Browse All Posts (134)

Allison summarizes the September 2026 update for GitHub Copilot in Visual Studio 2026, including PR exploration via the Git agent, preview BYOM support (with a breaking change to the new Agent harness), and a new flow to fix NuGet Audit vulnerabilities directly from the Error List.

Daniel Roth and Shriram Sankaran join the Blazor Community Standup to demo the free, open-source Syncfusion Toolkit for Blazor, showing the components in action and how to use them when building Blazor apps.

Allison announces an update to the Copilot usage metrics API that reports configured names for custom skills, custom agents, MCP servers, slash commands, and plugins (instead of grouping them as “other/custom”), making it easier for admins to track adoption and usage trends across an organization.

sbaynes introduces Flint-interactive, a language that helps AI agents generate interactive data visualizations (not just static charts) using high-level semantic events and update operators, so users can click, filter, zoom, and link interactions across charts, text, tables, and app state.

Allison announces general availability of a global default policy for GitHub Copilot features on Copilot Business and Copilot Enterprise, explaining how unconfigured settings will be enforced during the rollout and where admins can review and override defaults.

arindamc introduces Schema-aware Fabric Eventstreams (Preview), which lets Microsoft Fabric Real-Time Intelligence streams preserve event “shape” so teams can explore, classify, and process multiple event types in a single live stream without forcing everything into one wide schema.

Christoph Berlin explains how an AI agent can speed up root cause analysis by correlating data and reducing the dependency on tracking down subject-matter experts, helping engineers start investigations with better initial context.

Allison announces new GitHub Actions blob storage hosts that are now included in the GitHub meta API, with guidance for organizations that use network allowlists to avoid interruptions to job summaries and logs.

Allison announces a public preview feature for GitHub Enterprise Cloud with data residency that expands secret scanning to public commits on github.com, while keeping alert delivery and data handling within the customer’s residency region via verified domain matching.

Allison announces two GitHub pull request review improvements: a saved whitespace visibility preference that persists across pull requests, and a split-view change where new and deleted files use the full width to reduce wrapping and improve readability.

MichalBar introduces a preview feature in Microsoft Fabric Real-Time Dashboards that uses Copilot to generate purpose-built custom visuals. By describing an operational question in natural language, dashboard authors can have Copilot create both the KQL query and an HTML-based visualization directly as a new dashboard tile.

Allison announces a new “Industry comparison” view in the GitHub Copilot impact dashboard, letting opted-in enterprises benchmark agentic adoption and leverage against aggregated peer data, with controls for policy-based participation, daily refresh, and data residency boundaries.

Microsoft Developer walks through how developers (and AI coding agents) can build applications with Azure SQL, including a demo flow that starts from an Azure SQL DB container and moves into Azure SQL Database’s free tier, plus an overview of Microsoft SQL agent skills and plugin concepts.

Marko Hotti and Patty Chow show how to build an Azure Cosmos DB app using AI-assisted development, starting from a blank folder and a product spec to generate a working travel planner. They cover data modeling, container design, queries, and local testing using the Cosmos DB Linux emulator and GitHub Copilot in VS Code.

GitHub explains how GitHub Copilot approvals can help teams avoid routine pull request review bottlenecks by letting Copilot provide delegated review approvals that count toward merge protection rules, while still combining that automated assessment with a human approval to satisfy branch requirements.

Marko Hotti and Madeline Egan explain how to move an AI agent from a demo to a production-ready system using Azure Cosmos DB, focusing on observability and evaluation practices like tracing, regression testing, and before/after metrics to improve retrieval quality, latency, token usage, memory efficiency, and RU consumption.

Marko Hotti and Madeline Egan show how to build AI agents that keep durable, shared memory across sessions using Azure Cosmos DB, so a multi-agent travel planner can remember user preferences, share context between agents, and continue work after handoffs instead of restarting from scratch.

Marko Hotti and Patty Chow demonstrate how to build a smarter AI travel planner on Azure Cosmos DB by combining operational app data with vector embeddings and search features, so the app can answer nuanced queries while still respecting real inventory and booking workflows.

Sunip explains an enterprise Azure networking pattern that separates “where workloads live” from “what needs to be reachable,” using enterprise-routable prefixes for shared services while keeping workload VNets non-advertised and exposing only selected endpoints through a routable front door.

Microsoft Developer shows how to use Agent Optimizer in Azure AI Foundry to improve an agent when prompt tweaks aren’t reliably fixing behavior. The video walks through building an evaluation dataset, scoring a baseline, generating candidate instruction sets, and validating improvements (quality, latency, and safety) before shipping a new agent version.

