Azure Feeds

GA: Azure Sphere OS 26.09 is available in the Retail feed; internet-connected devices will receive the OS update automatically and there is no SDK change to apply.

Public preview: a guided GitHub Copilot experience in VS Code provides a structured workflow from idea to deployed Azure app instead of free-form chat, try the preview in VS Code to evaluate the new authoring and deployment flow.

Generally available: Azure Functions now supports PowerShell 7.6, so update your Function apps and local development toolchains to 7.6 before deploying to Functions plans.

Public preview: Foundry Agent Service adds Foundry Routines, a native trigger primitive to run published agents on schedules or business events, evaluate and test routines to automate agent runs in your workflows.

Public preview: Mdsv4 and Msv4 memory-optimised VM series (6th Gen Intel, enhanced security, Azure Boost) are available for SAP and other memory-intensive workloads, test them in preview for your SAP sizing and performance validation.

Generally available: Agent 365 in Microsoft Admin Center now exposes enable and disable actions for Microsoft Foundry agents, so administrators can toggle agent availability across their tenant via the governance surface.

Public preview: Microsoft Foundry hosted agents can be governed with ordered outbound egress rules matched on destination host (FQDN with wildcards) and actions to allow or deny, so author rules to restrict hosted agent outbound connectivity.

Generally available: You can now publish Microsoft Foundry agents to Microsoft 365 Copilot and Teams natively, so update your publishing workflows to make agents available to users via Copilot and Teams.

Generally Available: Azure Database for PostgreSQL Flexible Server exposes the logical_replication_slot_sync_status Azure Monitor metric so you can monitor per-logical-replication-slot sync state and add alerts or dashboards.

Generally Available: updated troubleshooting documentation for Azure Database for PostgreSQL Flexible Server provides expanded diagnostics for high CPU, memory, IOPS, temporary file usage, and autovacuum to help you triage incidents.

Generally Available: Azure Database for PostgreSQL elastic clusters now support PostgreSQL 18, so you can deploy new clusters or plan upgrades to PG18,validate application compatibility before migrating.

Public preview: Azure Payments HSM v2 is available as a highly available, single-tenant Payment HSM that gives you exclusive administrative control for payment processing, credential issuance, PIN processing, key management, and authentication data protection, evaluate it for pay

Generally Available: Azure Virtual Network Manager high-scale mesh (connected group) now supports up to 3,000 virtual networks in a single mesh by default in available regions, so update your network designs and automation to exploit the higher VN-to-mesh scale.

Retirement: the containerized SAP data connector was retired on 14 Sep 2026 and is unsupported, and its container images will be removed on 14 Oct 2026,migrate any pipelines that depend on those images.

Public Preview: Azure SQL now supports configurable soft delete for logical servers so deleted servers enter a soft-deleted, self-restorable state for the configured retention period,test and set retention to meet recovery needs.

Public Preview: Azure Red Hat OpenShift adds a hosted control plane deployment option where the OpenShift control plane is a fully managed service separate from customer worker nodes running applications.

Public Preview: the PostgreSQL skills and MCP plugin for Azure Database for PostgreSQL enables supported AI coding assistants to be context-aware and act on connected databases, so review access controls and governance before enabling it.

Beginning early October 2026, Windows App will start using three new wildcard FQDNs for Azure Virtual Desktop client-side service traffic; update client-side firewall and allowlist rules to permit those domains (they are already included in cloud-side requirements).

Public preview: Azure Application Gateway now supports HTTP/3 over QUIC; enable and test HTTP/3 for compatible web apps and clients, and validate connection setup, latency, and behaviour under your traffic patterns.

Retirement: Azure Linux with OS Guard in Azure Kubernetes Service will be retired on 10 December 2026; plan and migrate workloads to Azure Container Linux (the stated replacement) before that date, and expect new Azure Linux with OS Guard creations to be blocked from then.

Preview: Azure Storage Mover now supports agentless migration of on-premises SMB file shares to Azure Files (SMB) in public preview, so you can migrate Windows Server or NAS shares without deploying or maintaining migration agents.

GA: Azure Functions Flex Consumption now supports TLS/SSL certificates and end-to-end TLS via a site-scoped certificate model; each function app can hold up to three private (.pfx) and three public (.cer) certificates uploaded or imported, so plan certificate deployment according

GA: Azure Copilot Troubleshooting Agent is now generally available; enable the built-in capability through Azure Copilot or Support to help investigate and resolve operational issues faster.

GA: User-bound user delegation SAS for Azure Storage is now generally available, enabling SAS tokens that are constrained to a specific Entra ID identity, update your SAS issuance and access flows to issue user-bound UD SAS where appropriate.

GA: Azure Ephemeral OS Disk with full caching is generally available for new VMs and VMSS, caching the complete OS image on local storage to eliminate remote-storage reads after caching finishes; consider it for stateless workloads.

GA: Playwright Workspaces in Azure App Testing is now generally available in Switzerland North, Japan East, and Australia East, so deploy managed cloud-hosted browsers in those regions to run scalable Playwright end-to-end tests.

GA: The Azure Developer CLI (azd) Extension Framework is now generally available, so start installing or building azd extensions to add custom commands into your development workflows.

Azure Virtual Network Manager IPAM is now generally available in additional regions: US Gov Virginia, US Gov Texas, US Gov Arizona, China North 3, and China East 3, so deploy or migrate IPAM configurations in those regions as needed.

Public preview: Azure Front Door now supports WAF policy associations at the profile and route level, so test applying a profile-wide baseline policy combined with targeted route-level policies to validate rule precedence and coverage.

Preview: Azure Database for MySQL - Flexible Server introduces a reader endpoint that automatically load-balances read-only connections across replicas, so update and test your read-only connection strings to use the reader endpoint.

GA: Microsoft Defender for Cloud now supports Azure Container Apps in the Serverless Containers Posture experience,enable Defender for Cloud on your Container Apps environments to extend posture management and recommendations.

GA: AKS now supports Windows Server 2025 node pools,provision Windows Server 2025 nodes to modernise Windows workloads and validate application compatibility ahead of older Windows Server retirements.

GA: Artifact Streaming is available for AKS with Azure Container Registry,enable artifact streaming to reduce container startup time during scale-outs by beginning execution before the full image pull completes.

GA: Confidential VMs for Azure Linux are supported in AKS node pools,create CVM-backed node pools to run highly sensitive container workloads with hardware-backed confidentiality.

GA: Purchase order mapping is available in Microsoft Marketplace,configure purchase order mappings to allocate Marketplace charges on your invoice and simplify cloud and AI spend reconciliation.

