Browse All Posts (119)

Steven Masada explains how Microsoft disrupted EvilTokens, an AI-enabled phishing-as-a-service platform that automated inbox analysis, target selection, and fraud preparation after compromising email accounts. The post outlines how the operation worked, what defenders should learn from it, and how coordinated legal and technical action helped take down its infrastructure.

Kyle Daigle opens GitHub Copilot Day by outlining how software development is moving from manual coding toward agentic orchestration, and introduces GitHub’s HydraFusion work on optimizing model selection to reduce cost while improving quality. He also previews the shared runtime, the Copilot app, and the Copilot SDK for building custom workflows.

Allison announces that Anthropic’s Claude Opus 5.5 model is now available in GitHub Copilot, including where you can select it, which Copilot plans get access, and how admins can control enablement via model policies and usage-based billing.

Aaron Powell walks through diagnosing a production hang in a C# app by capturing a memory dump and analyzing it in Visual Studio, using Parallel Stacks to spot thread-pool saturation and then using GitHub Copilot to help interpret what the dump is showing.

Aaron Powell shows how to generate memory dumps from a C# app when it becomes unresponsive, so you can debug production hangs with more than just logs. The article includes a thread-pool saturation watcher, Windows dump creation via dbghelp.dll, and Linux dump creation via the .NET runtime’s createdump utility.

Allison announces that OpenAI’s GPT-6 Sol and GPT-6 Luna are now available as model choices in GitHub Copilot, alongside GPT-6 Astra. The update covers what each model is optimized for, where you can select them, how they’re billed, and how admins can control access via model policy settings.

James Montemagno introduces Agent Merge (Experimental) in Visual Studio Code, showing how an agent can help keep pull requests moving by addressing review feedback, fixing failed checks, and resolving merge conflicts so a PR is ready to merge.

Vishnu Charan TJ shows how to use Azure Blob Storage as a durable, shareable “virtual filesystem” for LangChain Deep Agents, including a Python setup walkthrough, identity-based authentication with DefaultAzureCredential, and practical guidance for routing durable paths, isolating containers, and applying least-privilege access.

GitHub shows how the GitHub Copilot app can automate a daily pull request review workflow by grouping dependency update PRs by risk, checking CI build statuses, and summarizing what looks safe to merge.

Microsoft Threat Intelligence, Microsoft Defender Experts and Microsoft Security Research break down EvilTokens, a phishing-as-a-service platform that abuses the OAuth device code flow to steal tokens and take over accounts. The post explains the attack chain, common evasion techniques, and concrete Defender/Entra mitigations plus hunting queries.

Allison announces upcoming GitHub SSH hardening changes: deprecating SHA-1-based RSA signatures, removing a Diffie-Hellman key exchange, enforcing 3072-bit minimum RSA keys for new uploads, and enabling a post-quantum hybrid key exchange on github.com and some GitHub Enterprise Cloud regions.

Visual Studio Code highlights how the Prettier extension simplifies consistent code formatting directly in VS Code, making it easier to keep files clean and standardized while you work.

Roger Barreto and Tao Chen explain how Foundry hosted agent isolation works in Microsoft Agent Framework, breaking it into user isolation (who the request represents) and session isolation (which sandbox and files persist). They show how to pass delegated identities and how to create, reuse, and pool Foundry hosted sessions in .NET and Python.

Andrew Lock walks through the new experimental Device Bound Session Credentials (DBSC) support in ASP.NET Core for .NET 11, showing how to harden cookie authentication (including ASP.NET Core Identity) against session hijacking and what the registration/refresh protocol looks like in practice.

Allison announces that the all-platform CodeQL bundle is deprecated starting with CodeQL CLI 2.27.0 and will be removed in mid-March 2027, with guidance to switch to platform-specific downloads (including Linux ARM64).

kinfey explains how Azure KARS (a Kubernetes reference stack) can run “coding-agent” CLIs as governed workloads, focusing on blast-radius control, credential isolation, and consistent policy enforcement across multiple agent runtimes like Copilot CLI, Claude Code, and Codex.

