Browse All .NET Content (328)

Imran Siddique and Shawn Henry explain how Microsoft Agent Framework and the Agent Governance Toolkit (AGT) fit together to run AI agents safely in production, with deterministic runtime policy checks, budget enforcement, and end-to-end auditability across local and cross-boundary (A2A) agent interactions.

Jim Harrer announces the VSLive! Microsoft AI Hackathon 2026 at Microsoft HQ in Redmond, a hands-on evening build event designed to help teams ship real prototypes using Azure OpenAI, Azure AI Foundry, GitHub Copilot, and agent-based patterns, with judging criteria that emphasize architecture, security, and practical value.

DevClass reports on Microsoft’s claimed WinUI 3 performance improvements, including a 25% speed-up in File Explorer areas built with WinUI and reductions in memory allocations and function calls, alongside developer concerns about WinUI 3 responsiveness versus WPF and UWP.

The Visual Studio Code Team shares the 1.121 (Insiders) release notes, covering Copilot Chat and agent terminal improvements, model picker updates, terminal output compression for common dev tools, SSH authentication enhancements, and a newer bundled ConPTY on Windows.

TulikaC introduces Platform Release Channel for Azure App Service for Linux, a setting that lets teams control how quickly runtime patch updates are applied so they can balance security updates with validation time in production.

Authorised Territory demonstrates a .NET data ingestion pipeline that converts a PDF to Markdown via the MarkItDown MCP server, generates embeddings with a local Ollama model, and stores those embeddings in SQL Server 2025 running in Docker Desktop.

Bruno Capuano and Jose Luis Latorre preview what to watch for at Microsoft Build 2026 around .NET and AI, including agentic patterns, copilots, and expected updates across the Microsoft developer ecosystem.

Adam Sitnik details the biggest update to System.Diagnostics.Process in years, introducing new .NET 11 APIs for starting processes, capturing stdout/stderr without deadlocks, controlling handle inheritance and redirection, and managing process lifetimes, with benchmarks showing reduced allocations and better scalability across Windows, Linux, and Apple platforms.

David Ortinau explains the .NET 11 Preview 4 change that makes CoreCLR the default runtime for .NET MAUI apps on Android, iOS, and Mac Catalyst, and what developers should test as they validate the transition.

Simona Liao introduces Agent Skills in Visual Studio, a way to package reusable, task-specific instructions so Copilot agents can follow your team’s workflows and standards. The post shows how to create and manage skills in the IDE or from your repo, and when to use skills versus custom instructions.

Nick Chapsas revisits a set of older .NET “best practices” he previously followed and explains why he no longer recommends them, focusing on practical trade-offs and what tends to work better in real-world C# codebases.

Rick Strahl shows a small, ready-to-use ASP.NET Core helper extension method for retrieving a request’s client IP address, including the common reverse-proxy case where you need to read X-Forwarded-For instead of the proxy’s RemoteIpAddress.

.NET Team announces .NET 11 Preview 4 and highlights what’s new across the runtime, SDK, libraries, ASP.NET Core, .NET MAUI, C#, and Entity Framework Core, with links to detailed release notes and guidance on installing the preview SDK.

Rahul Bhandari (MSFT) and Tara Overfield recap the May 2026 servicing releases for .NET and .NET Framework, including security and non-security fixes, the CVEs addressed, and where to find release notes, installers, container images, Linux packages, and known issues.

Allison summarizes what’s new in CodeQL 2.25.4 for GitHub code scanning, including Swift 6.3.1 support, improved C# and ASP.NET taint-flow modeling, expanded Java/Kotlin query sanitizers to reduce false positives, and new data-flow barrier extensions to tune results across many languages.

samkemp announces Foundry Local 1.1.0, adding on-device live speech transcription, text embeddings for semantic search/RAG, and an Open Responses API client for streaming, tool calling, and vision. The post also covers WebGPU as an optional plugin, smaller JavaScript packages, and broader .NET compatibility for the C# SDK.

Nick Brady’s April 2026 digest covers Microsoft Foundry updates for model access, local inference, agent observability, and SDK changes across Python, JavaScript/TypeScript, .NET, and Java, with concrete guidance on quota tiers, tracing via OpenTelemetry, and monitoring/evaluation features for production agents.

osmancokakoglu announces the winners of the AI Dev Days Hackathon and summarizes the projects and the Microsoft stack they used, including Azure AI Foundry, Azure OpenAI models, and the Microsoft Agent Framework, plus common Azure services and DevOps practices used to ship production-grade agentic apps.

David McCarter joins On .NET Live to discuss practical coding standards (from the 20th anniversary edition of his book) and how they improve long-term maintainability, productivity, and performance in .NET codebases.

This roundup tracks a clear shift from agent capability to agent governance: more context, more observability, and more policy controls across Copilot, VS Code, and the CLI. On the platform side, Microsoft tightened the path from prototype to production with .NET agent building blocks, Azure AI Foundry deployment patterns, and data governance improvements that make RAG and operations easier to standardize. We also cover the less flashy work that keeps systems dependable at scale, including Fabric and Databricks operational updates, GitHub migration and ruleset changes, and security research that keeps token theft, privilege escalation, and supply chain risk in focus.

