Browse All Posts (118)

sbaynes interviews Mercedes-AMG PETRONAS F1 lead race strategist Joey McMillan on how the team uses Microsoft Azure—especially Azure Batch—to run large-scale race simulations quickly enough to influence live, race-day strategy decisions under changing weather and track conditions.

Michael Scovetta shares joint Microsoft and NVIDIA guidance for managing risks when deploying open-weight AI models in enterprise environments, including a shared risk taxonomy, how to use evaluations as evidence, and where safeguards and responsibilities shift across model, runtime, and application layers.

abhilashasr threat-models Azure MCP Server for AI-assisted incident response, focusing on how Entra ID, Azure RBAC, Key Vault, Policy, and monitoring controls prevent an assistant from turning diagnostics into unintended production changes. It also includes a read-only demo connecting GitHub Copilot in VS Code to Azure Monitor and Log Analytics.

John Savill shares a short Azure Weekly Update for 16 October 2026, covering a handful of platform changes across resiliency, compute, networking, storage, and Azure’s AI hardware/model announcements.

Allison announces general availability of GitHub’s open source license compliance for GitHub Enterprise Cloud, adding enterprise-wide license policies and PR checks to help teams prevent non-compliant dependencies from being merged.

Jesse Houwing breaks down how real-world supply chain attacks have abused GitHub Actions workflows, then walks through the platform changes GitHub shipped in 2025–2026 (from safer pull_request_target behavior to lock files and cache controls) and ends with a practical checklist of hardening steps to apply now.

Visual Studio Code highlights what’s new in VS Code v1.142, including interactive canvases for agent workflows, chat handoffs that keep context, and new Markdown editing capabilities, with a link to the full weekly update notes.

Fokko at Work demos selected new features in Visual Studio Code 1.142 with a focus on GitHub Copilot and related UI changes, including canvases and the redesigned model picker, plus workflow improvements like moving chats between folders and worktrees.

RicardoDuncan rounds up the latest SQL developer tooling updates for VS Code, including new MSSQL extension features, GitHub Copilot schema-aware agent workflows, and Microsoft SQL “skills” for assessing and migrating SQL Server to Azure SQL, plus driver releases aligned with SQL Server 2025.

Rafia Aqil lays out three practical patterns for moving Azure Cosmos DB for NoSQL workloads across regions, with a clear decision framework and cutover guidance. The post includes Azure CLI commands for PITR restore and preview online container copy, plus validation steps and trade-offs around downtime, capacity, and multi-region design.

Allison announces general availability of the Xcode 27 GitHub Actions runner image for building and testing Apple apps, including the new runner labels to target the Xcode 27 toolchain on Apple Silicon hosted runners.

Allison announces updates to GitHub Copilot in Slack and Microsoft Teams, including multi-repo support in a single conversation plus improvements to mentions, repository switching, Slack thread context, and overall reliability.

Nick Brady’s September 2026 roundup covers Microsoft Foundry updates across models, agents, observability, and tooling—highlighting GPT-6 family GA, Routines and Tool Search GA, Insights preview, Model Router preview controls, and Foundry Local 2.1 bring-your-own-model support with ONNX Runtime GenAI.

Manfred Riem and Nicole Haugen join Open Source Friday to walk through the Spec Kit 1.0.0 release, focusing on what changed in the project and what it takes to ship a stable open source developer tool.

HilaryWang announces general availability of Automatic Zone Balance for Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets, explaining how Azure continuously rebalances instances across availability zones with safeguards like create-before-delete and health checks, and how to enable it via portal, CLI, PowerShell, or REST API.

Allison announces a new GitHub Code Quality billing feature that lets organizations download a CSV report of license usage, including which active committers consumed licenses, which repositories they contributed to in the last 90 days, and whether committers are unique to a repo or org.

GitHub demonstrates how the Logitech MX Keypad integrates with the GitHub Copilot app to control Copilot Chat and voice prompts from dedicated hardware keys, plus manage projects, sessions, and MCP server toggles without leaving the coding flow.

Martin Woodward explains how GitHub Copilot’s agentic workflows are shifting development from issuing commands to expressing intent, and why “ambient intelligence” needs strong context, clear boundaries, and developer control. He also shares a practical example: mapping Copilot actions to physical controls like the Logitech MX Keypad.

Allison announces a November 16, 2026 deprecation of several AI models across GitHub Copilot experiences, and explains what admins and teams need to do to keep Copilot Chat, agent modes, and other Copilot features working with supported alternatives.

Greg Mohler explains how GitHub built “Evergreen”, a GitHub App that automates quarterly outside-collaborator access reviews and stale-repo archival using native GitHub features like Actions, issues, webhooks, and custom properties, with a fail-secure approach and an audit trail stored directly in git history.

