News For Dev-ops

Amazon WorkSpaces Applications now offers images powered by Microsoft Windows Server 2025, enabling customers to launch streaming instances with the latest features and enhancements from Microsoft’s newest server operating system. This update ensures your application streaming environment benefits from improved security, performance, and modern capabilities. With Windows Server 2025 support, you can deliver the Microsoft Windows 11 desktop experience to your end users, giving you greater flexibility in choosing the right operating system for your specific application and desktop streaming needs. Whether you're running business-critical applications or providing remote access to specialized software, you now have expanded options to align your infrastructure decisions with your unique workload requirements and organizational standards. You can select from AWS-provided public images or create custom images tailored to your requirements using Image Builder. Support for Microsoft W...

Security vulnerabilities don't fix themselves. Someone needs to track them, prioritize them, and actually ship the fix. If you've ever tried to manage security alerts alongside your regular sprint work, though, you know the friction: you're looking at an alert in one tab, switching to your backlog in another, trying to remember which vulnerability you were supposed to file a bug for. We shipped work item linking for GitHub Advanced Security for Azure DevOps alerts to fix this. It's now generally available and it does exactly what it sounds like: you can link work items in Boards directly to security alerts. Note that this only works for Advanced Security alerts in Azure DevOps. The problem we see Security alerts live in the Advanced Security hub while sprint planning happens in Boards. Teams end up with lost context (which alerts have owners?) and visibility gaps (is anyone actually working on this vulnerability?). When your security team asks "is someone fixin...

Say you have a shortcut file and you want to see what its target is. The natural thing to do is to call IShellLink:: GetPath , which returns S_FALSE if the shortcut does not target a path, or returns S_OK and a path to the target. But for some shortcuts, it returns S_OK but produces a weird path to a file inside the C:\Windows\ Installer directory that is definitely not the shortcut target. So what is it? You're seeing a backward compatibility consequence of shortcuts to MSI applications. The Microsoft Windows Installer (MSI) was introduced in Windows 2000. It supports various types of installation functionality, but the interesting one here is install-on-demand. A shortcut to an MSI-installed application is not a shortcut to an executable, but rather it is a shortcut that encodes the MSI information to identify an MSI application. When the user double-clicks the shortcut, the shortcut file asks MSI to get the application ready to run, which involves installing the applicatio...

TL;DR Move from prototype to production in hours, not weeks: The new Microsoft Agent Framework and Hosted Agents let you build, test, and deploy multi-agent AI systems with enterprise-grade security—no Kubernetes or container headaches. Orchestrate any model, anywhere: Model Router and BYO Model Gateway let you mix and match thousands of models (including Claude, GPT, and your own) with unified governance and compliance—no code changes required. Ship agents to Teams and M365 with one click: New low-code/no-code tools, templates, and deployment channels make it easy to launch and scale AI agents for your users. Build smarter, more reliable workflows: Multi-agent orchestration, persistent memory, and deep Microsoft 365 integration enable robust, context-aware solutions for complex enterprise scenarios. Fine-tune and innovate faster: Redesigned UI, support for reinforcement fine-tuning (RFT) on GPT-5, and parity for non-OpenAI models like Mistral accelerate custom model develop...

1. Introduction AI coding agents/assistants such as GitHub Copilot have become common in modern software engineering workflows. Their strengths—rapid pattern completion, context-aware suggestions, and the ability to learn style from local code—stem from broad training on large corpora of public, general-purpose code. They perform best when the languages, libraries, and idioms requested by developers align with patterns they have seen many times before. Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs) break this assumption. DSLs are deliberately narrow, domain-targeted languages with unique syntax rules, semantics, and execution models. They often have little representation in public datasets, evolve quickly, and include concepts that resemble no mainstream programming language. For these reasons, DSLs expose the fundamental weaknesses of large language models when used as code generators. While AI coding agents excel at generating code for mainstream languages, recent research shows their accuracy ...

For the past few articles (starting with conversion between CF_ OEM­TEXT and CF_ TEXT ), we've been looking at how Windows performs text conversion among its three clipboard text formats: CF_ UNICODE­TEXT , CF_ TEXT , and CF_ OEM­TEXT . A lot of the weirdness dates back to adding Unicode support to what originally supported only 8-bit code page-based encodings. You might take away from this that the clipboard text conversion system is a mess, and you should simply avoid putting text on the clipboard. But really, all the problems boil down to inconsistent conversions to and from the 8-bit formats. If you stick with CF_ UNICODE­TEXT , then everything works great! For over two decades, Windows has been pushing application developers to move to Unicode, with support for 8-bit code pages being retained for backward compatibility with old programs that haven't had a chance to update. So don't be an old program. Be a new program that uses Unicode, specifically the UTF-16LE enc...