Christoph Berlin explains how agentic AI can speed up root cause analysis by correlating signals across multiple systems, ranking likely causes by confidence, and presenting supporting evidence so engineers can start investigations faster after stoppages or slowdowns.

madhurinrao explains ABFS Vectored Read for Azure Data Lake Storage and how it reduces request overhead for selective Parquet reads by coordinating noncontiguous byte ranges through the ABFS driver, enabling compatible Spark workloads to adopt the optimization via configuration.

mukta introduces Enhanced Feature Flags (public preview) in Azure App Configuration, explaining how a dedicated resource model and API surface improve governance of feature rollouts. The post focuses on separating feature-flag permissions from general configuration, adding server-side validation, and keeping existing key-value feature flags supported.

poorvinarang explains how Azure Linux evolved from CBL-Mariner into Azure Linux 4.0, and what Microsoft changed to make it a supported, general-purpose Linux option for Azure VMs, VM Scale Sets, and container images, with a focus on upstream alignment, lifecycle predictability, and security servicing.

Sindhura Bandhakavi explains why “using fewer tokens” can backfire when you’re building AI agents: if the agent has too little context, it may compensate by making more calls to reach the same accuracy, which can increase total cost.

Bruno Capuano and Luis Quintanilla explain how .NET’s AI building blocks fit together for real-world apps, focusing on data ingestion, embeddings, and vector search to ground LLM responses in your own documents and business data.

Wiliam_Rosa breaks down Azure Databricks multi-table, multi-statement transactions (GA as of Oct 16, 2026), explaining the two transaction modes, how conflict detection works, and why external clients need explicit retry logic to be reliable under real concurrency.

sbaynes reports on Microsoft Research work proving the KLS conjecture, a long-standing result in high-dimensional geometry with implications for sampling, optimization, and randomized algorithms. The post also describes a human-directed, agentic AI workflow used to explore candidate proof paths and support derivations and verification.

Microsoft Security Research and Microsoft Threat Intelligence detail how Storm-0940 used the ARTEX agentic AI framework to accelerate a ConnectWise supply chain compromise, then abused OAuth application identities to access Microsoft 365 tenants via app-only authentication and Microsoft Graph, with concrete mitigation steps, detections, IOCs, and hunting queries.

prl explains the preview incremental migration workflow in Migration Assistant for Microsoft Fabric Warehouse, focusing on migrating database object definitions in phases, re-running migrations without recreating the destination, and handling naming conflicts safely. The post also clarifies how object migration differs from data loading and where Data Factory copy jobs fit in.

GitHub shares a September platform update roundup covering Project HydraFusion’s expansion to VS Code and the GitHub Copilot app, plus new workflow features like local sandboxing GA, automated PR approvals that can satisfy merge gates, and bulk autofix for CodeQL findings.

Mahesh Sundaram introduces a preview feature for Azure Monitor Private Link that compresses the private IP footprint of Data Collection Endpoints (DCEs). The post explains the scaling problem in large hub-and-spoke networks, how regional endpoint grouping reduces IP usage, what stays unchanged in the Azure Monitor model, and how to prepare for the controlled preview.

Niels Laute announces PowerToys 0.102 and walks through the headline changes, including new mouse utilities, a quick-access shelf for Command Palette, ZoomIt snip dictation, and new command-line tools that make it easier to script and automate PowerToys features from the terminal.

Hugo Meiland benchmarks Ansys CFX CFD workloads across Azure HBv5, HBv4, HX, and Fams_v7 VM families, showing how mesh size changes the best choice when you measure cost per completed simulation instead of hourly VM price.

prl introduces the preview of Fabric Migration Assistant for migrating Teradata workloads to Fabric Data Warehouse, focusing on translating metadata and SQL/BTEQ into Fabric-compatible T-SQL, reviewing exceptions, and choosing practical data-movement and validation approaches to reduce manual migration effort.

QixiaoWang introduces the Fabric Notebook Toolkit (FNTK) preview, a CLI that lets coding agents interact with live Microsoft Fabric notebooks—reading and editing cells, running code, and pulling outputs and Spark diagnostics—so iterative debugging and validation can happen directly from an agent-driven terminal workflow.

Allison announces a public preview in GitHub CLI v2.103.0 that lets you opt in to expiring, auto-refreshing OAuth credentials, reducing the risk of long-lived leaked tokens. The post explains how to enable the feature, how it behaves with Git over HTTPS, and what to watch for in scripts that cache tokens.

Eleanor White explains how GitHub is moving its Git storage to Azure, focusing on the last ultra-busy repositories blocked by cross-region latency. The post breaks down per-reference write quorums and a “virtual replica” design that makes Azure Blob Storage part of the durability path so reads and writes can scale independently.

Laura Jiang announces Agentic Autofix for GitHub Advanced Security in Azure DevOps, which generates proposed fixes for both code scanning alerts and vulnerable dependencies. The update uses repository context plus custom instructions/skills to better match team standards, and adds triage signals like EPSS and dependency scope to help prioritize what to fix first.

John Edward breaks down six Copilot Studio enhancements landing in general availability on October 26, 2026, focused on building and operating Copilot Chat (declarative) agents with more predictable conversation flows, better testing and evaluation, usage monitoring, and clearer lifecycle controls across environments.