Browse .NET News (138)

Jason Helmick announces that starting with PowerShell 7.7-preview.1, PowerShell will move away from MSI installers on Windows and adopt MSIX as the primary install method, outlining the servicing, reliability, enterprise deployment, and accessibility reasons behind the change.

Nick Brady’s March 2026 digest for Microsoft Foundry (Azure AI Foundry) covers major GA releases like Foundry Agent Service, GPT-5.4 family models, evaluations with continuous monitoring into Azure Monitor, private networking, and SDK 2.0 updates across Python, JS/TS, Java, and .NET—plus guardrails and third-party runtime security integrations.

samkemp announces the GA of Foundry Local, a cross-platform on-device AI runtime and SDK that bundles ONNX Runtime and lets developers ship chat and audio inference inside apps with offline operation, hardware acceleration, and OpenAI-format APIs.

Lilian Kasem (she/her) introduces a new Fluent API for building MCP Apps with Azure Functions (.NET isolated worker), showing how to turn an MCP tool into a UI-capable app and configure views, permissions, and CSP security policies with a small amount of code.

Jeffrey Fritz walks through GitHub Copilot’s application modernization assessment report, showing how it drives planning and execution for migrating .NET or Java apps to Azure, including issue triage (cloud readiness, upgrades, security), target compute comparisons (App Service/AKS/Container Apps), and downstream IaC and deployment outputs.

Daniel Roth announces that ASP.NET Core 2.3 reaches end of support on April 7, 2027, explains the practical impact for existing apps, and recommends upgrading to a supported .NET version, including using GitHub Copilot App Modernization to help plan and execute the migration.

Mads Kristensen explains a lesser-known Visual Studio option that controls whether floating tool windows and document windows are owned by the main IDE window, and how setting it to “None” pairs well with PowerToys FancyZones for a cleaner multi-monitor workflow.

Microsoft Fabric Blog announces a preview ADO.NET driver that lets .NET apps connect to Microsoft Fabric Data Engineering Spark workloads via Livy APIs, using familiar ADO.NET abstractions plus Entra ID authentication, pooling, session reuse, and Spark SQL support.

The Visual Studio Code Team summarizes what’s new in VS Code 1.115 (Insiders), including updates to Copilot-related agent sessions, terminal automation, and remote SSH connections for agent hosting.

Shawn Henry announces Microsoft Agent Framework 1.0 for .NET and Python, highlighting production-ready APIs, multi-agent orchestration, Azure Foundry/Azure OpenAI integrations, and new capabilities like workflows, memory providers, MCP/A2A support, and tooling such as DevUI.

Allison announces the public preview of the GitHub Copilot SDK, outlining how developers can embed Copilot’s agent runtime into apps and workflows with built-in tools like streaming, permissions, and OpenTelemetry, plus BYOK support.

Bill Wagner introduces union types in C# 15, explaining the new `union` keyword, how it enables exhaustive pattern matching over a closed set of case types, and how to try the feature today using .NET 11 Preview 2 with `preview`.

Allison summarizes the March 2026 update for GitHub Copilot in Visual Studio 2026, focusing on new extensibility features like custom agents and agent skills, plus debugging, profiling, and dependency-vulnerability fixes that integrate directly into the IDE.

Jason Helmick shares a postmortem of the PowerShell 7.6 delay (shipped March 2026), breaking down what failed in packaging and validation, how preview cadence and ownership gaps amplified the risk, and which release-process investments the team is making to improve predictability.

Mark Downie walks through the Visual Studio March update features that let teams customize GitHub Copilot with repo-based custom agents, reusable agent skills, and a new language-aware find_symbol tool, plus Copilot-assisted profiling and NuGet vulnerability fixes inside the IDE.

Ronnie Geraghty summarizes the March 2026 Azure SDK updates, highlighting Azure Identity 1.19.0 for .NET, Cosmos DB 0.31.0 for Rust, and the GA release of Azure AI Content Understanding 1.0.0, plus a roundup of new stable and beta client/management libraries across .NET, JavaScript, Python, Go, and more.

The Visual Studio Code Team summarizes VS Code 1.114 (Insiders), highlighting pinned chat session indicators and a new `${taskVar:name}` variable for passing task problem-matcher output into launch configurations.

Allison shares a GitHub update: CodeQL pull request scans for C#, Java, JavaScript/TypeScript, Python, and Ruby are now incremental by default, reducing scan times by analyzing only changed code and combining it with a cached database of the full codebase.

Pablo Lopes and Bruno Capuano announce Version 2 of the free, open-source “Generative AI for Beginners .NET” course, rebuilt on .NET 10 with Microsoft.Extensions.AI, refreshed RAG samples, and a new Microsoft Agent Framework lesson aimed at helping developers build more production-ready AI apps.

Stephen Toub - MSFT shares what the .NET team learned after 10 months using GitHub Copilot Coding Agent in dotnet/runtime, including PR throughput data, success and revert rates, review burden, and why good repo instructions and task selection matter more than model hype.