Allison announces the general availability of GitHub’s refreshed repository pull requests page, highlighting new filtering and search capabilities, a collapsible sidebar with common filters, a compact view, and richer PR context like status check counts and unread update indicators.

Allison announces a GitHub Enterprise feature that lets enterprise owners export a full credential inventory (keys and tokens) via the UI or a paginated REST API, making it easier to assess exposure during incidents and correlate credentials with audit log activity.

Cameron Tomisser shares Episode 6 of The Upload, covering .NET 11 performance improvements, Azure VM Scale Sets resiliency updates, Microsoft’s multicloud database SDK, critical .NET security updates, and new production-ready capabilities in Microsoft Foundry.

hailukassa introduces next-generation virtual nodes on Azure Container Instances (ACI) for Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), showing how to add a serverless compute layer to a cluster for burst capacity and per-pod isolation. The post includes hands-on Helm and kubectl steps, plus how to enable confidential containers with hardware-backed attestation.

Amanda Silver explains how Microsoft engages with open source, including community-driven documentation and upstream contributions to projects like Kubernetes, Apache, and the Linux kernel, and why that work matters for interoperability and product quality.

EldertGrootenboer explains how Azure API Management’s generally available send-service-bus-message policy lets an HTTP API enqueue work to Azure Service Bus, and which queue/topic patterns fit best for commands, routing, buffering, and independent scaling behind a governed API boundary.

GitHub explains how teams can move beyond basic AI code completion and chat to agentic workflows that automate real engineering tasks. The video highlights an internal GitHub example that automates a documentation lifecycle across multiple repositories using an agentic workflow approach.

Allison announces that Grok 4.7 (xAI’s reasoning model) is rolling out in GitHub Copilot, including where developers can select it, which Copilot plans get access, and how admins can control availability via model policy and default model enablement settings.

piyush05 explains how to deploy Elastic’s serverless Elasticsearch Vector Database through Azure Native Integrations, then use it for hybrid (keyword + vector) semantic search and RAG. The post also covers Azure portal onboarding, permissions, Entra ID SSO, and Azure-connected billing for Elastic resources.

John Savill shares practical lessons from customer work and Microsoft’s own AI efforts, focusing on what drives real value, why initiatives stall, and how to think about the human side, trust, and risk when adopting AI.

Waldek Mastykarz explains why a model’s published knowledge cutoff date doesn’t reliably predict whether it can do real work with a specific developer product, and shows how workload-based evaluations give a more accurate signal when building and testing AI coding agents and extensions.

Welcome to this week's .NET roundup, where the big themes are speed, agent architecture, and safer defaults. .NET 11 performance work landed across the JIT, GC, async/runtime plumbing, and core libraries, with BenchmarkDotNet-backed results that make it easier to validate wins (and explain them) in your own workloads. On the AI side, the focus shifted from isolated demos to end-to-end agent patterns using the GitHub Copilot SDK, Microsoft Agent Framework, and MCP, with practical guidance on tool scoping, orchestration, and observability. We close with a timely ASP.NET Core reminder about protecting sensitive runtime-generated files that can accidentally become public under wwwroot.

This week's ML roundup focuses on how data agents are getting closer to production standards, from Fabric IQ and MCP-grounded Copilot Studio experiences to Databricks Genie evaluations that run as a continuous quality loop. On the platform side, Fabric shipped updates that reduce migration risk (BigQuery mirroring GA and an ODBC inventory tool for the ADBC cutover) and improve day-2 operations with bounded, read-only natural-language diagnostics for Fabric Data Warehouse. We also look at Azure's MLPerf Inference v6.1 results for DeepSeek-R1 on NVIDIA GB200 and GB300 systems, plus smaller governance and integration updates across Databricks and Fabric.

kinfey lays out a practical way to evaluate text-to-image models using the HEIM benchmark, focusing on repeatable testing across quality, instruction following, safety, bias, robustness, multilingual prompts, and production constraints like latency and cost.

