations, tracing, memory), and GitHub Copilot updates including a desktop app and an SDK.

EldertGrootenboer explains how to secure Azure Service Bus namespaces using layered controls—firewall rules, service endpoints, private endpoints, and Network Security Perimeter—then ties the network layer to identity with Entra ID and managed identities, including practical notes on geo-replication and DNS.

Waldek Mastykarz shares results from running 150 agent tasks comparing Claude Sonnet 4.6 vs Sonnet 5 inside GitHub Copilot Chat in VS Code, showing how “cheaper per token” can still mean higher costs, higher variance, and worse output quality depending on the workload.

Connor Peet explains how VS Code’s Agent Host Protocol changes the way coding agents run and stay connected, moving beyond window-bound local agents to sessions that can persist, sync state across machines, and support remote, long-running workflows.

Welcome to this week's Weekly AI Roundup, where the common thread is taking agentic AI from demos to operations: more automation, more guardrails, and more ways to prove what happened. Azure pushed reliability toward standardized, automatable determinations with its internal "Brain" system and scenario-first Chaos Studio Workspaces that can plug into Copilot and MCP. GitHub Copilot news focused on enterprise governance and spend controls (managed-settings.json, credit pools, session limits, and audit-grade agent session streaming) alongside rapid model lineup changes and the approaching GitHub Models shutdown. Across MCP, Foundry, Fabric, and IDEs, the story is clear: tool use is expanding (browser automation, vision inputs, CI diagnostics), so security, provenance, and repeatable evaluation need to expand with it.

This week's ML roundup focuses on making Microsoft Fabric deployments more governable and production-ready, from delegated OneLake shortcuts that tighten zero-copy security across workspaces and tenants to new outbound access controls for Real-Time Intelligence (RTI). On the streaming side, Eventstream connectors picked up practical upgrades like private networking, Kafka and Service Bus support, and mTLS, while preview features point to broader CDC and IoT ingestion coverage. We also saw Fabric move further toward repeatable operations with a public data agent API, GA item recovery with REST restore, and an AI-assisted CLI path for migrating Synapse Spark and pipelines. Outside Fabric, SkillOpt and MCP-based SQL Server tooling both reinforce a shared lesson for agent builders: skills, tools, and permissions are the control plane that keeps agent behavior reliable and bounded.

Welcome to this week's .NET Roundup. Microsoft set a clear planning deadline with .NET 8 and .NET 9 ending support on November 10, 2026, pushing teams to budget upgrade work toward .NET 10 and revisit TargetFramework and dependency constraints. On the AI tooling side, the focus shifted from chat-based demos to repeatable workflows: MCP-powered build diagnostics in GitHub Actions, practical auditing and OpenTelemetry for agent governance, and patterns for building tools (Functions, search) with safer data access. We also saw platform-focused updates like SkiaSharp 4 for .NET MAUI, a C# preview feature for closed class hierarchies, Azure Blob client-side integrity checks reaching GA, and a useful warning about ambiguous routes when inheriting ASP.NET Core controllers.

This week in DevOps, the common thread was making operational change more repeatable, reviewable, and safer. Azure Chaos Studio introduced scenario-based Workspaces with reports tied to Azure Monitor signals, while Azure Monitor added Dynamic Thresholds for Prometheus and OpenTelemetry metric alerts to cut noise without relying on static thresholds. On the CI and governance side, GitHub tightened least-privilege defaults (including read-only cache tokens for untrusted triggers), reduced secret sprawl by letting Copilot CLI use GITHUB_TOKEN in Actions, and expanded enterprise security controls across secret scanning, license compliance rulesets, and upcoming Dependabot alert retention changes.

Welcome to this week's Security roundup, where agent governance moved from design guidance to concrete tooling across Kubernetes, developer IDEs, and Microsoft Security. We look at kars and AGT patterns for isolating and auditing agent behavior, plus new mitigations for MCP risks like tool metadata poisoning and untrusted server connections. On the platform side, GitHub tightened CI and audit controls (read-only cache tokens, reduced PAT use, Copilot session streaming) and expanded secret scanning into a more operational model. We also cover integrity and egress controls in Azure and Fabric, and why resilience drills and a faster post-quantum timeline mean security planning needs to start earlier.