Browse All Posts (116)

Microsoft Developer walks through the practical work needed to take an AI agent from prototype to production using Azure AI Foundry and Microsoft Agent Framework, including model selection, MCP-based prompts, tool calling, tracing, evaluation, monitoring, and governance guardrails.

Amanda Silver reflects on major technical shifts behind Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code, focusing on VS Code’s open-source architecture and extension ecosystem, and how GitHub Copilot and AI-assisted coding changed what developers expect from an editor and its connected cloud services.

Amanda Silver reflects on how Visual Studio Code grew from an open source editor into a platform shaped by its extension ecosystem, and how GitHub Copilot changed expectations for developer tools by bringing AI-powered coding assistance into everyday workflows.

Allison summarizes the August 2026 update for GitHub Copilot in Visual Studio, including organization-level custom agents, usage visibility, model selection and “thinking effort” controls, and a Git agent that can review uncommitted changes or commits before opening a pull request.

Allison summarizes the August 24 weekly GitHub Copilot updates, covering shared agent sessions in Slack and Microsoft Teams, the Copilot app’s new Customize experience (including MCP servers and plugins), Copilot CLI session and permission defaults, and IDE improvements across VS Code, JetBrains, and Visual Studio.

erikbailey explains how Azure “advertised gateway prefixes” let hub-and-spoke environments summarize many hub/spoke routes into a smaller set of CIDRs for ExpressRoute or VPN Gateway BGP advertisements, helping reduce route-table growth and avoid advertised-prefix limits.

sbaynes breaks down three concrete architecture choices PONS made to build a legal AI platform on Azure for regulated customers: separating public legal knowledge from private client data, leaning on managed Azure services to reduce ops overhead, and turning compliance requirements into enforceable technical controls.

Juan Lavista Ferres describes how ALERTCalifornia and Microsoft’s AI for Good Lab use AI-powered imaging to detect wildfire smoke earlier, helping dispatchers and firefighters validate incidents faster and respond with better situational awareness.

goupadhy announces the August 2026 on-premises data gateway release (version 3000.330), highlighting Power BI Desktop compatibility plus updates across security, authentication, diagnostics, and reliability, along with guidance to upgrade to stay current with dependency and CVE-related fixes.

Yo-Lei Chen demonstrates how to build a full-stack app around SQL Server using GitHub Copilot in VS Code, from database schema design and query assistance through to generating backend code and wiring up REST or GraphQL endpoints.

Visual Studio Code shares a quick tip focused on staying in the editor flow by creating new files quickly while you work.

Allison outlines three upcoming GitHub Copilot changes that affect how organizations pay for seats and usage, how Copilot Chat and the cloud agent are governed under a single policy, and what to expect from the new default “Balanced” effort level for Copilot code review.

Learn Microsoft AI explains how edges in Microsoft Agent Framework workflows control message routing between executors, including conditional paths for dynamic branching based on message content or execution results.

John Savill shares a short weekly Azure update, highlighting what’s new across Microsoft Azure and pointing viewers to related learning resources and playlists on his channel.

junjieli’s August 2026 roundup for Foundry Toolkit for VS Code covers new end-to-end agent-building workflows: improved “Create Agent” entry points, centrally managed MCP toolboxes, preview Agent-to-Agent connections, user-scoped hosted sessions, and deeper run inspection with latency and token breakdowns.

Allison announces generally available improvements to GitHub Issues label management, aimed at making issue triage faster in repositories with large label sets.

Allison announces updates to GitHub Copilot code review, including support for automatically requested reviews on bot-authored pull requests (including Copilot cloud agent), removal of previous large-PR size limits, and new resolution-reason options to provide feedback when closing Copilot review comments.

Allison announces that GitHub Classroom has been deprecated and decommissioned as of August 28, 2026, and outlines what happens to existing GitHub accounts, repositories, and organizations created for Classroom, plus which Classroom data will be permanently deleted under GitHub’s retention policies.

Allison announces a GitHub Actions retention change taking effect October 1, 2026: checks, workflow runs, and statuses will be deleted according to the same retention setting used for artifacts and logs (default 90 days), instead of being kept for 400+ days.

Sreekanth Thirthala announces zone redundancy support for Azure API Management Standard v2, explaining why Availability Zones matter for API reliability and what the feature changes for production workloads. The post also outlines common scenarios and the basic Azure portal steps to enable zone redundancy during service creation.

DevClass reviews Kubernetes v1.37 (Garhwal), focusing on production-readiness changes like the Metrics API reaching GA, upcoming removals of kube-dns, IPVS mode in kube-proxy, and cgroup v1, plus new features around autoscaling, watch cache behavior, and stricter YAML conventions via KYAML.