This week in DevOps, GitHub Copilot moved from "chat in the IDE" toward agent-first delivery workflows that span Slack, the Copilot app, VS Code, and the terminal, with PR handling and issue triage featured heavily. Product updates added the kinds of controls teams need at scale, including improved code review, auto model selection tiers, and Business and Enterprise reporting and policies, plus a Sentry canvas for incident context. On the platform side, Microsoft previewed a guided Copilot flow for building Azure apps that uses structured stages, `az` and `azd`, and cost-aware resource summaries, while the repository readiness checklist grounded the conversation in repeatable automation, CI enforcement, and least-privilege controls.

This week's Security roundup ties together three threads: tighter controls in CI/CD and package publishing, stronger enterprise identity enforcement in GitHub, and more practical guidance for hardening AI agents and their tool access. On the supply chain side, GitHub Actions workflow execution protections reached GA, npm introduced stage-only tokens for safer automation, and GitHub completed its SHA-1 HTTPS sunset while warning teams to audit risky `pull_request_target` usage ahead of enforcement. We also look at agent security patterns (MCP governance, identity-aware tool authorization, and outcome-based observability) plus Azure hardening work across TLS, private networking DNS automation, hosted control planes, and repeatable image and configuration delivery.

This week's GitHub Copilot updates tightened the feedback loop from pull request review to merge, with a refreshed review experience that tracks findings across pushes and makes resolution behavior easier to understand. On the governance side, admins got new levers for model lifecycle planning (including mid-October deprecations), Auto model selection tiers, and a cleaner workflow for budget increase requests. Agent workflows continued to expand across the Copilot app, VS Code, and the CLI, with more emphasis on portable sessions, safer tool calling via MCP, and stronger measurement through new usage and engagement breakdowns. Under the hood, deep dives on the Rust runtime migration and the new Inline Suggestions model show how GitHub is making agentic changes faster to run and easier to review.

This week's AI roundup is about turning agent work into something teams can run reliably: connected Copilot sessions across app, IDE, terminal, and PRs, plus clearer patterns for repo readiness, skills, and handoffs. On the platform side, GitHub added cost and policy levers (Auto model tiers, budget escalation) while warning about mid-October model deprecations and improving Copilot code review iteration tracking to reduce reviewer noise. Under the hood, we got a practical look at production agent engineering, from the Copilot runtime's move to Rust and the shift to diff-first inline suggestions, to the growing focus on MCP authorization, evaluation, and observability for data and ops agents.

This week's Azure updates focus on making platforms easier to run, easier to govern, and safer to change. Plan for an action-required Azure Monitor Workspace shift to spec-compliant PromQL regex matching, and take a look at Azure Policy custom policy versioning to roll out guardrails with less risk. On the build-and-ship side, guided Copilot flows in VS Code, GA TLS improvements for Functions Flex Consumption, and Durable Functions-based dynamic workflows show a move toward repeatable delivery and long-running orchestration. The agent story gets more concrete too, with MCP hosting and tool-call governance patterns, Foundry setup and observability guidance, and Databricks pushing continuous evaluation and retention controls as standard production hygiene.

Authorised Territory shows how to stop passwords, API keys, and other secrets from being sent to an LLM when building AI agents with the Microsoft Agent Framework in .NET and Ollama, by adding middleware that detects and redacts sensitive values before model calls.

Madhura Amlekar explains a key Azure Reservations policy change taking effect on February 1, 2027: reservation exchanges end for services covered by savings plans. The post breaks down what’s affected, what stays the same, how reservations and savings plans stack hourly, and practical rules to reduce risk before committing.

Matt Pocock shares 25 practical “agent skills” for getting more consistent results from GitHub Copilot, including techniques for aligning on requirements, generating more useful pull requests, and running code review and architecture checks earlier in the implementation process.

DevClass reports on Microsoft’s migration of the GitHub Copilot runtime from TypeScript/Node.js to Rust using AI agents, including token costs, release cadence, performance benchmarks, and the practical risks of compiler-passing regressions when LLMs generate Rust at scale.

GitHub discusses how organizations can respond when developers adopt unapproved AI coding tools, focusing on practical governance approaches that keep teams moving while reducing risk.