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Highlights
Aspire 13.5: Fresh pixels and better workflows
Azure Cosmos DB in the Agentic Era: Data Tools for Developers and AI Agents
Today I will... Modernize a .NET application
Latest posts
Unlocking the Power of AI for Every Developer in Visual Studio with Bring your Own Model
The best AI in Visual Studio is the AI you can bring with you. Developers don't work in a single-model world anymore. You might reach for one model for everyday coding, another for a domain-specific problem, and an approved model for work that must stay within your organization's governance boundaries. So, the question we hear most often isn't which model is best. It's, can I use mine? We're bringing Bring Your Own Model (BYOM) in Preview to Visual Studio, making it available and enabled by default across Community, Professional, and Enterprise SKUs. This Preview focuses on the developer experience available t...
Java OpenJDK August 2026 Critical Patch Update
Hello Java customers! We are happy to announce the latest August 2026 critical patch update release for the Microsoft Build of OpenJDK. Check our release notes page for details on fixes and enhancements or download and install the binaries today. The source code of our builds are now available on GitHub for further inspection: Microsoft Build of OpenJDK specific updates OpenJDK 25 OpenJDK 21 OpenJDK 17 OpenJDK 11 Summary of Upstream Updates OpenJDK Vulnerability Advisory August 2026 OpenJDK 25 OpenJDK 21 OpenJDK 17 ...
From dotnet run to Foundry Hosted Agent in 3 lines of C#
You built an agent with Microsoft Agent Framework and it works great on your machine. Now what? Turns out deploying it to production takes 1 NuGet package, 3 lines of C#, and 2 commands. Let's do it.
Explore new features available in C# 15 preview
C# 15 ships with .NET 11. It adds union types, closed hierarchies, a preview of the updated unsafe model, and a few smaller changes that remove everyday ceremony.
Powering Memory in Foundry Agent Service, with Azure Cosmos DB
Move from a locally composed memory-enabled agent to a deployed Foundry Agent Service agent, with keyless Azure infrastructure and an interactive browser sample. In Native Agent Memory for Microsoft Agent Framework, Powered by Azure Cosmos DB, we introduced : a Microsoft Agent Framework context provider that extracts useful information from conversations, stores it in Azure Cosmos DB, and retrieves it before later agent runs. That article used a locally composed Agent Framework agent and . It was a useful way to isolate the memory concepts: one provider, two lifecycle hooks, and a stable u...
Comparing the two holograms on the Windows 95 box
Filling in with your imagination.
Today I will… Modernize a .NET application
Today I will modernize a .NET Framework application to .NET 10 using the GitHub Copilot modernization tooling built-in to Visual Studio. The tooling helps us upgrade applications running on legacy versions of .NET and also migrate them to Azure. Today we're going to focus on the upgrade portion. And, the tooling will do all the work for us! But it doesn't do everything at once, and that's good. It introduces checkpoints into the .NET upgrade process to tell us what it has been up to we can then guide it towards the outcome we want. And at each of those checkpoints it creates a markdown file t...
Reducing C++ template bloat by factoring out the type-dependent portions of the function, practical exam
Applying our principles.
Reducing C++ template bloat by factoring out the type-dependent portions of the function
Looking for consolidation points.
Go 1.27.0-1 Microsoft build now available
A new release of the Microsoft build of Go is now available for download.
Go 1.26.7-1 and 1.25.14-1 Microsoft builds now available
A new release of the Microsoft build of Go is now available for download.
Outgrowing SQL Server Express? Upgrade to Azure SQL Database Free Tier in 3 Steps
If you’ve been building local prototypes, internal tools, web backends, or lightweight services on SQL Server Express, you know the routine: it’s free, familiar, and gets the job done – until you hit hardware limits or spend weekends manual backup scripts and handling OS patches. Learn how to upgrade from SQL Server Express to Azure SQL Database free tier in 3 simple steps. Whether you're running SQL Server 2022 (or older) and hitting the hard 10 GB storage wall, or using SQL Server 2025 and realizing 50 GB of disk space doesn't solve the strict 1.4 GB memory bottleneck, staying on Express limits your applica...