Generally Available: Azure Firewall now auto-learns registered and private destination prefixes periodically and applies them as No-SNAT ranges to preserve original source IPs, so review your firewall policies and SNAT expectations where source IP visibility matters.

Generally Available: Azure Copilot Observability Agent now supports Log Analytics data in Basic and Auxiliary table plans for interactive analysis and deep investigations, so plan where to place high-volume telemetry if you want it included in Copilot analysis.

Generally Available: Azure Monitor Auxiliary Logs Plan is now available in Azure Government and China sovereign regions, enabling a lower-cost option for ingesting and retaining high-volume, verbose logs used for compliance and auditing.

Generally Available: Azure Monitor Auxiliary Logs Plan now supports ingesting Azure tables and plan switching, so evaluate moving eligible tables to the Auxiliary plan and follow the documented steps to switch plans.

Public preview: per-disk resiliency for Azure VMs is now available, when a managed disk loses connectivity Azure will automatically shut down and power the VM back on after disk connectivity is restored (this remains the default behaviour), no action required.

Public preview: Azure Multicloud Interconnect is now available to provide managed private connectivity between Azure and supported cloud providers, with AWS as the first supported provider in preview.

GA: Azure Files CSI driver (SMB) in AKS now supports workload identity so pods can authenticate to Azure Files SMB shares at pod level; update mounts to use workload identity instead of node credentials.

GA: Azure VM Image Builder is now generally available in Azure Government, China North 3, Azure Government Secret, and Azure Government Top Secret, so you can use the managed image-building service in those sovereign and air-gapped clouds.

GA: Azure Bastion shareable link expiration is generally available, administrators can now set an expiry date and time for RDP/SSH shareable links so they automatically stop working after the configured time.

Public preview: Azure Bastion supports IPv4 and IPv6 dual-stack deployment, allowing new Bastion instances to be assigned both IPv4 and IPv6 public IPs,test your DNS, firewall, and connectivity policies for IPv6 traffic.

GA: Azure Bastion integration with AKS is generally available, you can now tunnel from your local machine through Bastion to an AKS API server to run kubectl or port-forwarding securely,update access controls and workflows accordingly.

Public preview: Azure SRE Agent Live Reports are available, letting ops teams create dynamic operational views from SRE Agent conversations,try the preview to validate dashboards and workflows against your incident data sources.

GA: Azure SRE Agent VNet Integration is generally available, enabling SRE Agents to run inside your VNets and honour NSGs, private DNS, and firewall policies,plan to deploy agents into your network boundaries for controlled access.

GA: Azure SRE Agent 30-Day Trial is generally available for new customers, allowing you to create SRE Agents and connect operational tools and data sources for 30 days without initial commitment,use the trial to validate integration before purchasing.

Release: Aspire 13.5 has shipped, adding a refreshed dashboard and aspire.dev, expanded Interaction Service, cross-scope Azure references, persistent Kubernetes volumes, and live terminals in the apphost; plan to upgrade if you depend on those features.

GA: New D/E v7 VM sizes with 248 and 372 vCPUs are now available (Intel Xeon 6), offering higher compute versus prior v6 machines,select these sizes for large general-purpose or memory-optimised workloads and verify quotas and cost before provisioning.

Follow the Azure Architecture Center guide to convert a hub-and-spoke network to dual-stack IPv4/IPv6, and plan addressing, routing, and security group changes as part of your migration.

Follow the Architecture Centre guide to implement advanced monitoring for Foundry Models through a gateway to enable chargeback, auditing, and other model telemetry scenarios.

Use the Azure vs AWS database services comparison to select relational and non-relational options (document, key-value, wide-column, graph, in-memory) that align with your workload characteristics and migration constraints.

Use the Azure vs AWS analytics services comparison to map data integration, data lakes, data engineering, data warehousing, real-time analytics, governance, and BI requirements to the appropriate platform services for your architecture and migration plan.

Use the Azure vs AWS AI and machine learning comparison to match requirements for model training, generative AI, vision, speech, language, document intelligence, and AI search to the cloud services that fit your deployment and operational needs.

Architecture reference maps AWS messaging services to their Azure equivalents (for SES, SQS, and related components) to use when planning migrations or integration work.

Implement the network secure ingress pattern with Azure Front Door Premium to get global routing, health-based origin failover, and edge-based attack mitigation: follow the architecture guide for configuration and origin placement.

Adopt the APIOps CLI to extract, review, and deploy Azure API Management configuration as version-controlled artefacts so you can manage APIM config in your CI/CD pipelines.

Follow the reference guide to connect an on-premises SAP ERP system to the OPC UA reference solution using Azure Logic Apps and Azure Data Explorer to stream industrial telemetry into your Azure pipeline.

Use the integration guide to create customer assets and IoT alerts in Dynamics 365 Field Service from OPC UA telemetry by wiring Azure Logic Apps to Azure Data Explorer and D365 Field Service.

Use Azure Arc to manage, maintain, and monitor SQL Server instances across on-premises and multicloud environments; follow the guide to attach servers and centralise management and monitoring.

Follow the Azure reference baseline architecture when deploying AKS clusters to align with recommended infrastructure patterns and reduce custom configuration surprises during cluster rollout.

Guidance: choose and implement the appropriate Key Vault multitenancy pattern,tenant-specific vaults, shared vaults, or other isolation models,and apply the described tenant isolation and access controls when designing multitenant solutions.

Architecture guidance: implement a SQL-first medallion data warehouse in Microsoft Fabric using Fabric Data Warehouse, OneLake, Fabric Data Factory, and Power BI as described in the guidance.

Reference solution: integrate agentic AI components into an OPC UA-based pipeline to augment shop-floor telemetry before it reaches Azure analytics services, following the provided architecture patterns.

Use the 'Technology choices for Azure solutions' curated comparisons to evaluate compute, data, analytics, networking, and AI options when making design and procurement decisions.

Follow the 'Get started with Azure hybrid and adaptive cloud architecture' guide to plan deployments that span Azure, on-prem datacentres, edge locations, and other clouds.

Review the 'Azure hybrid options' architecture guide to choose workload placement and address operations, sovereignty, connectivity, and AI requirements for hybrid deployments.

Use the OPC UA reference solution to implement a standards-based industrial IoT pipeline that connects shop-floor telemetry to Azure analytics services.

Read 'Workload identity and access in EKS and AKS' to compare how clusters, nodes, and pods handle identity and access, and pick the appropriate pod identity or IAM approach for your Kubernetes deployments.

Follow the Azure Data Factory baseline architecture guidance to implement a medallion lakehouse inside an Azure landing zone using Azure Data Factory, Databricks, SQL Server, and Power BI.

