Browse All Posts (129)

James Rempt explains how Azure Dev/Test pricing (included with eligible Visual Studio subscriptions) can reduce the cost of running non-production Azure environments, making it easier to provision production-like resources for testing, validation, and CI/CD workflows without letting cloud spend slow down iteration.

Visual Studio Code highlights TypeScript 7.0 and its “10x faster” native port, and points developers to a VS Code extension to try the updated TypeScript experience in the editor.

Matt Goldman, David Ortinau, and Gerald Versluis recap “MAUI UI July”, highlighting community contributions, recent improvements, and practical UI tips and demos for building cross-platform apps with .NET MAUI.

sbaynes announces changes to Microsoft Entra ID authentication: passkeys become the default MFA experience starting September 1, 2026, and Microsoft-provided SMS/voice delivery is retired on February 1, 2027. The post explains why phishing-resistant methods matter and outlines concrete admin steps and a rollout timeline.

abhimittal shows how to use Azure API Management (APIM) as an AI gateway in front of Azure AI Foundry to capture per-model token usage for governance. The post walks through an inbound policy that authenticates with managed identity, emits token metrics to Azure Monitor/Application Insights, and adds edge protection with Azure Front Door + WAF.

Microsoft Developer demonstrates a real-time 3D digital twin of a wind farm built in Microsoft Fabric, combining LiDAR-derived terrain geometry, live turbine telemetry from a Fabric Eventhouse, and a natural-language interface that can identify underperforming turbines and estimate cost impact.

Helen Hou-Sandí explains how GitHub addressed an accessibility issue in pull requests where status checkmarks were hard to distinguish, and how the team used GitHub Copilot to quickly investigate unfamiliar code and ship a design fix that improves the PR review experience.

Allison announces a GitHub settings UI change that splits the previously combined “SSO & Organizations” page into two separate pages, making it easier to manage SSO configuration and organization membership independently.

EldertGrootenboer breaks down Azure Service Bus reliability as a set of layered choices rather than a single SLA number, explaining what each layer protects you from and where the real trade-offs show up when you plan for zone and regional failures.

kinfey shares a reference implementation for running long-lived autonomous coding agents from Microsoft Teams, using MCP as the control plane and Azure Container Apps dynamic sessions as a Hyper-V-isolated sandbox. The post focuses on multi-agent orchestration, deployment reliability under platform timeouts, and practical security guardrails like auth, allowlists, private ingress, and managed identities.

This week's AI roundup tracks a clear shift from demos to deployment: Microsoft Foundry and Azure shipped updates that treat agents like governed services, with tracing, evaluation, hosting, and regional data options built in. GitHub Copilot followed the same path, expanding app access and BYOK model switching while tightening enterprise controls for policy, telemetry (OpenTelemetry), and spend (budgets, cost centers, and billing UI). Across cloud operations and developer workflows, MCP keeps showing up as the bridge to real tools, and security teams are adapting with prompt-injection detection in CodeQL and Microsoft's multi-agent hardening work. We also round out the week with applied AI progress, including Aurora 1.5's ensemble weather forecasting and a practical case study on building safer real-time voice experiences.

Welcome to this week's Weekly .NET Roundup, where the themes are clear: tighter security scanning and more practical, governed agent workflows. CodeQL 2.26.0 adds AI prompt injection detections and improves query accuracy across languages, which is relevant for .NET repos that mix C#, JavaScript/TypeScript, and GitHub Actions-heavy CI. On the productivity side, Copilot's new upgrade canvas, real-world cross-repo agent automation patterns, and Agent Framework updates (orchestration patterns and stable skills) show how teams are turning agents into repeatable workflows. We also cover VS Code Copilot governance details, Logic Apps Standard moving closer to Functions-style hosting for .NET, and the growing link between agent platforms (Foundry) and UI patterns in Blazor.

This week's Security roundup centers on making security controls easier to apply at scale, from production-grade guardrails for AI agents to stricter, more automatable supply chain defaults. GitHub and npm updates push publishing toward identity-based workflows (OIDC) and improve coordinated remediation with innersource advisories, while CodeQL and secret scanning add clearer triage and coverage for AI-era risks like system prompt injection. On the Microsoft side, Secure Future Initiative updates show how continuous control validation and crypto readiness (including post-quantum planning) are becoming measurable engineering work, and Azure expands key custody options with external key management for Managed HSM.

