Aug 18, 2026
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What’s a PFN?
Howard Kapustein
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...
Aug 18, 2026
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Apple Silicon and Xcode 27 images available in pay-as-you-go (preview)
Eric van Wijk
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...
Aug 14, 2026
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Windows App Development CLI v0.6 – create new WinUI applications, sign packages with Azure, and more
Zachary Teutsch
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...
Aug 14, 2026
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Git-APE SaaS Factory
davidwright,
Arnaud,
Suzanne
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....
Aug 13, 2026
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Clearer Build Optimization Results with GitHub Copilot
David Li
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...
Aug 13, 2026
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Routing and Failover for Microsoft.Extensions.AI
Joshua Yue
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.
Aug 13, 2026
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Your best friend: BlockOnPossibleDataLoss=True
Jerry Nixon
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.
Aug 13, 2026
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Building Agents for Teams: Managing the noise of collaboration
Lily Du
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...
Aug 12, 2026
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From Sync APIs to support for the GPT-5 model series and agentic workflows: What’s new in Azure Content Understanding – August 2026
Peyton,
Krishnakumar,
Joe
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...
Aug 12, 2026
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Azure Content Understanding GPT-5 Series Guide: Model Selection, Grounding Improvements, and Confidence Enhancements
Joe,
Krishnakumar
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...
Aug 11, 2026
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What’s New in vcpkg (Jul 2026)
Augustin Popa
These updates include major SBOM improvements in vcpkg-tool, 302 updated ports including multiple major library upgrades, and other minor improvements and bug fixes.
Aug 11, 2026
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Azure Developer CLI extension framework is GA: build dev workflows for apps using Azure
Kristen Womack
What parts of building and shipping on Azure still take too many steps? Maybe you want a command that starts a project with your organization’s approved architecture and infrastructure. Maybe you need to connect deployments to an internal service catalog, run security checks before provisioning, or guide developers through a process that currently lives across scripts and documentation. When we first introduced the azd extension framework, we invited developers to think about that wish list. The framework was still taking shape in beta, and we wanted to learn which workflows developers and platform teams ne...
Aug 11, 2026
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August Patches for Azure DevOps Server
Gloridel Morales
We are releasing new patches for our self‑hosted product, Azure DevOps Server. We strongly recommend that all customers stay up to date with the latest, most secure version of Azure DevOps Server. The most recent release, Azure DevOps Server, is available on the download page. The following versions have been patched. For more details on these updates, see the release notes: ⬇️Azure DevOps Server Patch Download ✅Verifying Installation To verify that the patch is installed, run the following command on the Azure DevOps Server machine using the patch installer you downloaded: Replace with the name of the...
Aug 11, 2026
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.NET 11 Preview 7 is now available!
.NET Team
Find out about the new features in .NET 11 Preview 7 across libraries, runtime, SDK, C#, ASP.NET Core, .NET MAUI, Entity Framework Core, F#, and Windows Forms.
Aug 11, 2026
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Today I will… manage Git Submodules without leaving the IDE
Harshada Hole
If you've worked with Git submodules for any length of time, you probably have a love-hate relationship with them. They're genuinely useful for pulling a shared library, an SDK, or common build scripts into your project. But actually working with them usually means tabbing over to a terminal and trying to remember whether it's this time all while a perfectly good IDE sits right in front of you, shrugging. That's the part we wanted to fix. Starting in Visual Studio 18.9, Git submodules are a first-class part of the IDE no more bouncing out to the command line just to keep your dependencies in order. It's been one...
Aug 11, 2026
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Remove and Package Lifetime
Howard Kapustein
MSIX uses a Garbage Collection (GC) design for staged package lifetime and destaging. Throughout this article: Package Core Principles A staged package can't be destaged while any references to it exist. This is a direct consequence of MSIX's core architectural principles: Consequently, removing a package's payload from disk is not a direct result of a single API call. Instead, package payloads are automatically destaged when they are no longer needed. Even then, destaging may not occur immediately. Some actions that remove a reference don't directly trigger Deployment activity. In these cases,...
Aug 10, 2026
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Build Locally, Ship to Cloud for $0: Azure SQL for Modern App Developers
Vandana,
Andrew
As app developers, our primary focus is building great user experiences, designing APIs, and shipping features quickly. What we don't want is database friction—wasting hours configuring local DB instances, writing verbose migration scripts by hand, or worrying about unexpected cloud bills while prototyping. Today, we are making database development fast, intelligent, and completely free. By combining the Azure SQL Developer Container for local offline development, AI Agent Skills to automate your ORM and data layer, and the Azure SQL Database Free Tier, you can build locally and ship to production in minutes f...
Aug 10, 2026
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Intelligent Terminal 0.2 is here with local model support
Hamza Usmani
We're back, and this is our first minor version bump: 0.1 to 0.2! It's our biggest release yet. This update adds support for local models, lets you run a different agent in each tab with , brings OpenCode into the built-in agent lineup, runs your agent inside WSL where your work actually lives, and makes the Agent Pane richer to navigate and easier to read. It also sharpens Autofix and fixes a long list of reliability issues. You can grab the update from the Microsoft Store, via , or by heading to the release page on GitHub. Let's dive in! Local model support is here! We've heard you: one of the most common ...
Aug 10, 2026
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I Enabled RBAC and Everything Broke. What Did I Do Wrong?
Sudhanshu,
Iria
We covered the roles your Azure Cosmos DB app needs in our previous post. Now let’s look at what happens after you’ve assigned those roles, switched identities, disabled keys and suddenly staring at a . As we continue this security series, we’ll walk through the most common causes, how to diagnose them, and how to get back to green quickly. The situation You did everything right. You gave your app a managed identity, assigned a data role, switched your code over to , and turned off key-based auth like all the good security guidance told you to. Then you deploy, and every single call comes back with this: Res...
Aug 6, 2026
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Announcing the preview of the Work IQ Developer Tools
Sébastien Levert
Software is shifting from apps built for people to agents that can reason over context and act on someone's behalf. Microsoft 365 Copilot put that shift in front of hundreds of millions of users, and Work IQ gave agents a production-ready intelligence layer to build on. What's been missing is the path in between: getting from an idea to a production agent running in front of customers. Today we're announcing the developer preview of Work IQ Developer Tools (WIQD), the agentic experience for Microsoft 365 Copilot extensibility that takes any plugin (skills, connectors, declarative agents) from an empty folder t...
Aug 6, 2026
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Pull request annotations on work item cards
Dan Hellem
It's now easier to track development progress without leaving your Kanban board. Azure Boards now displays pull request annotations directly on work item cards, making it easy to see at a glance when work is actively moving through code review. With pull request status visible directly on the board, your team can quickly understand the state of development without opening a work item or switching to Azure Repos. Whether you're in a stand-up, planning your next sprint, or simply reviewing the board, you can immediately identify which work items have active pull requests. If you prefer a cleaner board, you can ...
Aug 6, 2026
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You can now use the Azure DevOps Service Connection instead of a PAT or Build Session token
Eric van Wijk
We're excited to announce the Azure DevOps service connection, a new way to access Azure DevOps from your pipelines using a Microsoft Entra workload identity (a service principal or managed identity) instead of a Personal Access Token (PAT) or session token. This post walks through what it is, how to set it up, and the many places you can use it, including several capabilities we've added based on your feedback. Why use an Azure DevOps service connection? Using an Azure DevOps service connection improves the security of your pipelines in several ways: Because the connection authenticates as a Microsoft ...