Browse All Blogs (84)

Emanuele Bartolesi recaps GitHub Universe 2026 through its two keynotes, connecting Copilot’s multi-repository workflows with review, security, and Git infrastructure changes. His practical takeaways focus on verification gates, contributor guardrails, shared planning, and keeping human judgment central as teams adopt coding agents.

Andrew Lock explains how .NET Lazy thread-safety modes control factory execution, value publication, and exception caching. Through C# examples and concurrency diagrams, he compares PublicationOnly with ExecutionAndPublication, discusses their allocation and locking trade-offs, and shows when LazyInitializer offers a simpler alternative without caching exceptions.

Khalid Abuhakmeh shows how to avoid unnecessary static-site builds by checking post publication dates in a scheduled GitHub Actions workflow. The guide uses sparse checkout and awk, preserves manual deployments, and explains scheduling reliability trade-offs and adaptations for different static-site generators and hosting providers.

John Edward outlines the generally available GitHub app for Microsoft Teams, including Copilot task tracking, multi-repository work, and MCP connections. He also explains onboarding and administrator requirements, showing how teams can turn conversations into issues and pull requests while retaining human review of AI-generated changes.

John Edward explains how Microsoft Copilot Studio flags agents that have never been evaluated or whose models have changed since their last evaluation. The automatic Review panel warnings link makers to evaluation tools without blocking publishing, helping teams identify when previous test results may no longer reflect current agent behavior.

John Edward explains an upcoming Microsoft Graph change that makes Threads the default layout for newly created Teams channels when layoutType is omitted. The article shows how developers can preserve Posts through explicit API configuration and outlines checks for scripts, provisioning applications, and third-party integrations before the November rollout.

John Edward covers the general availability of automation flow evaluations in Microsoft Copilot Studio. The capability extends structured quality assessment beyond agents to automation flows, helping makers assess expected outcomes and identify issues before production. The article also outlines repeatable evaluation practices and explains why no immediate administrative action is required.

John Edward covers the general availability of Microsoft Copilot Studio's tool accuracy grader, which evaluates whether AI agents select the correct tools and supply expected inputs. The feature adds execution-level checks to agent testing, while leaving response quality, downstream outcomes, and connected-system reliability as separate evaluation concerns.

John Edward compares Azure Bicep and ARM templates, explaining their shared deployment engine and differences in syntax, validation, dependencies, and reuse. Practical Azure CLI examples show how to compile templates, preview changes, and deploy resources, while migration guidance helps teams decide when to adopt Bicep or retain existing JSON workflows.

John Edward explains why hotpatch-enabled Windows Server 2022 systems will require restarts for November and December 2026 security updates. The article outlines affected devices, the planned January baseline update, and practical steps for scheduling maintenance, coordinating failover, and verifying successful installation without changing hotpatch enrollment.

John Edward explains how to connect Copilot Studio actions to Power Automate flows for controlled contract approval workflows. The guide covers structured inputs and outputs, ambiguous requests, execution permissions, validation, and error handling, with an emphasis on keeping business rules and authorization outside the agent’s conversational instructions.

John Edward explains the upcoming Move to Quarantine action in Microsoft Defender for Office 365 Plan 2. The article covers supported mailbox locations, required permissions, quarantine policies, and partial failures, helping security teams prepare for the worldwide rollout scheduled from November through December 2026.

Bruno Van Thournout's Blog explains how .NET 11 Runtime Async replaces compiler-generated state machines with runtime-managed suspension and resumption. The article covers opt-in configuration, cleaner live stack traces, allocation benchmarks, and compatibility checks, while highlighting slower exception paths and why the preview feature should stay out of production defaults.

Khalid Abuhakmeh compares practical ways to iterate C# lists, including indexed loops, safe removal, spans, and asynchronous processing. Benchmarks on .NET 10 and .NET 11 show where performance differs, while the examples explain when readability, allocation costs, and collection safety should guide your choice.

Hidde de Smet's Blog compares Bicep and Terraform for Azure, focusing on resource ownership rather than syntax preferences. The guide explains deletion behavior, deployment previews, ARM API coverage, module defaults, and existing-resource adoption, then outlines a disposable pilot for testing each tool against your team's infrastructure requirements.

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.

Andrew Lock introduces CBOR as a compact binary alternative to JSON and explains where it fits compared to formats like Protobuf and MessagePack. He then demonstrates how to read and write CBOR in .NET using the low-level System.Formats.Cbor APIs, including conformance modes and practical decoding patterns.

John Edward explains how to monitor Copilot Studio agents in production by combining conversation analytics with application telemetry, security controls, and outcome-based metrics. The guide focuses on catching failures early (tool-call errors, latency, unsafe access), setting baselines and alerts, and tying cost and performance back to successful task completion.

Khalid Abuhakmeh shows how ASP.NET Core 11 can localize Minimal API validation errors using Microsoft.Extensions.Validation and standard resx resources, without FluentValidation or custom endpoint filters. The post includes a working Program.cs setup, resource key conventions, and an integration test harness that verifies responses across multiple cultures.