This week in machine learning, Microsoft pushed both ends of the stack toward more operational AI: Aurora 1.5 adds hourly resolution, 22 variables, and ensemble uncertainty so weather model output looks more like a forecast product. On the data platform side, Fabric and SQL updates focused on making AI workloads practical to run at scale, with GPU-accelerated warehouse queries, controlled Spark runtime release channels, and more direct hooks for embeddings and agent context via MCP. We also saw governance move closer to runtime behavior, including sensitivity labels that can guide agent actions and clearer patterns for shipping Fabric Apps into production.

Welcome to this week's Weekly Azure Roundup, where the theme is getting agentic systems and cloud operations closer to production reality. Microsoft Foundry and Agent Framework both shipped concrete building blocks (hosted agents, orchestration patterns 1.0, skills packaging, tracing, and cost controls) while Azure also leaned into "agent-ready" design workflows with Diagram Builder generating WAF checks, pricing estimates, and Bicep. On the platform side, resiliency work showed up from edge routing improvements in Azure Front Door to new operational agents in Azure Monitor and GA for Azure SRE Agent, with security and integration updates rounding out the week (external key management for Managed HSM, Service Bus network posture guidance, and Logic Apps features for legacy formats and hybrid deployments).

This week's DevOps roundup focuses on taking agents from experiments to production systems, with clearer governance, better telemetry, and practical cost controls. Microsoft Foundry and Azure operations updates push hosted agents, SRE workflows, and autonomous alert triage toward day-2 reliability, while resiliency guidance shifts from design-time checklists to continuous validation. On the developer platform side, GitHub shipped more structured workflow management (issue fields and PR dashboards), tighter policy controls (rulesets), and stronger supply-chain tooling (innersource advisories, secret scanning metadata, CodeQL updates, and npm v12 security changes). Across the board, the throughline is making automation auditable, repeatable, and predictable at scale.

Welcome to this week's GitHub Copilot roundup, where the big theme is Copilot shifting from a single assistant into a platform you can govern. The Copilot desktop app is now available across all plans and adds Bring Your Own Key (BYOK), while the model picker expands with new OpenAI GPT-5.6 variants and Copilot's first open-weight option (Kimi K2.7 Code). On the admin side, managed settings via MDM, enterprise-managed OpenTelemetry export, and easier budgets in the billing UI make it more realistic to roll out agents at scale with clear policy, telemetry, and spend controls. Across IDEs and GitHub Mobile, agent workflows gain better status visibility, permissions, and repeatability, alongside engineering notes that show why benchmarking, A/B tests, and incident learnings matter when models and tools change.

Authorised Territory demonstrates how a .NET AI agent running in a harness can request human approval before executing a tool, using a locally hosted LLM via Ollama.

supriyas lays out a practical, end-to-end lifecycle for building enterprise AI agents, using a banking “loan agent” example to show how to design guardrails, build with safety controls, test with evaluations and red teaming, deploy gradually, and continuously monitor and iterate using Microsoft Foundry and Azure services.

Rob Bos shares a curated set of GitHub governance references he regularly sends to teams, covering enterprise platform baselines, GitHub Actions supply-chain controls, GitHub Advanced Security rollout and triage practices, and GitHub Copilot governance topics like premium requests, extension governance, and MCP-related security notes.

GitHub announces general availability of GitHub issue fields, enabling structured, typed metadata on issues (priority, effort, dates, and custom values) and surfacing that data directly in the repository issues list. GitHub also highlights connecting issue fields to external tools via the GitHub MCP server.

GitHub announces that the GitHub Copilot desktop app is now available across every plan, including Copilot Free and GitHub Education, and highlights agentic coding sessions plus bring-your-own-key support for custom AI model providers.

Abhishek Tiwari explains how Azure Front Door’s tenant isolation work (completed after the October 2025 incidents) reduces blast radius in a dense, multi-tenant edge fleet, using configuration isolation and a micro-cellular, layered ingress-sharding design to keep one tenant’s bad config or traffic from impacting others.

