News For Dev-ops

Windows provides a family of functions for accessing so-called "extra bytes". There are two categories of extra bytes: Class extra bytes (which belong to the window class) and window extra bytes (which belong to each window created from that class). Applications can request extra bytes at class registration, and those are accessed at increasing offsets starting at zero. The system also defines a number of extra bytes, and those use negative offsets. We're going to look at the system-defined offsets. In 16-bit Windows, these were the available extra bytes and the function you used to read them: Name Size Accessor Notes GCW_MENUNAME int16_t GetClassWord   GCW_HBRBACKGROUND int16_t GetClassWord   GCW_HCURSOR int16_t GetClassWord   GCW_HICON int16_t GetClassWord   GCW_HMODULE int16_t GetClassWord   GCW_CBWNDEXTRA int16_t GetClassWord   GCW_CBCLSEXTRA int16_t GetClassWord   GCL_WNDPROC int32_t GetClass...

Amazon ElastiCache now supports Valkey 9.1 for node-based clusters, delivering higher throughput, improved memory efficiency, and stronger access control for multi-tenant workloads. This release helps customers get more performance from existing infrastructure while simplifying common application patterns with new commands. Valkey 9.1 includes a redesigned I/O threading model that improves throughput by up to 17%, reduces memory usage for strings under 128 bytes by up to 20%, and introduces database-level access control lists that let administrators scope user permissions to specific numbered databases. New commands like HGETDEL for atomic hash field retrieval and deletion, MSETEX for setting multiple keys with a shared expiration, and CLUSTERSCAN for cluster-wide key iteration simplify workflows that previously required multi-step client logic. The release also adds new main-thread and I/O-thread usage metrics for better operational visibility.  To get started, see Creating a...

If you’re building and maintaining Visual Studio extensions, you’ve probably ended up with some sort of build and publishing workflow - whether it’s manual, scripted, or stitched together over time. This post is for extension authors who want a simple, repeatable way to build, version, and publish their VSIX files using GitHub Actions. I’m going to show how I do this across my own extensions. I’ve been using this approach for a long time, and over time I pulled the most repetitive pieces into a few small reusable actions, so I don’t have to keep rewriting the same logic in every repo. Those are: vsix-version-stamp – keeps your versioning in sync publish-vsixgallery – publishes CI builds for testing publish-marketplace – publishes to the Visual Studio Marketplace You can use them independently or together, but I tend to use all three. If you want to see this wired up in a real repo, take a look at Start Screen . A real workflow Here’s a simplified setup very s...

Part 2 of Build your own claw and agent harness with Microsoft Agent Framework . In Part 1 we stood up a harness and gave our personal finance assistant its first abilities: a custom tool, web search, and planning. It can talk about the markets - but it can't yet touch your data, and nothing stops it from taking a sensitive action on a whim. This part fixes both, using three abilities that are all included in the harness: File access - read your portfolio from a CSV and write reports back to disk. Approvals - gate risky actions (like placing a trade) behind a human's explicit OK. Durable memory - remember things across sessions, in two complementary ways. As before, we only supply what makes our agent ours ; the harness provides the machinery. Let's take the three in turn. Give it your data: file access Our assistant should work from the user's actual holdings, not made-up numbers. The harness includes a file-access provider that exposes a set...

On July 1, 2027 , Remote Event Receivers (RERs) will stop working in SharePoint Online. After that date, no remote event receiver will fire events, regardless of how it was registered. If your application still relies on remote event receivers to react to changes in SharePoint, now is the time to plan your move to SharePoint webhooks . [alert type="important" heading="Key message"]All remote event receivers in SharePoint Online will stop working on July 1, 2027. Migrate any remaining RER-based functionality to SharePoint webhooks (or Microsoft Graph change notifications) before that date.[/alert] Background Remote event receivers are part of the SharePoint Add-in model and depend on Azure Access Control Services (Azure ACS) for authentication. With the retirement of Azure ACS now complete, remote event receivers registered using Azure ACS have stopped functioning correctly as of April 2, 2026 . They can still be added programmatically, events might still fire, bu...

The wait is over.  Spring AI 2.0 is generally available , and Azure Cosmos DB is right there with it. With this release, Spring AI graduates into a mature, production-ready framework for building AI applications in Java, and Azure Cosmos DB ships  dedicated, vendor-maintained integrations  that plug straight into the Spring AI ecosystem. The Spring AI 2.0 GA announcement names Azure Cosmos DB among its vendor-maintained modules, maintained directly by Microsoft rather than the core Spring AI team. This means the integration is built and supported by the engineers who work on Cosmos DB itself, bringing deep, first-hand knowledge of how to get the most out of it. If you are a Java or Spring developer building RAG pipelines, chatbots, or multi-agent systems, this is a great moment to start (or restart) on Azure Cosmos DB. What changed in Spring AI 2.0 (and why it's good news for Cosmos DB) Spring AI 2.0 brings a cleaner, more modular architecture built on  Spring Boot 4.1  and ...