Jesse Houwing explains how to harden GitHub Actions OIDC authentication to Azure by switching to immutable subject claims, so federated credentials can’t be hijacked after a repo rename, transfer, or deletion. The post shows what changes in the subject claim and how to fetch the required IDs via the GitHub API.

John Edward explains when multi-agent systems are worth the added complexity, and how to design them so they stay predictable, secure, and testable. The article breaks down common orchestration patterns, communication/state design, guardrails, and practical evaluation metrics for cost, latency, and accuracy.

Jesse Houwing breaks down how real-world supply chain attacks have abused GitHub Actions workflows, then walks through the platform changes GitHub shipped in 2025–2026 (from safer pull_request_target behavior to lock files and cache controls) and ends with a practical checklist of hardening steps to apply now.

John Edward explains an upcoming Microsoft Entra default-permission change that lets ordinary users create agent blueprints unless admins disable it. The post breaks down what’s changing, what isn’t, and the specific Entra admin center setting IT teams should review before the November 2026 rollout.

John Edward explains the planner-executor loop as a practical architecture for building agentic systems on Azure, focusing on how to separate planning from execution, validate model outputs, and run tool calls safely. The article maps the pattern to Azure services and highlights reliability, observability, and access-control decisions needed for production use.

John Edward breaks down how to design stateful AI agents that can keep context across interactions, safely call external tools, and coordinate multi-step work with structured planning. The article focuses on practical system design: what to store, how to retrieve it, and how to control execution so agents behave reliably in production.

Jacquie Capur joins Matty Stratton to unpack what “meaningful control” over tooling looks like in practice: understanding dependencies, verifying reliability, and keeping a realistic exit path. They connect classic DevOps lessons (config management, Terraform, CI/CD) to today’s fast-moving AI tooling, open models, and data residency constraints.

Khalid Abuhakmeh explains how C# 15 extends collection expressions with a new `with(...)` element, letting you pass constructor arguments (like comparers and capacity) without giving up the `[a, b, c]` syntax.

Khalid Abuhakmeh shows how to replace ASP.NET Core Minimal API JSON output with the REDox serializer by implementing a custom IResult, then benchmarks REDox vs System.Text.Json to see whether serializer speedups translate into faster HTTP endpoints.

John Edward explains a planned Microsoft Entra ID change that lets users register passkeys and other passwordless methods as their first MFA option, removing the previous requirement to set up SMS or voice first. The post outlines rollout phases and what admins should review in Conditional Access and authentication method policies.

Khalid Abuhakmeh explains how Directory.Build.props lets you set shared MSBuild defaults (like Nullable, LangVersion, and analyzers) once for an entire .NET solution, how nested files behave, and when to switch to Directory.Build.targets or Directory.Packages.props for late-bound logic and centralized package versions.

Khalid Abuhakmeh shows how to use C# 15 union types on .NET 11 to model a workflow as a single state value plus one Next method, with exhaustive switch expressions and typed inputs/results. He also covers how to persist and rehydrate workflow state using System.Text.Json with an explicit discriminator.

John Edward outlines a practical audit process for old online accounts, focusing on reducing account-takeover risk through breach checks, password hygiene, MFA, recovery settings, and reviewing third-party access like OAuth tokens and API keys.

Thomas Maurer announces two NVIDIA GTC Berlin sessions covering Microsoft Sovereign Cloud updates and how to run Sovereign AI from Azure to the edge using Azure Local and Foundry Local, with an emphasis on control, compliance, resilience, and security requirements.

John Edward explains Microsoft’s Windows Update certificate rotation planned for 2027, including the two expiration deadlines and which Windows client and server versions need specific security updates to avoid losing access to Windows Update. It also outlines practical inventory, compliance, and recovery steps for IT teams.

Emanuele Bartolesi shares a practical fix for high CPU/disk usage on Windows 11 when running Claude, Codex, and GitHub Copilot tooling: adding targeted Microsoft Defender Antivirus folder exclusions. The post also calls out the security tradeoff and walks through the exact Windows Security steps to apply exclusions safely.

Andrew Lock shows how to shrink a .NET NativeAOT binary by using ILLink.Substitutions.xml to replace a runtime-only property with a compile-time constant, letting the linker remove an otherwise “reachable” dependency chain (including Azure.Identity and MSAL) and cutting output size by roughly 22–25%.

Samu Niemelä shares practical takeaways from FabCon 2026 on how Microsoft Fabric is maturing, from Fabric IQ grounding Copilot and agents in governed business semantics to new on-demand compute and stronger monitoring and governance features for running Fabric at scale.

Rob Bos shares a short pointer to his Azure Heroes session on how he works with GitHub Copilot, with a link to download the slides.

John Edward covers Microsoft’s new self-service onboarding flow for publishing new applications to the Microsoft Entra App Gallery, including built-in validation for SSO and provisioning integrations, submission tracking, and the rollout timeline from public preview to general availability in late 2026.

Khalid Abuhakmeh breaks down three built-in ways to convert strings to integers in C#: int.TryParse, int.Parse, and Convert.ToInt32. He explains when each is appropriate, what exceptions to expect, and how culture and number formatting (like thousands separators) can make parsing fail.