Read the App Configuration multitenancy guidance and examples to choose and implement per-tenant configuration patterns for your multitenant apps.

Follow the Azure guide to implement an industrial dataspace that provides a secure point-to-point channel for data exchange between manufacturer and customer.

Implement the Idempotent Consumer pattern when handling at-least-once message deliveries so duplicate messages produce the same outcome as a single processing run.

Use Foundry Tools and Foundry Models to extract and analyse customer conversations at your call centre, following the Architecture Center guidance to integrate the extraction and insight pipelines into your analytics workflows.

Choose from the documented Azure hosting options and follow the deployment, security, scalability, and cost guidance to deploy a secure, scalable, cost-effective WordPress installation on Azure.

Replatform and deploy existing Kubernetes microservice workloads to Azure Container Apps using the Architecture Center guidance to run your microservices on Container Apps.

Use the baseline reference architecture to build a network-secured, highly available, zone-redundant Azure App Service web application.

Apply the baseline Azure Virtual Machines architecture guidance to set up an environment configured to run your workload on Azure Virtual Machines.

Apply the 'Minimize coordination' recommendations to reduce inter-service coordination and improve scalability: review your service interactions and implement the guide's tactics to lower cross-service dependencies.

For workloads that require many CPU or GPU-based nodes to solve complex mathematical tasks, plan to use Azure high-performance computing offerings and map your scaling, networking, and storage needs to Azure HPC services.

Build serverless microservices on Azure Container Apps by using Dapr for building blocks and KEDA for event-driven autoscaling, and update your Container Apps deployments to integrate Dapr components and KEDA scaling where appropriate.

Deploy Silk Cloud Data Platform virtual SAN on Azure IaaS to run real-time AI inferencing on live data while maintaining stability and performance, and validate storage and network configurations against your inference workload.

Use a scale-out pattern (for example low-touch or zero-touch provisioning) with Azure IoT Hub and follow the scale-out model guidance to support millions of devices, validating provisioning and update workflows at scale.

Import OPC UA information models from the UA Cloud Library into Azure Data Explorer, Microsoft Fabric, or Azure Databricks by following the documented import steps to enable OPC UA data analysis in those services.

Follow the baseline Microsoft Foundry chat reference architecture to build network-secured, highly available, and zone-redundant enterprise chat applications using Microsoft Foundry tools and Azure App Service.

Follow this guide to connect Azure Managed Grafana to the OPC UA reference solution to visualise your industrial telemetry, including the data source and dashboard configuration steps you need to perform.

Use this guidance to manage Kubernetes nodes and node pools: it explains AKS node and node pool handling and compares node pool options for Amazon EKS and AKS so you can choose and configure the right pool strategy.

Follow the Sidecar pattern guidance: deploy auxiliary components in a separate process or container to provide isolation and encapsulation for functionality such as logging, proxies, or adapters.

Use this guidance to compare Azure image and video processing and generation technologies, including Foundry Tools, so you can pick the service that matches your video processing or generation use case.

Use the Azure Architecture Center guidance and the IBM Db2 connector to move archive data from mainframe systems into Azure, and plan connector configuration, throughput, and data validation as part of your migration runbook.

You can extract text from images in Power Automate using AI Builder together with Azure Document Intelligence (Foundry Tools) to enable indexing and retrieval, add those steps to your flow to enable image text extraction.

When deploying Azure Virtual Machines into an Azure landing zone, adapt the VM baseline architecture using the Azure Architecture Center guidance to address landing-zone-specific expectations and changes.

When migrating IBM z/OS OLTP workloads to Azure, use the provided architecture guidance to map transaction processing into cost-effective, responsive, and scalable Azure application patterns.

Use RDRS, the mainframe data replication solution, to migrate mainframe data to and from Azure data platform services following the step-by-step migration guidance.

Implement high-volume batch transaction processing with Azure Kubernetes Service and Azure Service Bus as described in the architecture example to handle workload orchestration and throughput.

Build an end-to-end analytics platform on Microsoft Fabric by following the guidance to combine Microsoft data services for common organisational data challenges.

Azure Architecture Center walkthrough: implement a basic enterprise integration pattern using Azure Logic Apps and Azure API Management by following the guide and included patterns.

Azure Cosmos DB now provides the first GitHub Spec Kit database extension to codify design decisions (partition keys, access patterns, client configuration) alongside your code,add it to your repo to record those choices.

Microsoft Security Blog: follow the exposure management guidance and recommended controls for AI-changed threat scenarios and prioritise implementing the advised controls to materially reduce your organisation's risk.

Microsoft Defender email benchmarking shows where pre-delivery and post-delivery protections are effective and where threats are evolving, review the report and adjust your email protection rules and detection tuning accordingly.

General Availability: Microsoft Desired State Configuration v3.3.0 is GA with new Windows resources, a registry adapter, server mode improvements, expression function updates, expanded what-if support, and experimental export filtering, plan upgrades and test compatibility with y

Follow the four-part live series that builds a production-ready C# AI agent with the Microsoft Agent Framework, covering an IChatClient, observability, and governance.

Microsoft Graph PowerShell engineering is shifting focus to PowerShell 7.x and later; run and validate Graph PowerShell on PowerShell 7.x to receive fixes and new capabilities rather than relying on Windows PowerShell 5.x.

Run the Foundry Dev Pack one-command installer to prepare your machine for Microsoft Foundry development, installing terminal tools, VS Code integrations, and coding agent tooling in a single step.

A benchmark of coding agents found they selected Azure SQL Database when asked to pick and build with a database; if you use AI coding agents that scaffold projects, evaluate Azure SQL for compatibility, connection strings, and migration paths.

.NET 11 contains hundreds of performance improvements; benchmark your applications on .NET 11 and plan upgrades where the improvements reduce latency, CPU, or memory for your workloads.

Submit your team's .NET case study to be considered for .NET Conf 2026 and other .NET channels, sharing how you solved real problems with .NET to get community exposure.

The MulticloudDB SDK for Java exposes a single CRUD and query API across Azure Cosmos DB, Amazon DynamoDB, and Google Cloud Spanner; evaluate it to reduce provider-specific SDK work and simplify cross-cloud testing, including agent-driven code generation.

A reusable Japanese LLM evaluation pipeline from a two-day hackathon now demonstrates multi-turn, facet-based scoring and cross-provider model support with publication-ready benchmarking outputs you can adopt for Japanese model evaluation.

Azure App Service for Linux now supports .NET 11, Python 3.15, and Node.js 26; test and update your apps' runtime selection, base images, and CI/CD pipelines if you plan to move to these newer platform versions.