Authorised Territory demonstrates how to build an end-to-end durable workflow for an AI agent pipeline using the .NET Microsoft Agent Framework, running the Durable Task Scheduler Emulator in Docker Desktop and streaming workflow events in real time, with a local Ollama LLM.

Amanda Silver explains why Microsoft created TypeScript, focusing on the problems it set out to solve for large JavaScript codebases—adding structure and scalability while keeping compatibility with the existing web ecosystem.

hcamposu announces Microsoft Host Integration Server (HIS) 2028 preview, outlining the move to .NET 10 (including Linux support for non-SNA features), new REST-based connectivity for DB2 and CICS/IMS workloads, and a set of deprecations aimed at removing legacy dependencies and improving security and hybrid operations.

Jacob Alber walks through the Microsoft Agent Framework “Handoff” orchestration pattern for multi-agent workflows, showing how to model agent-to-agent routing as a bounded graph with shared conversation context, guardrails, and natural termination. The post compares .NET and Python authoring APIs and highlights when to choose Handoff vs Sequential or explicit conditional branching.

Daniel Roth and Javier Calvarro Nelson preview a new end-to-end component testing library for Blazor, coming in .NET 11. They explain the motivation for the approach, show how it tests real Blazor apps more reliably, and outline what feedback they’re looking for next.

Kristen Womack introduces an Azure Developer CLI (azd) template from Curity and Microsoft that deploys an AI agent app to Azure with least-privilege authorization. It focuses on using short-lived OAuth 2.0 tokens (JWTs) and token exchange so APIs can enforce data boundaries even when agent behavior is nondeterministic.

Reynald Adolphe walks through the April 2026 Visual Studio Code release highlights, focusing on the new Agents Window, tools for evaluating chat customizations, and updates to GitHub Copilot for CLI including “thinking effort” and remote control features.

Daniel Roth explains how Microsoft Copilot Studio upgraded its in-browser .NET WebAssembly engine from .NET 8 to .NET 10, what changed in deployment and packaging, and the performance gains the team measured—especially for larger, more complex agents running AOT-compiled code.

Microsoft Developer demonstrates how to connect GitHub Copilot to the Unity Editor using Model Context Protocol (MCP), then uses prompts to build a playable Unity prototype with C#/.NET. The video focuses on setup, permissions, agents/skills, debugging common workflow issues, and practical best practices for AI-assisted game development.

Microsoft Developer introduces Quest to Compile, a new show where two game-dev siblings explore modern game development in the .NET ecosystem, from fundamentals like gameplay code and debugging to practical workflows like Git version control and AI-assisted coding with GitHub Copilot.

Mark Russinovich discusses why Win32 is still treated as a first-class Windows API surface in 2026, and how Windows’ long-term compatibility commitments and the size of the desktop software ecosystem keep “legacy” APIs operationally essential.

David Ortinau and Gerald Versluis are joined by Nick Kovalsky to demo .NET MAUI work that combines Rust, SkiaSharp, and a drawn-UI approach, plus AI/ML live processing techniques he’s been building.

Authorised Territory demonstrates how to add API versioning to a .NET 10 Minimal API using the Asp.Versioning.Http NuGet package, including query-string and URL-segment versioning approaches, plus how to mark an API version as deprecated and test requests using a Visual Studio 2026 .http file.

Tao Chen and Shawn Henry explain how to take a Microsoft Agent Framework (MAF) agent from local development to production by deploying it as a container to Foundry Hosted Agents, with built-in identity, scaling, session persistence, versioning, and observability.

Shyju Krishnankutty shows how to build durable, multi-step AI agent workflows with the Microsoft Agent Framework: start with an in-process .NET console workflow, add durability via the Durable Task runtime and scheduler, then scale out with parallel agents and host the same workflow on Azure Functions.

Devi Priya explains how GitHub Copilot Workspace supports intent-driven, multi-file refactoring across a repository, including a practical walkthrough that modernizes an app’s authentication flow and highlights planning, review, and adoption best practices.

Jeremy Likness shows how the Microsoft Agent Framework (v1.0) builds on Microsoft.Extensions.AI to create autonomous, tool-using AI agents in .NET, including multi-turn sessions, memory via context providers, and graph-based workflows for orchestrating multiple agents.

This week’s roundup is about turning agentic tooling into something teams can run, budget, and govern. GitHub Copilot’s shift to token-based billing and AI Credits makes cost a first-class part of rollout checklists, especially as agent-style IDE and PR workflows expand and code review begins consuming both AI Credits and GitHub Actions minutes. On the platform side, GPT-5.5 in Microsoft Foundry, Microsoft Agent Framework 1.0, and A2A/MCP interoperability point toward more standardized agent runtimes, while Azure and Fabric updates reinforce the same operational theme: tighter identity, clearer observability, and more precise controls in both connected and constrained environments.

Authorised Territory demonstrates how to use dependency injection with class-based skills in the .NET Agent Framework, showing how an AgentSkillResource function can resolve services via DI instead of instantiating them with new, while the agent runs a local LLM using Ollama.

Hidde de Smet shows how to combine five GitHub Copilot customization file types in a single .NET Aspire repo, so the right instructions, skills, prompts, and agent roles load at the right time without bloating every chat request.