News For Dev-ops

Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL-Compatible Edition has added support for PostgreSQL versions 17.7, 16.11, 15.15, 14.20 and 13.23. The update includes the PostgreSQL community's product improvements and bug fixes, and also includes Aurora-specific enhancements. The release includes improvements to Blue Green deployments, resulting in reduced switchover times by limiting new commits on the primary instance. There are also enhancements to Query Plan Management (QPM), and improved instance recovery times by optimizing commit log loading during database recovery. To use the new versions, create a new Aurora PostgreSQL-compatible database with just a few clicks in the Amazon RDS Management Console. You can also upgrade your existing database. Please review the Aurora documentation to learn more about upgrading. Refer to the Aurora version policy to help you to decide how often to upgrade and how to plan your upgrade process. These releases are available in all commercial AWS Regions and ...

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...

Today, AWS Payment Cryptography has expanded to Australia (Sydney) Region, and now supports AS2805 functionality. This expansion represents the service's thirteenth AWS Region worldwide. With AS2805 capabilities customers can migrate more payment workloads to AWS while maintaining operability with other companies utilizing this standard. Australia, New Zealand and several other countries rely on Australia Standards 2805 (AS2805) as a consistent approach for managing cryptography between organizations for card payments. Historically, these companies required Hardware Security Modules (HSM) to perform these operations in a compliant, compatible manner. AWS Payment Cryptography now provides equivalent functionality for node-to-node use cases in an elastic, scalable service, eliminating the operational burden of procuring and managing standalone hardware. Customers can leverage the service’s use of PCI-certified HSMs as part of their overall compliance programs while using APIs that...

Today, AWS announces the general availability of the new Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) M8gn and M8gb instances. These instances are powered by AWS Graviton4 processors to deliver up to 30% better compute performance than AWS Graviton3 processors. M8gn instances feature the latest 6th generation AWS Nitro Cards, and offer up to 600 Gbps network bandwidth, the highest network bandwidth among network optimized EC2 instances. M8gb offer up to 150 Gbps of EBS bandwidth to provide higher EBS performance compared to same-sized equivalent Graviton4-based instances. M8gn are ideal for network-intensive workloads such as high-performance file systems, distributed web scale in-memory caches, caching fleets, real-time big data analytics, and Telco applications such as 5G User Plane Function (UPF). M8gb are ideal for workloads requiring high block storage performance such as high performance databases and NoSQL databases. M8gn instances offer instance sizes up to 48xlarge, up to 768 ...

DirectX12 shipped in 2015 with a simple goal: give developers more control so games run faster, look better, and scale across Windows PC and console. Over the last decade, DirectX 12 delivered on that promise. We added features and made it easier for developers to focus on gameplay & graphics by providing more flexibility and achievable performance wins. We built technologies that dramatically reduce load times and deliver consistently high frames for a polished gaming experience in the most demanding of titles. Our platform’s continuous evolution brought advanced visuals previously unimaginable into the mainstream. Today, DirectX 12 sits at the heart of many AAA titles and modern game engines, powering some of the most visually stunning games ever made. Happy 10 th birthday DirectX 12, here are some of the biggest milestones that made games better! A Decade of “Closer to the Metal” Innovation: DirectX 12 Ultimate: Unlocking Realism, Control, & Performance (2018-2020) Direct...

Aspire 13.1 - Our holiday gift to you 🎁 Before we head off for the holidays, we wanted to leave you with one more release. Aspire 13.1 is packed with improvements to make your AI coding assistants first-class citizens in your development workflow, along with CLI enhancements, dashboard refinements, and streamlined Azure deployments. Check out the full What's New for all the details! Without further ado, let's dive into the highlights. 🛠️ CLI quality-of-life improvements Several enhancements make the CLI experience smoother: Channel persistence : When you run aspire update --self and select a channel, your selection is saved globally. Future aspire new and aspire init commands use this channel by default. Automatic instance detection : Running aspire run when an instance is already running? Aspire 13.1 detects it and offers to terminate: An Aspire application is already running for this AppHost. Do you want to stop it and start a new instance? [Y/n] No more hunti...

Email is a key part of how people get things done, whether it’s booking a reservation, confirming a package delivery, or managing a cab reservation. But as inboxes become increasingly cluttered, important transactional information often gets buried. Users are forced to open multiple emails, search through text, and manually look for key details such as reservation times, delivery status, or order confirmations. Let's think about business travel, When users are flying out for meetings, training, or conferences, they shouldn’t have to dig through a crowded inbox to find flight details, hotel confirmations, or car service information. Technology should simplify this experience—so everything they need is right at their fingertips. With schema.org markup, senders can structure email content in a format that can enable Microsoft Outlook to surface key information more intelligently helping users to always stay on top of their bookings, deliveries, and other critical details. What is S...