Chet Husk introduces dotnetup, a public-preview toolchain manager that installs and updates user-local .NET SDKs and runtimes on macOS and Linux, with support for side-by-side stable, preview, and daily builds and predictable version pinning via global.json.

Microsoft Developer presents a Data Exposed session on Fabric Database Hub, focusing on bringing Azure SQL, SQL Server, Cosmos DB, PostgreSQL, and Fabric databases into a single place for discovery, estate-level visibility, governance, and AI-assisted insights to prioritize actions.

Mike Hulme explains how Azure is evolving its cloud-native platform to better support AI workloads and AI agents, focusing on coordinated compute/storage/networking, production-ready open-source foundations (notably Kubernetes), cost governance with FinOps, and “agentic” operations to improve reliability and efficiency at scale.

Lim Ai Leen reports on Bar-Ilan University’s pilot of an AI agent in Moodle that helps students search, summarize, and quiz themselves on course materials using natural language, built with Azure AI Services and Microsoft Copilot Studio and run in the university’s Azure environment.

Allison announces general availability of GitHub’s AI Scan for pull requests, an AI-powered code scanning capability that complements CodeQL by detecting vulnerabilities in PR changes (including languages and file types CodeQL may not cover) and surfacing advisory findings with explanations and suggested fixes.

GitHub explains why making stacked pull requests a native feature is more than just linking PRs and merging them in order, and how it required changes to core merge architecture and legacy systems.

Aaron Stark talks with Haishi Bai about Adaptive Applications, a capability-based architectural approach for building portable apps that can run across Azure, sovereign environments, edge, and on-premises. They focus on decoupling application needs (AI, data, identity) from the underlying services to meet compliance, residency, and continuity requirements.

Mads Kristensen introduces a new Visual Studio 2026 (18.11) option that stops a solution build after the first project failure, so you can get back to fixing the first error instead of waiting for queued projects to finish.

Allison announces general availability of agentic autofix for GitHub code scanning alerts, where Copilot explores the codebase, proposes and validates fixes with CodeQL, and opens a draft pull request. The post also covers where it can be used, required policies and permissions, and how billing works with AI Credits and Actions minutes.

Visual Studio Code shows how to keep momentum while working with agents by highlighting text to ask follow-up questions in a side chat with its own context, or quoting selected text directly into your current chat for an immediate response.

Allison announces that GitHub has retired email notifications for repository push events as of October 15, 2026, and explains the spam/abuse rationale. The post also points developers to a replacement approach using a GitHub Actions workflow triggered on push to send emails via their own SMTP server or email provider.

Eduard van Valkenburg explains how Microsoft Agent Framework for Python models and uses vector stores for embeddings, vector search, and agent context. The post shows how to define typed records, index and query data, expose vector search as an agent tool, and keep conversation history searchable via context providers across multiple database integrations.

John Edward explains an upcoming Microsoft Entra default-permission change that lets ordinary users create agent blueprints unless admins disable it. The post breaks down what’s changing, what isn’t, and the specific Entra admin center setting IT teams should review before the November 2026 rollout.

kinfey explains how to use small language models (SLMs) as typed “decision components” inside an application, then walks through a concrete pipeline using Microsoft Olive to LoRA fine-tune Qwen3.5-0.8B, export to CUDA FP16 ONNX, and validate decisions via option-letter probabilities.

John Edward explains the planner-executor loop as a practical architecture for building agentic systems on Azure, focusing on how to separate planning from execution, validate model outputs, and run tool calls safely. The article maps the pattern to Azure services and highlights reliability, observability, and access-control decisions needed for production use.

dchelupati explains how to scale Azure SRE Agent from a single team to enterprise-wide use, focusing on access control, guardrails, auditing, multi-agent topologies, and “agent as code” practices for repeatable deployment and governance.

dchelupati shares a practical “start small” adoption guide for Azure SRE Agent, focused on picking a first operational use case, connecting only the required context (telemetry, repos, runbooks), and expanding into repeatable workflows with the right triggers and permissions.

Meagan McCrory explains that Extended Security Updates (ESU) for Windows Server 2012 and 2012 R2 ended on October 13, 2026, and outlines practical next steps to reduce security and compliance risk by upgrading, migrating to Azure, or modernizing workloads.

Lee Murray explains how VS Code’s modernized UI preview evolved from the 2026 themes and the Agents window, and how developer feedback is shaping layout density, editor tabs, theming controls, and performance work in the workbench.

Daniel Roth hosts a Blazor Community Standup with the Infragistics team to walk through the stable release of the free, open-source Ignite UI component library for Blazor, what components are included, and how to use them in real Blazor apps.