Browse All Posts (127)

Allison announces a public preview for GitHub Enterprise that lets Copilot admins target AI model policies to enterprise teams, so different groups can be granted additional models beyond an enterprise-wide baseline.

shashankamalladi outlines updated scale limits for Azure Network Security Perimeter, including new hard limits for perimeters, profiles, rule elements, and associated PaaS resources, plus what changes apply to existing configurations through the 10/31/26 transition window.

nelsontam introduces Microsoft’s MARS (Map Autoregressive) model on Microsoft Foundry and explains how it converts satellite imagery into GIS-ready vector map data. The post outlines an end-to-end workflow with Microsoft Planetary Computer Pro, including STAC/COG ingestion requirements and practical deployment settings for running geospatial feature extraction at scale.

Allison announces a security change for npm: granular access tokens configured to bypass 2FA can no longer perform sensitive account, org, and package-management actions without an interactive 2FA challenge, and automated publishing should move to trusted or staged publishing.

Samantha Kubota introduces Echoverse, a set of high-fidelity synthetic “worlds” for training computer-use agents, and explains why depth (stateful workflows and database-grounded grading) matters more than sheer environment count. The post shares results from supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning, plus links to released code and datasets.

Alexander Neubeck explains how GitHub sped up Unicode case folding for code search by removing early-exit branches, enabling SIMD vectorization, and using byte-space arithmetic to avoid UTF-8 decode/encode work. The post also covers allocation-avoidance techniques and a compact lookup-table design for fast “does this fold?” checks.

John Savill rounds up a week of Azure platform updates, spanning AKS, networking, API Management, monitoring, data services, and regional expansion, plus a few notable AI model availability items and security-related changes like Azure Enclave and Key Vault symmetric keys.

Amaury Levé introduces an open-source polyglot unit-test generation agent that learns a repo’s conventions, writes tests, and validates they build and run in the project’s normal test workflow. The post explains the agent’s research/plan/execute/check loop, shows benchmark results versus stock Copilot, and includes setup commands for Copilot CLI and VS Code.

TomClaes explains how to govern Azure Log Analytics retention across many workspaces by keeping workspace defaults low, setting per-table interactive retention, and using long-term retention only where needed. The post includes an Azure Policy-based, DeployIfNotExists solution with auditing, drift detection, and automated remediation.

junjieli summarizes the July 2026 releases (1.6.3–1.6.6) of the Foundry Toolkit for VS Code, focusing on a flatter, tabbed workspace, inline tool wiring, deeper agent debugging via event-level inspection, and a new Agent Optimization preview that supports measured compare-and-deploy tuning for hosted agents.

HimanshuYadav explains how to transfer a live GitLab project to a new group without accidentally “resetting” Terraform state or breaking pipelines, focusing on what changes during a namespace move (variables, runners, identity mappings) and how to validate and roll back safely.

Zoran Jovanovic breaks down the main regional distribution patterns for Azure workloads—single region, failover, parallel (active-active), segmented, and portable—framing each as a deliberate reliability and risk decision with clear trade-offs around cost, complexity, RTO/RPO, and service capabilities.

Authorised Territory demonstrates how a .NET MCP server can expose a skill as a resource, and how an AI agent client can use that skill to answer a question, using a locally running LLM via Ollama.

KishoreKumarPattabiraman explains how to choose between building an interactive “skill” and an autonomous “sub-agent” when designing reusable AI capabilities, using practical checks around iteration style, voice fidelity, review gates, risk blast radius, and frequency of reuse.

Kristen Womack’s July 2026 roundup for Azure Developer CLI (azd) summarizes releases 1.27.0 through 1.29.0, including new extension install options, a full tool uninstall workflow, Azure AI Foundry resource modeling in azure.yaml, container deployments to Azure App Service, and CI-friendly non-interactive behavior plus a breaking flag rename.

diptiborkar summarizes why Microsoft Fabric and OneLake were recognized as a Leader in Forrester’s 2026 Data Lakehouses report, focusing on a unified lakehouse foundation for analytics and AI, open table formats, cross-cloud interoperability, and built-in governance and security across engines like Spark, SQL, KQL, and Power BI.

GitHub announces stacked pull requests and points to the official docs, focusing on how the feature helps teams review and manage a series of dependent changes more clearly.

Allison announces the retirement of GitHub Models as of July 30, 2026, including the shutdown of the playground, model catalog, inference API, and BYOK support. The post also points teams to Microsoft Foundry for model access and GitHub Copilot for building AI-powered workflows on GitHub.

arindamc explains how Workspace Outbound Access Protection (OAP) in Microsoft Fabric controls outbound connectivity for Eventstream, so streaming pipelines can only read from approved sources and write to approved destinations (including cross-workspace routes) using data connection rules.