September patches for self-hosted Azure DevOps Server are available, apply the listed updates from the download page to bring servers to the latest patched, more secure release.

Microsoft was named a Leader in Gartner's 2026 Magic Quadrant for Container Management; include AKS, Azure Arc, and Azure Container Apps in your container platform evaluations and proof-of-concepts for AI and hybrid workloads.

Azure announced Speech LLM 2607, which improves multilingual and mixed-language recognition, lowers latency, and adds enhanced phrase lists for simpler domain customisation, test your speech workloads and update phrase lists to measure gains.

Read Microsoft's analysis of an AI-assisted executive-impersonation and fake-invoice campaign that targeted finance teams with ACH payment fraud, and use the findings to update your email security and finance verification controls.

Adopt C# unions and closed hierarchies with System.Text.Json across ASP.NET Core Minimal APIs, MVC, SignalR, Blazor, and OpenAPI as described in the .NET Blog, and validate serialization and OpenAPI output in your apps.

Review the final installment of The Economics of Agent Optimization for concrete strategies to implement agent governance on Microsoft Foundry to control AI agent costs and demonstrate ROI.

Read Microsoft's guidance on designing infrastructure resiliency as part of modernisation so your infrastructure can withstand disruption and continue supporting critical operations.

See how Microsoft Defender detects and disrupts AI-themed phishing, malware, and multi-stage attacks across the attack chain, and apply those detections to your detection and response controls.

GA: Dell Managed PowerScale for Microsoft Azure is generally available; consider it if you want Dell-managed PowerScale on Azure to handle unstructured data without deploying or operating the underlying infrastructure yourself.

GA: Azure App Service Managed Instance is now generally available, and App Service added Markdown support for agents, consider Managed Instance for legacy Windows app migrations and expose agent-friendly Markdown where needed.

Microsoft Foundry updates (July-August 2026): Hosted Agent and Toolbox SDK paths stabilised, Claude tools available for Azure-hosted deployments, Model Router and local inference improvements, and SDK migrations to review before upgrading.

Public preview: Automatic Zone Placement for VM scale sets will let Azure pick availability zones for your VMSS based on SKU availability and capacity, supported for Uniform and Flexible orchestration modes, test it to remove manual zone lists.

Use the Cloud Web Applications Threat Matrix (MITRE ATT&CK aligned) to map, prioritise, and mitigate threats against your cloud-hosted web apps and serverless platforms and fold its mitigations into your threat modelling.

GA: You can now restrict user delegation SAS usage to a specific Entra ID identity (user-bound UD SAS), update your SAS policies to bind tokens to identities to reduce unintended access.

Announcement: Microsoft Foundry Agent Service is now available in Azure Government and new Azure OpenAI models are expanded there, plan evaluation and compliance testing if you operate in the Azure Government environment.

Include network intelligence in Azure migration plans: document IP prefixes, routes, network paths, load-balancing behaviour, security policies, and shared services, run discovery and validation before lift-and-shift to preserve connectivity and cost estimates.

Decide zone resilience per component: default to two-zone designs where possible, use service-managed zone redundancy when available, and reserve three-zone deployments only for components that must survive an additional failure domain; test failover per component.

Hunt and harden against passkey-themed social engineering: monitor for MFA persistence techniques, audit Microsoft Graph API activity for reconnaissance, and tighten detections and access controls on SharePoint, OneDrive, and email to limit post-compromise access.

GA: Ephemeral OS Disk with full caching is now generally available for VMs and VMSS,the entire OS disk image is cached on local storage to remove reads from remote storage, improving IO-sensitive and AI workloads; validate ephemeral storage behaviour for your scenarios.

Release Candidate: .NET 11 RC1 is available,test your applications and CI/CD pipelines against the RC to validate changes across runtime, SDK, MSBuild, NuGet, C#, F#, ASP.NET Core, .NET MAUI, and Windows Forms before the final release.

Submit a session proposal for the community-led .NET Conf 2026 Community Days by 6 October 2026 if you want to present.

For R&D teams, consider adopting agentic AI workflows that run multiple hypotheses, validate results against evidence, and iterate rather than relying on single-shot model answers.

Review and apply the September 2026 servicing updates for .NET and .NET Framework to keep your runtime environments patched and supported.

If az postgres flexible-server returns 'Provisioning is restricted in this region' for East US, expect AI-generated repeated support replies and delays; plan for slower resolution and consider alternative support paths or escalation.

Before releasing sensitive data, credentials, or models to customer-owned edge AI systems, apply the Microsoft Security Blog's recommended verification controls for systems, software, and AI assets.

Review the Azure SDK August 2026 release notes and update any client SDKs you depend on to pick up relevant fixes, API changes, or new features called out in the post.

Azure Firewall now offers five recent features (explicit proxy, IPv6 support, HTTP header insertion, auto-learn SNAT routes, and IDPS performance improvements) in general availability or public preview, so review the blog and enable or test the relevant features in your firewall

Refactor complex T-SQL by applying decomposition, encapsulation, statelessness, and clear contracts inside the database to make code easier to read, test, reuse, and maintain.

Adopt the six-phase schema-change approach to evolve production SQL schemas without downtime, following the phased steps to keep applications online during schema changes.

When moving AI into production, design an end-to-end Azure solution that combines models, infrastructure, data, applications, and developer tools as an integrated system rather than treating them as separate projects.

Preview: Azure Storage introduces a List Blobs optimisation that returns results in Apache Arrow format, offering up to 25x faster listings and up to 15x lower client CPU for workloads that need to list millions of objects,test it for large-scale blob listing scenarios.

GPT-6 Astra is now generally available in Microsoft Foundry (rolling out via the Foundry Limited Access Program to participating customers over the coming days), so plan access, testing, and governance for GPT-6 Astra in your Foundry workspaces.

MSTest source generation now supports running test projects with the same Native AOT and trimming deployment model as the applications they validate, so enable MSTest source generation and adjust tests that rely on runtime reflection before adopting Native AOT/trimming.

Attackers are using invisible Unicode characters (ASCII smuggling) to obfuscate words and evade email filters, so update mail-filtering and detection rules to normalise or flag invisible/zero-width characters and related obfuscation techniques.

Microsoft used Azure Arc and Azure Virtual Desktop to simplify hybrid physical security operations, improve visibility, and scale globally, so evaluate Azure Arc for hybrid resource management and Azure Virtual Desktop for centralised remote access in your security operations.

Threat actors are abusing Microsoft Teams external collaboration to impersonate IT support, gain remote access, and deploy a Node.js implant, so tighten external-collaboration controls and tune Microsoft Defender detections to spot remote-session and lateral-movement abuse.