Kristen Womack and Jeffrey C. summarize the August 2026 Azure Developer CLI (azd) releases, including the GA extension framework, new container deployment options for Azure Functions, breaking command/telemetry terminology changes, and a long list of provisioning, pipeline, and interactive UX fixes.

Sam Basu explains how Uno Platform built two MCP servers in C#—one for documentation grounding and one for driving a live app—so AI agents can look up accurate APIs, run and inspect a cross-platform .NET UI, and validate changes instead of just generating code.

Lauro Ojeda compares self-hosted PostgreSQL with managed PostgreSQL services on Azure, focusing on what you gain and give up around control, operational effort, resilience, security, and cost predictability. It includes a practical checklist to help teams decide which operating model fits their requirements and constraints.

Allison announces a GitHub moderation improvement that lets you automatically close all open issues, discussions, and pull requests authored by a user when you block them in a personal account or organization.

Peter Steinberger and the OpenClaw maintainers discuss how they scaled a viral open source project on GitHub, including handling large volumes of pull requests, setting up governance, and meeting enterprise security expectations while keeping the project model-neutral.

Mads Torgersen introduces union types coming in C# 15, showing how they let you model a closed set of unrelated types, create union values, and switch over them with full strong typing. He also points to a preview compiler you can try in Visual Studio and VS Code.

Kayla Cinnamon recaps the Windows developer announcements from Build 2026, including a new Intelligent Terminal aimed at agent workflows, a WSL-based native container solution, core command-line utilities coming to Windows, and WinGet configuration for one-pass dev machine setup.

Microsoft Developer walks through day-to-day database change workflows using SQL projects in VS Code, focusing on safer refactoring, catching errors early with IntelliSense, and generating publish scripts and profiles to deploy schema changes across environments.

Mads Torgersen introduces union types coming in C# 15, showing how they let you model a closed set of unrelated types, create union values, and switch over them with full strong typing, with notes on trying the feature today via preview tooling in Visual Studio and VS Code.

Gregg Cochran shares lessons from OpenClaw’s maintainers on what changes when an AI-driven open source project scales fast: how pull requests turn into “prompt requests,” what new trust signals look like, and how to reduce supply chain risk while keeping agent capabilities safe by default.

Alym Rayani rounds up August 2026 updates across Microsoft Security, including expanded Microsoft Defender Experts coverage via Microsoft Sentinel, new Microsoft Entra Tenant Governance capabilities, Intune endpoint-management improvements, higher-throughput Purview auto-labeling, and new Secure Now guidance for containing agentic activity.

robece-msft continues the Microsoft Fabric Business Events series by showing how to react to business events using Fabric Activator and Eventhouse, focusing on practical event-driven patterns for turning event streams into signals and actions across Fabric.

Scott Hanselman walks through diagnosing unexpectedly slow 10GbE file transfers by isolating storage from networking with iperf3, then fixing a Windows NIC bottleneck by increasing receive buffers and disabling Large Send Offload (LSO) V2 for IPv4 on an Intel E610-XT2 adapter.

Wes Steyn shows how to take a Microsoft Agent Framework “claw” from a working local prototype to something you can actually run for other people: one shared agent factory feeding multiple hosts, with OpenTelemetry observability, Purview governance, Foundry hosting, and repeatable evals for quality and regression checks.

James Rempt recaps VSLive! @ Microsoft HQ 2026 with the main themes developers discussed—AI across the workflow, GitHub Copilot inside Visual Studio, and practical .NET modernization—and links to recorded sessions on performance, ASP.NET Core/Blazor, C#, and an MCP-based SQL agent scenario.

Visual Studio Code shares a quick tip on adjusting editor and terminal font sizes independently, so you can make text larger or smaller without zooming the entire VS Code interface.

John Naguib lays out a practical architecture for building self-improving AI agents on Azure, focusing on controlled feedback loops (evaluate, learn, test, approve) rather than uncontrolled self-modification. The guide covers agent runtime, tool calling, RAG, memory/experience stores, evaluation, observability, and governance for production use.

AbhinavPremsekhar explains how to run authenticated browser workflows for Azure AI Foundry agents without exposing credentials to the model, using Browser Automation Tool (BAT) with Playwright Workspaces and Azure Key Vault. The post focuses on secret storage, RBAC access, just-in-time retrieval, and practical security guardrails.

Dan Hellem announces an Azure DevOps plugin for the GitHub Copilot app, letting teams view and manage Azure DevOps work items and pull requests directly inside Copilot, including opening, editing, and completing PRs without switching tools.