Arturo Quiroga shares major updates to the open-source Azure Architecture Diagram Builder, including a multi-turn Architecture Chat, a Blueprint (whiteboard-style) rendering mode, and a new MCP server interface so AI agents can generate, validate, cost, and render Azure architectures programmatically.

Allison announces CodeQL 2.26.0 updates for GitHub code scanning, including Kotlin 2.4.0 support, improved C# Razor Pages dataflow for SQL injection detection, new JavaScript/TypeScript system prompt injection coverage, and multiple query accuracy improvements across Go, Python, Swift, and GitHub Actions.

Varun Chawla (with Abhishek Tiwari and Amit Srivastava) explains how Azure Front Door reduces multi-tenant blast radius using Layered Ingress Sharding: combining independent, randomized tenant-to-shard assignments across layers with an ingress controller (IRIS) that uses real-time health and capacity signals to steer traffic and contain failures to a single tenant.

Allison announces a terminology update in GitHub Secret Scanning that renames detector types to better reflect how secrets are found, while keeping detection behavior unchanged. The post clarifies the difference between provider vs generic secrets and pattern-based vs AI-based detection, and confirms no API or webhook changes.

sbaynes shares a LinkedIn post announcing that Hosted Agents in Microsoft Foundry is now generally available, highlighting an end-to-end agent workflow that can run in Foundry and connect across Microsoft services.

Sridhar Baynes announces Aurora 1.5, an open-source update to Microsoft’s Earth-system foundation model that adds more weather variables, hourly resolution, and probabilistic ensemble forecasts, with results compared against ECMWF ensembles and examples including tropical cyclone track improvements.

Salim Chawro summarizes Microsoft’s July 2026 Secure Future Initiative (SFI) progress report, covering measurable improvements in identity and configuration hardening, AI-assisted proactive defense for vulnerability discovery and remediation, and preparations for post-quantum cryptography—plus concrete steps organizations can apply now.

Napalys Klicius explains why migrating Copilot code review to shared Unix-style exploration tools (grep, glob, view) initially increased cost and reduced useful findings, and how rewriting tool instructions to match a reviewer’s diff-first workflow delivered about 20% lower average review cost without hurting quality.

John Savill runs through a weekly set of Azure platform updates, covering new capabilities across OpenShift, storage, Event Hubs, Log Analytics, Chaos Studio, and identity. He also calls out security-related changes (WAF exceptions, Network Security Perimeter, Entra backup/restore) and an OpenAI/GPT update.

GitHub recaps this week’s developer news, including the general availability of the GitHub Copilot app (now supporting free and education plans plus bring-your-own-key), GitHub Issue Fields reaching general availability, and quick updates on new ECMAScript JavaScript methods and the new HTTP QUERY method.

Allison announces a GitHub Enterprise Cloud REST API update that lets enterprise owners and billing managers retrieve per-user consumption for a multi-user budget from a single endpoint, making it easier to review spend and identify users nearing their limits at scale.

David Paquette explains how the Azure DevOps team reduced Azure Pipelines task extension size by bundling Node-based tasks with esbuild, cutting thousands of files down to a few per task and significantly improving agent download and extraction time in real production pipelines.

Allison announces an update to GitHub Mobile that adds improved filtering and sorting for GitHub Copilot sessions, helping developers find active, completed, and needs-attention sessions more quickly as their session list grows.

Hidde de Smet breaks down why spec-driven development can either reduce risk or quietly add “delivery debt”, especially in regulated environments. He outlines six common process cost centers, a three-lane model (full/light/no-spec), and a small set of KPIs to tell when structure is paying off.

Fokko at Work demos selected updates in Visual Studio Code 1.128 that affect GitHub Copilot, including configuring the default utility model for BYOK and notes on how enterprise policies and pricing plans can change which features are available.

Daniel Roth, Javier Calvarro Nelson, Maya Mateva, and Stamo Gochev present a Blazor Community Standup on “generative UI”: using AI agents and agent-driven UI patterns to dynamically create and adapt application experiences with AG-UI, A2UI, Microsoft Agent Framework, and Blazor.

Carlotta Castelluccio demonstrates how to build a hosted, coded AI agent in VS Code using GitHub Copilot CLI and a Microsoft Foundry Skill, then walks through the workflow to test and deploy it for a social media management scenario.