Apply context engineering practices from Microsoft Foundry,optimise knowledge retrieval, tool selection, and memory,to reduce token and compute costs and improve agent performance at scale.

General availability: Azure Firewall explicit proxy is now GA, so you can configure browsers and applications to send outbound HTTP/HTTPS directly to Azure Firewall using standard proxy settings and start planning migration from self-managed forward proxies.

Evaluate your AI coding agents against SPFx scenarios, then target only the specific SPFx knowledge gaps in prompts or retrieval to improve accuracy and reduce token use.

Apply the Defender XDR detections, indicators of compromise, and mitigation guidance from Microsoft Defender Experts to identify, block, and investigate look-alike download pages and regenerated installer archives used in this campaign.

Azure CLI 2.90.0 is available: update the CLI to use new App Service capabilities to troubleshoot Linux web apps, interact with running containers, identify deployments, and create App Service plans using the latest Isolated tier.

Enterprise Live Migrations is now in public preview: you can migrate Azure DevOps repositories to GitHub Enterprise Cloud with data residency while minimising disruption to your teams.

Use Azure Connector Namespace to host MCP servers so Azure SRE Agent can access operational tools without you managing the underlying server infrastructure.

Introducing Azure Multicloud Interconnect for AWS (public preview): a managed, standards-based option to create private Azure-to-AWS connectivity aimed at simplifying operations for multicloud and AI workloads.

Azure Multicloud Interconnect provides a private connectivity option between Azure and AWS that reduces the need to stitch ExpressRoute, Direct Connect, colocation and customer-managed routers, so review your cross-cloud network design and provider choices before migrating large

When moving databases, pick bacpac for full database exports (including data) and dacpac for schema/object deployment and use cases supported by SqlPackage, and verify which tooling and behaviours match your migration or CI/CD workflow.

If migrating Windows apps to Azure App Service that depend on System.Drawing, Crystal Reports, MSMQ, Windows services, or drive-letter storage, follow the recorded guidance to identify blocking dependencies and apply recommended refactors or App Service patterns.

Microsoft.Data.SqlClient now exposes configurable retry logic on SqlConnection and SqlCommand, so update .NET apps to use the native retry settings instead of relying on Polly for transient SQL resilience.

Use advertised gateway prefixes (summarizedGatewayP) on your hub virtual network to summarise Azure hub-and-spoke address spaces sent to on-prem BGP peers, reducing BGP route table growth.

GA: Windows Autopilot device association is now generally available, update provisioning workflows to incorporate device association before enrollment where appropriate.

Beta/preview: SPFx 1.24 Beta 3 is available, React 18 support is coming in 1.24, and a Copilot Components preview programme is opening for customers and partners, test your solutions against 1.24 beta and prepare for React-related changes.

GA: the Azure Developer CLI (azd) extension framework is now generally available; azd also adds support for deploying Azure Functions from a Dockerfile and prebuilt images, update CI/CD templates and developer tooling accordingly.

If you plan to integrate AI agents with apps, consider Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers to ground agents in documentation and provide runtime control, as Uno Platform built two MCP servers in C# to do exactly that.

The Azure DevOps plugin is now available in the GitHub Copilot app, letting you view and manage Azure DevOps pull requests and work items directly in the Copilot app (initial release supports viewing My Work, opening and editing items and PRs).

The Cosmos DB blog explains how to let CI/CD pipelines access Cosmos DB without storing secrets in pipeline settings, follow the guidance to seed test data using non-secret identities or alternative secure authentication patterns.

Azure DNS now supports Traffic Manager linked records that evaluate a Traffic Manager profile inside DNS and can return A/AAAA endpoint IP addresses instead of a CNAME to trafficmanager.net; review and update DNS record sets to use linked records if you need direct IP responses.

Public preview: GitHub Copilot Code Review is now available for Azure Repos to all Azure DevOps customers with no early-access sign-up required; enable it on your repositories to start using automated code reviews.

New four-video Azure SQL Database Foundations series with GitHub samples walks from Hyperscale to running AI on operational data; clone the samples and follow the videos to reproduce the demos.

Save the date: .NET Conf runs 10-12 November 2026 and will include the launch of .NET 11; block time for sessions or product announcements.

Azure Sphere OS 26.09 is available in the Retail feed: internet-connected devices will auto-update to a kernel migration from Linux 5.10 to 6.1 (this is the final major kernel update before Azure Sphere retirement in 2031), no SDK or functional changes required.

Generally available: Microsoft.Data.SqlClient 7.1.0 fixes a range of issues around connection failures, retries, transactions, pooling, streaming, encryption, and newer SQL Server data types, upgrade your applications to 7.1.0 to get more predictable connection and transaction b

Virtual nodes on Azure Container Instances attach ACI as serverless Kubernetes nodes to your AKS cluster so pods can run on ACI for burst capacity without node management or capacity planning; evaluate virtual nodes for AKS burst scenarios.

Generally available: Microsoft Entra Tenant Governance is GA; if you manage multiple tenants, plan to deploy it to gain cross-tenant visibility, apply consistent policies, and reduce shadow-tenant risk, and join the webinars to learn deployment steps.

Generally available: Azure API Management now includes a send-service-bus-message policy so you can expose an HTTP API that sends messages directly to Service Bus queues or topics without an intermediary translator service, configure the policy to add an async boundary to your AP

Microsoft updated Defender Experts MDR (including Defender Experts Hunting) to provide more proactive investigations and earlier awareness of suspicious activity; security teams using the service should review the updated capabilities and adjust monitoring and response playbooks.

Foundry Models' model router (with RouteLab testing) lets you route requests in real time across models to balance cost, latency, and response quality, so adopt the router and use RouteLab to test routing rules before production.

Elastic has released a serverless Elasticsearch Vector Database on Azure with native portal integrations, enabling you to deploy semantic search and RAG without managing a search cluster.

Demonstrates a fully local RAG assistant built with Microsoft Foundry Local, running retrieval and model inference on the same machine and embedding structured records locally (all-MiniL in the example).

When evaluating text-to-image models, stop cherry-picking prompts and use standardized benchmarks, automated judge pipelines, and comprehensive metrics to get reliable comparisons.

Reservation exchange rules for Azure commitments are changing ahead of February 2027, so review whether to commit via reservations or savings plans now because your ability to exchange reservations will be reduced.

The latest Mixed Reality Link release lets Windows use your headset's built-in microphone and cameras directly, so update Mixed Reality Link and adjust Windows or Teams audio/video settings if you want headset mic and camera input.

