Browse All Posts (107)

John Savill runs through the Azure updates for 21st August 2026, covering changes across App Service, AVS licensing, ASR options, VM sizing, Application Gateway, Azure Firewall IPv6, SQL tooling in VS Code, SQL MI zone redundancy, Databricks region expansion, WSL Azure Linux, and new models and Copilot capabilities in Azure AI Foundry.

Hidde de Smet explains Agent Plugins 1.0, a small packaging standard that lets teams ship portable Agent Skills and MCP server definitions once, while keeping Copilot-specific extras in a namespaced folder. The post covers the required file layout, manifest and MCP schemas, and enterprise governance controls for plugin and MCP server policy.

Allison announces a GitHub Issues update that lets teams pin saved views to a repository’s issues sidebar, plus a set of smaller improvements to the Issues Dashboard and issue dependency REST API behavior.

Reynald Adolphe hosts a VS Code Live session with members of the Visual Studio Code and GitHub Copilot teams, highlighting recent product features and updates across the editor and Copilot experience.

Vlad Fedorov shares GitHub’s write-up of the August 17 outage, what failed under peak traffic, and what the team is changing to reduce the chance and blast radius of future incidents. It covers capacity shortfalls, recovery actions, and concrete reliability work like retry limits, safer rollouts, and expanded Azure footprint.

GitHub hosts a Rubber Duck Thursdays coworking-style coding session focused on checking out new goodies coming to GitHub and spending time coding together.

Allison announces general availability of the Windows 11 arm64 GitHub-hosted runner image with Visual Studio 2026, including how to opt in early via `runs-on` and what to expect during the September 2026 migration from the existing `windows-11-arm` image.

spurthikommajos explains how Microsoft Fabric Eventstream can connect to Azure Event Hubs using Fabric workspace identity (preview), replacing shared access keys with Microsoft Entra ID tokens and Azure RBAC. The post outlines why identity-based auth matters, how permissions are assigned, and the exact setup steps in Fabric and Event Hubs.

Naorbt announces the general availability of a new KPI visualization in Microsoft Fabric Real-Time Dashboards, designed to make operational metrics easier to interpret at a glance using status ranges, configurable scales, value formatting, and reference indicators.

salilkanade1 announces a preview of the Fabric Data Warehouse MCP Server (remote) and Skills for Fabric, aimed at letting MCP-compatible agents execute and iterate on T-SQL against live warehouse data while following Fabric-specific guidance for authoring, consumption, and operational troubleshooting.

James Montemagno introduces Agent Host in Visual Studio Code and explains how it keeps agent sessions persistent and accessible across different clients and machines, including VS Code, the Agents window, and the web.

dotnet explains how AI-assisted workflows are changing Windows Forms development, using real scenarios for migrating a legacy WinForms LOB app and building a new WinForms solution, plus a look at WinForms designer updates and upcoming .NET 11 runtime features.

dotnet explains what .NET developers need to know to improve application performance, focusing on how to identify hotspots, prevent common performance problems early, and use tooling to diagnose and fix slow code.

Anna Hoffman explains automatic backup immutability for Azure SQL Database and Azure SQL Managed Instance in a Q&A-style session, covering what “immutable backups” mean, why WORM matters, how to enable the feature, retention options, and how to verify whether backups are protected.

Scirqueira explains how to implement the Bronze, Silver, and Gold layers of a medallion architecture in Microsoft Fabric Data Warehouse, with concrete T-SQL patterns for ingestion, cleansing, and analytics-ready shaping, plus practical guidance on repeatability, performance, and governance boundaries between layers.

Allison announces a new GitHub code scanning dismissal reason, Mitigated, for cases where a vulnerability remains in code but external controls reduce its risk, helping teams align alert handling with formal risk-acceptance and exception processes.

Allison announces a generally available change that separates GitHub Code Quality CodeQL workflows onto a dedicated GitHub Actions path and actor, making it easier to distinguish Code Quality runs from code scanning in run history and usage/billing reports.

Allison announces new GitHub audit log events that record when GitHub Code Quality is enabled, disabled, or reconfigured on a repository, making it easier to track governance changes and understand when repositories enter or leave billing scope.

Visual Studio Code shows how the Outline view helps you navigate code faster by giving a structured list of symbols in the current file, so you can jump directly to classes, functions, variables, and other definitions without scrolling.

ronitauber explains how to turn Azure Monitor issues created by the Azure Copilot Observability Agent into downstream operational workflows using Action Groups. The post shows patterns for pushing rich issue context into Microsoft Teams, Azure DevOps, and custom automation via Logic Apps, Azure Functions, and event streaming.

GitHub hosts a Rubber Duck Thursday livestream AMA, inviting developers to connect with the GitHub team and stay up to date through GitHub’s official channels.