GitHub shares a lofi-focused coding stream themed around keeping pull requests small and using stacked PRs, aimed at helping developers stay in a steady flow while working in their terminal and reviewing and merging changes.

Samantha Kubota explains how Microsoft is pushing better AI performance per token and per dollar by co-optimizing models with evaluation harnesses and RL environments, sharing recent “Flash” model releases and benchmark results that reduce GPU costs while maintaining quality across products.

Abhishek Tiwari explains how Azure Front Door edge actions adds customer-defined logic in the request path while keeping hyperscale performance predictable, enforcing strong tenant isolation with Hyperlight micro-VMs, and building resiliency through bounded latency, fast-fail behavior, and validated fallback mechanisms.

Allison announces a GitHub Actions update that lets workflows reference actions and reusable workflows in the same repository using a new $/ prefix, avoiding an explicit checkout and keeping internal references aligned with the exact commit being executed.

Cassidy Williams shows how she used the GitHub Copilot app to modernize an old React codebase by splitting work into stacked sessions and stacked pull requests, keeping changes reviewable while iterating on plans, branching strategy, and dependency upgrades.

Shawn Henry and Tamir Dresher show how to run a multi-agent “Squad” team on top of the GitHub Copilot CLI/SDK and expose it as a first-class Microsoft Agent Framework (MAF) AIAgent in a .NET app, including DI wiring, session configuration, and OpenTelemetry-based observability.

GitHub hosts a Rubber Duck Thursdays session focused on Stacked PRs, covering how the feature fits into pull request workflows and what it changes for day-to-day code review and collaboration.

MattH_OneLake announces two Microsoft Fabric preview features that mirror Azure Monitor (Log Analytics) tables and AWS Glue Data Catalog-managed Apache Iceberg tables into OneLake. The post explains the zero-copy, metadata-based approach and outlines how to set up each mirroring source for analysis across Fabric workloads.

Visual Studio Code shares a quick tip for reducing token usage and improving GitHub Copilot results by running a grammar check on your prompt before submitting it in VS Code.

GitHub announces stacked pull requests and explains how they help teams break large changes into smaller, reviewable layers that can be merged one-by-one or all at once.

Allison announces GitHub stacked pull requests in public preview, a workflow for breaking large changes into an ordered series of smaller PRs that can be reviewed independently and merged together, while still respecting existing checks, reviews, and branch protections.

robece-msft outlines how to build event-driven applications in Microsoft Fabric using Business Events and User Data Functions, with code samples, architecture patterns, and practical scenarios aimed at teams building real-time, data-centric solutions.

Alym Rayani rounds up July 2026 updates across Microsoft Security, focusing on securing AI and agent environments. The post highlights Project Perception’s agentic SecOps approach, new Microsoft Defender protections (including prompt-injection defenses and cloud agent runtime coverage), Entra identity updates like passkeys-by-default, and Purview controls for data protection and investigations.

Allison summarizes the July 2026 updates for GitHub Copilot in Visual Studio, including a new preview agent built on the Copilot SDK, built-in .NET and Azure skills, selected-code review actions, and organization-wide custom instructions for consistent Copilot behavior across teams.

Allison announces a new GitHub Copilot enterprise managed setting that lets organizations restrict which managed devices can host remotely controlled Copilot sessions, including options to require SSO, disable remote control, or allow it without restrictions.

Gwyneth Peña-Siguenza demonstrates how to debug a real Python API in VS Code, covering breakpoints, stepping, variable inspection, watch expressions, and the call stack, plus how GitHub Copilot can help you understand failures and fix bugs faster.

kyleikeda explains an upcoming Azure Cost Management policy change: starting Feb. 1, 2027, reservation exchanges will no longer be available for services that are covered by Azure savings plans. The post lists affected services, clarifies what stays the same, and outlines practical steps to plan ahead.

Tzvia introduces Real-Time Dashboard in Microsoft Fabric, focusing on using streaming data to build live operational views that update in seconds so teams can spot spikes, slowdowns, and stalled processes quickly and respond while events are still unfolding.

Fokko at Work demos selected new features in Visual Studio Code 1.131 that relate to GitHub Copilot, including subagents session information in the Agents window and dictation mode, with notes on how enterprise policies and pricing plans can affect feature availability.

Allison summarizes the July 2026 GitHub Copilot updates in Visual Studio Code (v1.127–v1.131), focusing on the Agents window workflow, multi-chat sessions, model and chat controls (including Copilot Vision and BYOK), plus editor, terminal, browser, and accessibility improvements.

Chris Noring shows how to build an AI shopping assistant that remembers customer preferences across sessions by plugging a SQL Server-backed history provider into Microsoft Agent Framework, then explains how the same setup can move from local Docker to Azure SQL Database (including Hyperscale) with only a connection-string change.