From 18 Sep 2026 the Instructor-Led Training Title Plan is published weekly at http://aka.ms/Courseware_Title_Plan, check that URL regularly to ensure your ILT materials and course lists are using the latest title plan.

A2A protocol version 1.0 is generally available: the A2A Tool and incoming A2A endpoints now support v1.0 for new integrations, while the earlier a2a_preview tool and protocol 0.3 remain available in preview for existing integrations.

Public preview: Windows Admin Center 2610 combines Administration Mode and Virtualization Mode into a single installer where you must select one mode per installation (you cannot install both on the same machine); test the installer and new vMode features like Azure Arc onboardin

Part 2 of the FinOps-Ready Azure Landing Zone series provides implementation guidance using Azure Policy, Azure Monitor, Azure Cost Management, Azure Advisor, Microsoft Entra ID, and Log Analytics, consult it when designing governance and cost controls.

mssql-django 2.0 is released on PyPI: it adds Microsoft's mssql-python driver as an alternative to pyodbc (choose driver per database alias), advances supported Python, Django, and SQL Server versions, and includes connection and query fixes, run pip install --upgrade mssql-djan

Package a Microsoft Marketplace offer around the $0, 25-user, 30-day Microsoft 365 Copilot Business trial ('Copilot in 30') to create a repeatable SMB onboarding journey and a scalable managed-services entry point.

Microsoft Marketplace added 224 new offers on Aug 12-13, 2026, including AI Diagnostic Partner and AirMettle Select; review the new listings for AI assessment services and SQL-on-Blob Storage tools you might adopt.

Demonstrates building a Copilot Studio agent using Fabric IQ, Ontology, and ERP MCP to analyse D365 Finance and Operations plus third-party retail data for store-level promotional and customer insights; reuse the pattern for similar scenarios.

Azure Virtual Network Routing Appliance offers a hub-and-spoke routing alternative to VNet peering for transitive routing and centralised control, review whether to replace multiple peerings with this appliance for easier route management.

Intune Device App Inventory Agent now reacts to application changes instead of waiting the four-hour harvest cycle, reducing app inventory latency to about five minutes, so update reporting and remediation schedules to reflect near-real-time data.

John Savill's video collects practical lessons on AI adoption, model choice, trust, human+AI workflows, and organisational change; there is no direct Azure product change to apply, treat it as guidance for planning AI initiatives.

GitHub Actions OIDC is moving to immutable subject claims, so update your Microsoft Entra federated identity credentials to match the new subject claim format to avoid authentication failures.

Bicep now includes an experimental docs generate command with Scriban templates to turn modules into Markdown documentation,use bicep docs generate to produce and customise module docs.

This course page is work in progress and not yet released, so there is nothing to act on today; the 'Migrate from PowerShell DSC to Microsoft DSC' course is finished and available.

This knowledge-check page is work in progress and not yet released; no action is required today.

The "Pitfals from the field" course page is work in progress and contains no exercises yet, subscribe to be notified on release, and meanwhile consult the finished "Migrate from PowerShell DSC to Microsoft DSC" course.

The "Prove equivalence end to end" course page is work in progress and contains no exercises yet, subscribe to be notified on release, and meanwhile consult the finished "Migrate from PowerShell DSC to Microsoft DSC" course.

The "Migrate credentials" course page is work in progress and contains no exercises yet, subscribe to be notified on release, and meanwhile consult the finished "Migrate from PowerShell DSC to Microsoft DSC" course.

The "Reboots and cross-node coordination" course page is work in progress and contains no exercises yet, subscribe to be notified on release, and meanwhile consult the finished "Migrate from PowerShell DSC to Microsoft DSC" course.

The "Own the enforcement schedule" course page is work in progress and contains no exercises yet, subscribe to be notified on release, and meanwhile consult the finished "Migrate from PowerShell DSC to Microsoft DSC" course.

The "Map LCM features to Microsoft DSC" course page is work in progress and contains no exercises yet, subscribe to be notified on release, and meanwhile consult the finished "Migrate from PowerShell DSC to Microsoft DSC" course.

The "Introduction to replacing the LCM" course page is work in progress and contains no exercises yet, subscribe to be notified on release, and meanwhile consult the finished "Migrate from PowerShell DSC to Microsoft DSC" course.

The "Summary" course page is work in progress and contains no exercises yet, subscribe to be notified on release, and meanwhile consult the finished "Migrate from PowerShell DSC to Microsoft DSC" course.

The "Knowledge check" course page is work in progress and contains no exercises yet, subscribe to be notified on release, and meanwhile consult the finished "Migrate from PowerShell DSC to Microsoft DSC" course.

The "Path D: Going native" course page is work in progress and contains no exercises yet, subscribe to be notified on release, and meanwhile consult the finished "Migrate from PowerShell DSC to Microsoft DSC" course.

Preview (work in progress): the 'Rewrite AppEnvironment as a class' course page is not released yet, so no migration action to take now, subscribe on the source page to be notified when the lesson is published.

Preview (work in progress): the 'Path C: From script-based to class-based' lesson is not yet released; subscribe on the source page to get notified when the guidance for moving script-based DSC to class-based arrives.

Preview (work in progress): the 'Convert a MOF file' lesson is not published yet, so hold off on any MOF conversion work from this course until it is released; subscribe for a notification when it goes live.

Preview (work in progress): the 'Path B: Import your compiled MOFs' page is not available yet, no action required until the lesson is published, subscribe on the source to be alerted.

Preview (work in progress): the 'Adapt the legacy configuration' lesson is not released yet; subscribe on the source page to be notified when guidance for adapting legacy DSC configurations is published.

Preview (work in progress): the 'Path A: Adapt in place' lesson is not published, so do not change your in-place adaptation plans based on this page until it is released, subscribe to receive the release notice.

Video published: Episode 73 covers Microsoft Purview, explaining why data protection should be part of your security architecture and enterprise risk management, watch the episode for practical Purview and DLP guidance.

Article published: 'Introduction to migration configurations and resources' is available, read it to understand how migration configurations and resources are organised and what to plan for during migration.

Article published: the 'Summary' page collects the key takeaways from the course material, review it to confirm the main migration decisions and steps the course presents.

Knowledge check available: an interactive quiz lets you test your understanding of DSC resource adapter behaviour (for example differences between Microsoft.Adapter/WindowsPowerShell and Microsoft.Adapter/PowerShell), use it to validate migration readiness.

Read the article to choose the right migration path for your estate and use it to decide which migration approach to plan and schedule next.

Speaker session at JNUC 2026 covers securing Azure and AKS with Jamf Connect ZTNA and Jamf Trust, so if you manage Azure/AKS with Jamf, plan to attend or watch the recording for implementation patterns and configuration details.