Fokko at Work explains how to cut GitHub Copilot token usage in Visual Studio Code after the shift to usage-based billing, sharing five practical tweaks that reduce AI credit consumption without sacrificing output quality.

Pamela Fox shows how to build a browser-using QA agent by combining Pydantic AI with Playwright, backed by Microsoft Foundry models. The post covers keyless Entra authentication, safe browsing constraints, and OpenTelemetry tracing with optional export to Azure Application Insights.

Lee Stott wraps up the FibreOps series with a practical look at running autonomous agent systems in production: adding hands-free spoken updates via Azure AI Voice Live, and building an observability stack with OpenTelemetry and Application Insights so agent decisions can be traced, evaluated, and audited.

Dirk Brinkmann explains a practical FinOps pattern for attributing AI spend (tokens, Copilot, and agent meters) when cost data is scattered across inconsistent meter categories and free-text meter names. The approach builds a customer-owned “meter map” from the Azure price sheet and joins it to FOCUS cost rows to enable reliable reporting.

Authorised Territory demonstrates how to build a .NET agent that generates an answer, has a second model judge it against criteria, and retries automatically until it passes or hits an iteration limit, using Microsoft Agent Framework with local models running in Ollama.

supriyas breaks down how to choose between Prompt Agents and Hosted Agents in Microsoft Foundry Agent Service, focusing on the practical architecture question: where orchestration, state, and operations should live. The post outlines decision criteria, warning signs, and enterprise runtime concerns like identity, content safety, tracing, and cost controls.

Allison summarizes what’s new in CodeQL 2.26.3, including improved GitHub Actions security queries and expanded JavaScript/TypeScript modeling (with Vue and Vue Router support), plus smaller modeling updates for C/C++ and Ruby that reduce false positives and improve alert accuracy.

SupriyaKashyap explains the generally available billing persona model for PowerTable within Fabric Planning in Fabric IQ, including how Viewer, Stakeholder, and Planner roles are assigned dynamically per session and how each role maps to 30-day session metering and capacity consumption attribution.

Sumiran23 announces the general availability of Customer-Managed Key (CMK) REST APIs for Microsoft Fabric workspaces, enabling teams to programmatically assign, inspect, rotate, and reset workspace encryption using keys stored in Azure Key Vault, with tenant-wide visibility for governance and auditing.

goupadhy explains how to choose the right connectivity pattern for Microsoft Fabric data integration workloads, focusing on when to use VNet data gateway, On-premises Data Gateway (standard mode), or direct cloud connections based on where your data sources live and whether private network boundaries must be crossed.

Christopher Harrison explains how to use the GitHub Copilot app’s My work pane to keep pull requests, issues, and Copilot agent sessions organized, including built-in views, custom filters, and ways to start new sessions directly from work items.

Ran Rosin summarizes why Frost & Sullivan’s 2026 Frost Radar positions Microsoft as a leader in cloud workload protection, and uses Microsoft Defender for Cloud to illustrate the shift from pre-deployment scanning to runtime security that connects posture, identity, workload telemetry, and SOC response across multi-cloud and AI workloads.

Sajeetharan Sinnathurai explains how recent Azure Cosmos DB developer tooling updates bring GitHub Copilot into the VS Code Query Editor with schema-aware query generation, consent-based schema sampling and execution, optional MCP support via Cosmos DB Shell, and local/CI testing using the Cosmos DB Emulator.

dotnet discusses how .NET MAUI development is changing in 2026, focusing on AI-assisted workflows and how to customize GitHub Copilot for mobile and desktop app development, alongside team-driven productivity enhancements across building, testing, design, and release.

dotnet outlines the future direction of ASP.NET Core and Blazor in .NET 11, focusing on the themes and priorities shaping upcoming web development capabilities on the platform.

Microsoft Developer explains how Azure SQL Hyperscale’s architecture supports elastic scaling, predictable performance, and cost-efficient operation while staying SQL Server compatible, and shows how to build modern SQL-based apps using JSON APIs, REST-style data access, vector search, and SQL MCP for AI agent integration.

Microsoft Developer presents a demo-heavy session showing how to build AI applications securely on top of SQL and Microsoft’s data platforms, from Azure to Microsoft Fabric, with practical examples developers can reuse.

misha-bansal announces GA for two Azure Virtual Machines CPU configuration features: disabling SMT/Hyper-Threading and choosing constrained vCPU counts per VM size. The post explains where the options apply, what performance and licensing scenarios they target, and how billing works for these settings.

John Savill explains what an AI “harness” is and why it matters when working with large language models, focusing on how models behave (including their lack of native memory) and how the harness provides the surrounding logic and context needed to make an LLM useful in real applications.