MSSQL Extension for VS Code: SQL Formatter, Azure SQL Database Provisioning, and More
Writing and maintaining SQL is easier when you can eliminate repetitive steps and keep your scripts cleanly formatted. With the MSSQL extension for VS Code v1.45, we're introducing the Public Preview of the SQL Formatter alongside the General Availability of Azure SQL Database Provisioning and Shortcuts Configuration. You can now apply consistent T-SQL formatting across your projects, create free tier cloud databases with automated post-deployment actions, and streamline frequently used commands and queries directly inside Visual Studio Code. What's new in MSSQL extension for VS Code v1.45 Here's a summary of t...
On wrapping a callable in a lambda that just calls it with the same parameters
Just use the callable directly.
Aspire 13.5: Fresh pixels and better workflows
Aspire 13.5 refreshes the dashboard and aspire.dev, expands the Interaction Service, adds cross-scope Azure references and Kubernetes persistent volumes, and brings live terminals into the AppHost.
Announcing AppxManifest IntelliSense Support in the WinApp VS Code Extension
The WinApp VS Code extension exists to make Windows app development feel at home in VS Code. It brings the Windows App Development CLI right into the editor, so you can initialize, run, debug, define the identity of, package, and sign Windows apps built with .NET, WPF, WinUI, C++, Electron, Rust, Tauri, or Flutter, all without switching tools. Get it now: Install the WinApp extension from the VS Code Marketplace. We're excited to announce the release of v0.3.0. This release brings schema-aware IntelliSense to your manifest files, adds workspace search to the commands that require a file or folder, and i...
Azure Cosmos DB in the Agentic Era: Data Tools for Developers and AI Agents
Anthropic's 2026 Agentic Coding Trends Report captures an important tension in how developers use AI. Engineers report using AI in roughly 60% of their work, yet say they can fully delegate only 0–20% of their tasks. AI is becoming a constant collaborator, but it still needs setup, supervision, validation, and human judgment. That gap is especially relevant when an agent starts working with a database. Database requests often sound easy. “Show me the failed orders from last week.” “Why is this query expensive?” “Does this container have the field I need?” For a developer, answering those question...
The Two Hybrid Searches in Microsoft SQL
Hybrid search is usually described as combining keyword search with vector search. Microsoft SQL does that, for sure, but we do quite a bit more right out of the box. SQL dynamically evaluates queries and switches between kNN and ANN vector search based on cost and selectivity. These two types of hybrid search, work together, ensuring your semantic queries return the best possible results to your apps and agents. Text search In 1998, Microsoft Research Cambridge welcomed Stephen Robertson, one of the principal architects of BM25, or Best Matching 25, the relevance-ranking algorithm that became foundational to m...
What’s a PFN?
What's a PFN? MSIX introduced Package identity in Windows 8. While the familiar package identity "5-tuple" was functional, it wasn't especially convenient to pass through APIs or embed in resources such as files, registry keys, URLs, or XML documents. To address this, Windows defined an opaque string representation known as a Package Moniker. Windows called a related identifier derived from a package's Name and Publisher the Package Family Moniker. These were commonly abbreviated as PM and PFM. As development progressed, Windows quite sensibly required new APIs to pass through API Design Review. The review tea...
Why did the Microsoft Entertainment Pack for Windows have a special sticker announcing that it also had Tetris?
A contingency plan.
Apple Silicon and Xcode 27 images available in pay-as-you-go (preview)
Apple developers can now build and test their applications natively on Apple Silicon in Azure Pipelines. New arm64 macOS agents are available in public preview through the pay-as-you-go GitHub-hosted Agents pool. Starting with Apple Silicon, Azure Pipelines is bringing over some of the agent sizes already available in GitHub Actions. The preview includes the following macOS images: Running workloads directly on Apple Silicon avoids the overhead and compatibility limitations of emulating arm64 on Intel hardware. It also lets teams validate applications against the same architecture used by current Apple device...
From single call to agents: five new Claude capabilities now available in Microsoft Foundry
Structured outputs, web search, web fetch, MCP connector, and tool search are now available for Claude models hosted on Azure in Microsoft Foundry, turning a model endpoint into a production agent platform.
How do functions like alloca allocate memory from the stack?
The usual probing.