A Pluralsight course on integrating AI agents in enterprise systems is coming as part of a new Agentic AI Integration path, so schedule time to take the course when it publishes to learn practical integration patterns.

Follow the guidance in this article to build and inventory your Bindery estate so you have an actionable asset list before any migration or refactor work.

Use the article's recommendations to inventory your existing environment now, creating a baseline of configurations and artefacts you can reference during migration or remediation.

Before migrating PowerShell DSC, evaluate whether you actually need to move: DSC 5.1 and the LCM still work, so document motivations and risks and only migrate when the benefits outweigh maintaining the existing setup.

If you have an existing PowerShell DSC estate, read this practical introduction to migrating from DSC to understand how to handle real-world artefacts, folders, and legacy configurations before you start.

Speaker at Afrofest Tech Day on 18 September will present 'AI The Bigger Picture', so if you are nearby and want a broad perspective on AI in industry, consider attending the session.

Retirement noted: the weekly update lists 'AKS Azure Linux with OS Guard' as retiring; watch the episode for timelines and plan migrations from that image or feature now.

Join the Visual Studio Code documentary watch party to hear the project's history and ecosystem lessons that may inform your VS Code extension, tooling, or contributor decisions.

Upcoming: 'Agentic Azure Insights' on 20 October; check the channel for the episode to catch updates and operational guidance on agent-based Azure tooling.

If you prefer not to look at code after 17:00, Kat's note is practical permission to set boundaries and adjust team handoffs, on-call rotations, or tooling so coding work stays within your preferred hours.

When an Exchange database will not mount, compare Stellar's online service and desktop repair software as alternative recovery paths and choose the option that meets your restore window and operational constraints.

Microsoft and Azure Local are positioned as leaders in two Gartner Magic Quadrants, so include Azure Local when short-listing platforms for hybrid, edge, AI, or digital sovereignty use cases.

Personal account: Kat explains choosing a computer science degree over a bootcamp, citing student-only internships, broader education, and a network that reaches Big Tech.

Audit Outlook Mobile sessions and Conditional Access logs: an investigation shows Outlook Mobile can continue accessing Exchange Online after Conditional Access and Continuous Access Evaluation indicate the session should be deauthorised, so verify your session termination and ap

Watch the Cybersecurity Mittendrin episode comparing Prompt Engineering and Context Engineering, and follow the linked GitHub workshop resources to adjust how you design prompts and manage contextual data for models.

Treat career envy as a practical signal: if someone's career path makes you jealous, record that as data to clarify what skills, roles, or projects you should aim for next.

Update a single pull request comment from GitHub Actions by adding a stable marker, verifying ownership, and using an upsert pattern so you avoid duplicate comments on every push.

Use the Adaptive Apps and Radius approaches to engineer, test, and prove sovereign application portability as part of your exit strategy, and validate those patterns against your compliance and deployment constraints.

Include junior engineers in your code-review rotation, they often spot issues senior reviewers stop seeing; adjust reviewer assignments to get fresh eyes on reviews regularly.

For cloud engineering prompts to Anthropic v5 models (Sonnet 5, Open 5, Fable 5.1), include the reason as well as the rule and follow the distilled practical prompting rules to improve model output for operational workflows.

APIM behaviour: a dedicated API Management Workspace Gateway can inherit and use the parent APIM service's managed identity, so check the gateway's effective identity and access permissions instead of assuming a distinct identity.

For local LLM labs using Ollama or Hugging Face, review the video's practical advice on model choice, model files, context window, quantisation, and VRAM requirements to size hosts and pick quantisation strategies.

If Intune marks devices noncompliant while Windows Defender is actually running, follow the troubleshooting and reporting-path guidance in this post to prevent false noncompliance states in device management.

If you are preparing for the Microsoft Certified: Azure AI Apps and Agents Developer Associate (AI-103), read the author's exam notes and topic breakdown to focus study on the areas that tripped them up across two attempts.

Watch the Azure Weekly Update video, it covers VM ephemeral OS disk full caching and Azure Functions Flexible (Flex); review the segments if you manage VMs or Functions for potential configuration or performance changes.

Use the RateMyWAF resource to convert a tenant's firewall posture into an A-F grade and identify specific WAF configuration gaps to remediate.

Digital Sovereignty guidance is now part of the Cloud Adoption Framework; consult the new guidance when designing governance and control models for cloud deployments, particularly in EMEA.

GA: Azure Virtual Desktop Hybrid is now generally available,run session hosts in your data centre while using Azure for connectivity and management; evaluate this for phased migrations when you cannot move all session hosts to Azure.

Podcast episode contrasts when to let AI solve a problem versus learning by doing and reviews Sysinternals' evolution; use it to inform where to apply AI tools in debugging, and where manual investigation should be preserved for team learning.

Listen to reflections on 30 years of Sysinternals to reassess which Sysinternals tools should remain in your troubleshooting toolbox and how those workflows may change as tooling and AI evolve.

Apply the provided fix to restore Microsoft Sentinel UEBA access in the Defender portal so you can enable or troubleshoot UEBA capabilities and associated detections in your environment.

Watch this deepfakes episode to understand how AI-manipulated images and video become a cybersecurity risk, and incorporate the detection cues and mitigations into your incident response and awareness training.

If you need sovereign or hybrid cloud options, evaluate Azure Local and the Microsoft Sovereign Private Cloud at the HPE Customer Innovation Center to plan architecture, compliance, and deployment choices.

Microsoft AI Update August 2026 lists model releases including MAI-Code-1.1-Flash, MAI-Image-2.6, MAI-Thinking-1, MAI-Transcribe-2, and Gemini 3.7 Flash; review these updates for compatibility and testing in your AI workloads.

PowerShell authoring features for Microsoft Desired State Configuration have been restored, review the updated authoring experience and adjust your DSC scripts and workflows accordingly.

Use the open-source Dataverse toolkit (MIT licence, 17 custom APIs) described here to add opening hours, live queue status, and callback capabilities to Copilot Studio voice agents so they can speak those details on calls.

Follow this Docker-based guide to run Ollama and Open WebUI in a container to run modern AI language models 100% locally for privacy and on-prem testing.

Compare Autopilot Device Preparation with Device Association to Classic Autopilot and choose which provisioning workflow to implement, then update your Intune/Autopilot configuration and deployment steps accordingly.

Adopt repeatable personal engineering systems (small processes, automation, and habit triggers) to reduce reliance on willpower and improve long-term productivity under pressure.

Use the author's Microsoft MVP journey as a practical example of community activities to increase your public contributions (blogs, talks, support) if you are pursuing MVP recognition.

