Browse .NET News (96)

Leah Tran introduces Visual Studio 18.7’s pull request review experience, which lets developers open PRs, browse diffs, discuss comments, and approve or merge changes from inside the IDE for both GitHub and Azure DevOps repos.

Jeffrey Fritz announces the .NET Day on Agentic Modernization livestream (June 16, 2026), focused on practical ways to modernize existing .NET applications without a full rewrite. The agenda highlights GitHub Copilot-assisted modernization, Aspire-based approaches, migration of WinForms and line-of-business apps, and adding agentic/AI capabilities.

The Visual Studio Code Team shares what’s new in VS Code 1.125 (Insiders), focusing on Agent Host improvements like the new /chronicle command set for session history, clearer file path display in chat, and updates to Cache Explorer for navigating multi-agent sessions and prompt-signature allocation details.

Jon Galloway recaps Microsoft Build 2026 with the main developer announcements across GitHub Copilot, Microsoft Foundry, Azure, Windows, Visual Studio, and .NET—highlighting agentic workflows, new tooling, governance specs, and a curated set of sessions and hubs to follow up on what shipped.

Daniel Roth rounds up the key .NET sessions from Microsoft Build 2026, highlighting what’s new in .NET 11 and C# (including union types), plus sessions on agentic web apps, AI building blocks for .NET, .NET MAUI on-device AI, and tooling like dotnetup.

Allison summarizes what’s new in CodeQL 2.25.6 for GitHub code scanning, including Swift 6.3.2 support, full extractor and data flow coverage for C# 14 and .NET 10, and query improvements that expand sensitive-data detection and reduce false positives across multiple languages.

Allison summarizes the May 2026 update for GitHub Copilot in Visual Studio 2026, covering new agent planning workflows, skill discovery, multi-file change review, context window tracking, and tighter Git integration for bringing commits into Copilot Chat and centralizing commit message instructions.

Dom Robinson, samkemp, and Inbal Sagiv announce Foundry Local 1.2.0 and preview Foundry Local on Azure Local, focusing on running AI on-device and at the edge with better transcription, broader hardware support, improved cancellation, and simpler acceleration across Windows and Linux.

Shawn Henry rounds up the BUILD 2026 announcements for Microsoft Agent Framework, covering the new Agent Harness for production-grade agent execution, Foundry Hosted Agents for deploying and operating agents at scale, and CodeAct (Hyperlight) to reduce tool-calling latency and token usage, with examples in .NET and Python.

Anna Hoffman summarizes Microsoft SQL announcements from Build 2026, focused on an “agentic” database developer workflow powered by GitHub Copilot across VS Code and SSMS, plus Azure SQL Hyperscale capabilities and new security and streaming features.

Allison announces general availability of the GitHub Copilot SDK, which lets you embed Copilot’s agent runtime into your own apps and developer tools. The post highlights supported languages, core agent capabilities (tools, MCP, prompts, tracing), authentication options, and what changed since public preview.

Mads Kristensen outlines the Visual Studio announcements from Microsoft Build 2026, focusing on GitHub Copilot’s move toward agentic workflows inside the IDE, plus practical inner-loop improvements like pre-build error checks, AI-assisted merge conflict resolution, and modernization help for upgrading older .NET apps.

tschuchman outlines what Microsoft Foundry is shipping at Build 2026 to help teams move AI agents from prototype to production, covering Agent Framework updates, Toolboxes and MCP-based tool access, hosted runtimes with memory and isolation, and an operations loop with tracing, evaluation, and optimizer-driven improvements.

Tina Manghnani and Pranav Pandit announce Microsoft Build updates for Hosted Agents in Azure AI Foundry Agent Service, including source-code deployments via azd, built-in Content Safety guardrails, real-time voice support with WebSocket/WebRTC, and an Agent Optimizer that automates evaluation and prompt/config improvements for production agents.

Shawn Henry shares a curated list of Microsoft Build 2026 sessions focused on Microsoft Agent Framework and Microsoft Foundry, spanning multi-agent patterns, production-scale agent lifecycles, governance and risk controls, and observability/evals across open standards and tools.

Nick Brady’s May 2026 digest covers Microsoft Foundry updates across models, evaluations, networking, and SDKs—highlighting trace-based evaluation for agents on any cloud, new catalog models (Grok 4.3, DeepSeek V4), GPT-5 reinforcement fine-tuning at gated GA, Managed VNET GA, Foundry Local 1.1/1.2, and new skills/toolboxes support in azure-ai-projects.

Microsoft Defender Experts and Microsoft Defender Security Research Team break down a cryptojacking campaign that uses SEO poisoning (and AI chatbot referrals) to deliver trojanized “utility” downloads, then abuses ScreenConnect for persistent access and hides mining activity via process hollowing into Microsoft-signed .NET Framework binaries.

Wendy Breiding shares practical ways .NET developers can get more value from GitHub Copilot by choosing the right surface (Visual Studio, VS Code, CLI, or cloud agent) and matching it to the task—whether that’s understanding legacy code, generating tests, planning refactors, or running bounded multi-step changes.

Gerald Versluis explains how to opt a .NET MAUI 10 Android app into Material 3 (Material You) styling using a single MSBuild property, what controls already support the new look, and which gaps are still being worked on.

Rachel Kang introduces the new Plan agent in Visual Studio, aimed at helping teams avoid wasted work by drafting and refining an implementation plan before any files are changed. The post explains how the agent asks clarifying questions, produces a detailed plan, and then hands off to Agent mode for step-by-step implementation.

Jack Batzner announces a public preview .NET package that adds governance controls to Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers via a single builder extension, covering startup tool scanning, identity-aware policy enforcement, response sanitization, and built-in audit/metrics so MCP tool calls can fail closed by default.

Richard Lander explains a new C# 16 “caller-unsafe” model that makes unsafe code contracts explicit and compiler-enforced, with a preview planned for .NET 11 and a production release in .NET 12. The post focuses on how unsafe operations propagate, how to document obligations, and how to build safe boundaries around interop-heavy code.

Nikolche Kolev explains how NuGet package pruning becomes the default in .NET 10, removing platform-provided packages from the restore graph to cut down false-positive vulnerability warnings and reduce restore complexity. The post also covers how transitive auditing now works by default and what warnings like NU1510 mean.

Swapnil Nagar explains how to prevent retry storms in Service Bus-triggered Azure Functions by combining exponential backoff with a circuit breaker. The article includes reference architecture guidance plus TypeScript, Python, and .NET examples for scheduling delayed retries, tracking retry metadata, and routing irrecoverable messages to DLQ or quarantine queues.

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.

Microsoft Threat Intelligence breaks down how Kazuar evolved into a modular P2P botnet used by the Russian state actor Secret Blizzard, including delivery chains, module roles (Kernel/Bridge/Worker), IPC and C2 transports, and practical hardening guidance using Microsoft Defender and related controls.

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.

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.

.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.

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.

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.

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.

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.