Windows App Development CLI v0.6 – create new WinUI applications, sign packages with Azure, and more
Windows App Development CLI v0.6.0 has just shipped and contains a ton of new features. Much of the changes in this release focus on getting from zero to a running app faster: scaffold a fresh WinUI project with a single command, search real WinUI controls and samples without leaving the terminal, and run your app straight from a .csproj with no manual build step first. It also adds cloud-based artifact signing, sparse-package workflows, and agent-friendly UI recordings. Grab it with winget install Microsoft.WinAppCLI, or head to the repo for npm and other install options. Here's a tour of the highligh...
Forcing an ARM64X executable to run as a specific architecture
You can request the target machine architecture.
Git-APE SaaS Factory
Agentic Platform Engineering for SaaS. Accelerating the Path to Market with Git-APE If you are an ISV building SaaS on Azure, the first demo is usually the easy part. The harder work is turning that proof of concept into a secure, scalable, commercial-ready service that can be operated confidently in production. That gap shows up quickly. Tenant isolation, identity, entitlement, marketplace fulfilment, metering, cost controls, observability, compliance evidence, and a clean path from customer purchase to tenant provisioning all need to be designed in, not bolted on later. None of those are side quests....
Go 1.26.6-1 and 1.25.13-1 Microsoft builds now available
A new release of the Microsoft build of Go including security fixes is now available for download.
Clearer Build Optimization Results with GitHub Copilot
We know that slow builds are a consistent theme in feedback from C++ developers. Your feedback helped us to shape GitHub Copilot build performance for Windows, an agent that can trace your build, find bottlenecks, apply optimizations, and measure the result. When using the agent, the clearest outcome is a straightforward win. The agent changes your project, rebuilds it, and shows how your build is made faster. Sometimes, a change may make a clean rebuild slightly slower while improving the incremental builds you run throughout the day. At other times, we also observed that optimizations may help without reachi...
MSVC Build Tools Preview updates – August 2026
Try the latest updates to MSVC Build Tools Preview
Routing and Failover for Microsoft.Extensions.AI
Route requests across models and providers natively in Microsoft.Extensions.AI with RoutingChatClient, SemanticRoutingChatClient, and FailoverChatClient — new experimental primitives for content-based routing, failover, and custom routing policies.
Your best friend: BlockOnPossibleDataLoss=True
BlockOnPossibleDataLoss can frustrate developers, but it's one of the most important safeguards in database deployment. Here's how to keep your local development loop fast while protecting the data that matters.
A little helper class for managing LPPROC_THREAD_ATTRIBUTE_LIST s
Another RAII-style wrapper.
Building Agents for Teams: Managing the noise of collaboration
Most of us are familiar with one-to-one agent chats: private, direct interactions where rules are relatively simple. With only you and the agent, each moment has clear intent. You can ask follow-up questions, pause, or restart without worrying about how each exchange affects anyone else. Collaboration in groups works differently. Every message competes for attention, and a reply that is helpful to one individual may interrupt five others. Effective collaboration is built on countless small social judgments and gestures: deciding when to respond or stay quiet, choosing how much to say, and using the conventions...
From Sync APIs to support for the GPT-5 model series and agentic workflows: What’s new in Azure Content Understanding – August 2026
Enterprise content is no longer just something people read. AI apps and agents are only as useful as the information they can understand, yet much of the world’s enterprise knowledge is locked in documents, forms, tables, images, audio, and video. The latest Azure Content Understanding updates help developers turn that content into structured, grounded data with less custom processing. This release brings broader support for the GPT-5 model series, lower token usage, improved confidence scoring, new synchronous APIs for Read and Layout, advanced contextualization for higher-quality extraction, new tax-focused pre...
Azure Content Understanding GPT-5 Series Guide: Model Selection, Grounding Improvements, and Confidence Enhancements
Enterprise content is no longer just something people consume. As organizations increasingly rely on AI to extract and act on information from documents, images, audio, and video, Azure Content Understanding is expanding support for the GPT-5 series and improving grounding and confidence to deliver greater flexibility, efficiency, and quality. This expanded model catalog enables organizations to choose the right level of intelligence for each workload, helping reduce costs for high-volume processing while preserving access to advanced reasoning capabilities where needed. It also provides optimized pipelines tu...
Instructions Hygiene – What Frontier Models Still Need You to Say
Get the most out of the latest models by providing the right level of instructions