Watch the Azure Weekly Update (4 Sept 2026) to catch this week's Azure announcements and demos, including coverage of Azure VM Image Builder you may want to apply to your images pipeline.

Attend Art Pugach's sessions or the listed events to see concrete Microsoft 365 Copilot adoption examples and co-work practices you can trial in your organisation.

Reassess your Windows patching and compliance reporting approach: the post warns that traditional enterprise patching programmes and current Windows compliance reports no longer reflect enterprise risk, so update your metrics and remediation priorities.

Windows Autopilot Device Association requires an OEM to assert device association so a new device can determine its tenant before sign-in, so ensure your OEM or supply-chain partner is configured to provision Autopilot associations for devices you want preassigned.

Install the free Dynamics 365 Performance Probe browser extension to capture both client-side and server-side response times, surface the likely root cause, and route the issue to the correct team for remediation.

Updated study guide and candidate notes for Exam AB-650 (Administering Microsoft 365 and AI Services) are available, use the author's beta exam experience and takeaways to structure your revision plan.

Watch the Tech in Five primer on why AI hallucinates to understand model behaviour and learn practical steps to minimise hallucinations when building or evaluating generative models.

Use Azure Application Gateway when you need an application-layer load balancer that routes by hostname, URL path, and TLS, centralises routing rules, and exposes a single public entry while keeping back ends private.

Use local LLM tooling (for example Ollama) with LangGraph to orchestrate pentesting workflows from recon through reporting; follow the linked repositories for runnable examples and orchestration patterns.

Thomas Maurer will speak at the Hybrid Platform Conference 2026 in Amsterdam on 28 September, the event is free to attend and targets professionals working with Azure Local, Windows Server, hybrid cloud, and AI workloads.

Apply the APIM policy patterns in Part 2 to enforce AI gateway runtime controls: perform content safety checks and model entitlement decisions at the API runtime to control whether requests and model access are allowed.

Microsoft Intune Service Release 2608 (August 2026) introduces new Android Enterprise changes; review the release notes to update your Android device management policies and service configurations accordingly.

Use Azure API Center's Spectral linting to enforce API governance rules by adding Spectral checks to your API artefacts and policy pipelines to catch schema and style violations earlier.

Watch the 60-minute John Savill AMA recording (celebrating 500,000 subscribers) for interactive Azure Q&A and practical tips you can apply to your environment.

GlobalAIConference Budapest is scheduled for 15 September 2026, so if you plan to attend add the date to your calendar and follow the event page for registration and agenda details.

Windows Autopilot Device Association lets Device Preparation identify the device's organisation before user sign-in so you can retrieve organisation-specific settings or policies during provisioning; evaluate enabling it in your Autopilot profiles and enrolment flows.

Azure Linux 4.0 is available for review: check compatibility, lifecycle, and container host behaviour in your environment and plan any testing or migration for workloads that will run on Azure Linux 4.0.

The Azure Linux 4.0 overview (including architecture, lifecycle, WSL integration, and Azure Container Host) means you should assess its suitability for your workloads and adjust migration or image-building plans accordingly.

Agent Package Manager introduces package.json-style manifests, lockfiles, and policy-based governance for AI agents in Azure engineering, so trial APM to manage agent dependencies, pin versions, and enforce policy in your agent pipelines.

The NIST Cybersecurity Framework 2.0 video explains the Core, Tiers, and Profiles; use those three components to organise your cybersecurity improvements and map existing controls to the CSF 2.0 structure.

A free tool is available to promote Dynamics 365 Contact Center configuration without using CMT, offering natural-key matching, automatic GUID remapping, and a dry-run mode, so try it to simplify environment-to-environment config moves.

If your Azure AI Search backend runs in Kubernetes and uses indexes with leading underscores, apply the described Kubernetes ingress and cert-manager and Let's Encrypt proxy fixes to resolve unusable index behaviour.

Use Drasi's MCP Reaction to subscribe to continuous queries and push real-time updates into Copilot agents, replacing polling to keep live data feeds current.

Enable Drasi's continuous vector sync to run per-change embeddings and deletions so your RAG store stays fresh and costs less than nightly reindexing.

Run standing Cypher queries with Drasi over your AKS cluster graph to detect cross-resource drift and trigger temporal or relational compliance alerts.

Replace pollers with Drasi's continuous PostgreSQL queries (trueLater/trueFor) to alert when events stop occurring, giving reliable, real-time absence detection.

Varun Badhwar (Project Akrites) flags AI surfacing decades-old vulnerabilities in open-source projects, so audit and prioritise fixes for long-lived dependencies flagged by AI scanning.

Preview: AKS Prepared Image Specification (PIS) is in preview, you can pre-bake stable container images and host customisations into AKS-managed node images so pods can start without downloading images on node boot; test in non-production and update your image-build pipeline.

No Azure product change to act on: this is a personal retrospective about shipping a side project, so there are no immediate Azure configuration or migration steps required.

No single product change announced in this item: it is a channel update video covering assorted Azure topics, watch for items relevant to your projects if you need operational or learning updates.

Action: establish a regular review process for Application Insights telemetry and configuration, the post warns many teams instrument applications but do not routinely review the data produced.

Security action: treat developer machines and coding agents as high-value targets, reduce local privileges, isolate or containerise agents, and audit access because developer endpoints often run high-privilege tools.

If 10GbE links show 10 Gbps but SMB file transfers are only ~100-300 Mbps, follow Scott Hanselman's debugging write-up to apply targeted NIC, host, SMB and network checks to find the bottleneck.

Microsoft has announced client-driven compliance evaluation for Windows devices: supported devices can detect local state changes and proactively request a new compliance evaluation to reduce reporting delays.

When protecting Azure Files shares used by VMs, follow this Azure Files backup and recovery guide to understand the operational steps and considerations for backing up and restoring Azure Files.

SQL Server 2016 reached end of support in July 2026 and Extended Security Update pricing is reported to escalate across years (75% → 150% → 300%), so inventory your estate and plan upgrades or ESU purchases now.

Try Felix Rieseberg's free Language Model Builder app to learn how language models work by building one, useful for hands-on understanding of model internals before applying them in projects.

Community video: Scott Hanselman and Mark Russinovich discuss gaming preferences and AI-generated content and its effect on how we value creative work; no Azure action required.

Podcast episode: Scott Hanselman and Mark Russinovich cover single-player versus multiplayer games, AI-generated content, and whether AI authorship changes perceived value; no Azure action required.

Video explains attacker recon using Shodan, GreyNoise, and dorking against IoT devices and outlines practical mitigations you can apply to reduce exposure.