News For Dev-ops

Suppose you want to distinguish between dismissing a dialog by pressing ESC and dismissing a dialog by clicking the Close button. One suggestion I saw was to call Get­Async­Key­State( VK_ ESCAPE) to check whether the ESC is down. In general, any time you see Get­Async­Key­State , you should be suspicious, since Get­Async­Key­State checks the state of the keyboard at the moment it is called, which might not be relevant to your window if it asynchronously lost keyboard focus, and which (from the point of view of your program) might even be from the future. Recall that the system maintains two types of keyboard states. One is the synchronous keyboard state, which represents the state of the keyboard as far as your program is aware. If your program received a WM_ KEYDOWN for the space bar, then Get­Key­State will report that the space bar is pressed. Even if the user releases the space bar, Get­Key­State will continue to report that the space bar is pressed until the program rece...

We're happy to announce that Microsoft Agent Framework is now in Release Candidate status for both .NET and Python . Release Candidate is an important milestone on the road to General Availability — it means the API surface is stable, and all features that we intend to release with version 1.0 are complete. Whether you're building a single helpful assistant or orchestrating a team of specialized agents, Agent Framework gives you a consistent, multi-language foundation to do it. Microsoft Agent Framework is the easy and most powerful way to build agents and agent systems using Microsoft Foundry or any model or AI service! What is Microsoft Agent Framework? Microsoft Agent Framework is a comprehensive, open-source framework for building, orchestrating, and deploying AI agents. It's the successor to Semantic Kernel and AutoGen, and it provides a unified programming model across .NET and Python with: Simple agent creation — go from zero to a working agent in just a few li...

Today we are releasing the first preview of the Microsoft C++ (MSVC) Build Tools version 14.51. This update, shipping in the latest Visual Studio 2026 version 18.4 Insiders release, introduces many C++23 conformance changes, bug fixes, and runtime performance improvements. Check out the release notes for an in-progress list of what’s new. Conformance improvements and bug fixes will be detailed in an upcoming blog post and Insiders release notes in the near future. We plan to ship more frequent, incremental MSVC Build Tools previews, just as we are shipping more frequent IDE updates. As a result, we have adjusted the process for enabling and using MSVC previews, and this post describes the new process. We encourage you to explore MSVC previews to adapt to breaking changes and report issues early. MSVC previews do not receive servicing patches and thus should not be used in production environments. How to opt in Visual Studio 2026 has changed the process for opting in to MSVC Build Too...

Author's note : So.. it has been a bit. I have to level with you — I returned from paternity leave in January and between Microsoft Ignite 2025 and present day, things have changed a lot . Without further adieu, here is your monthly (late) drop for all things new with Microsoft Foundry. Expect following editions to be back on track going forward. Thanks for your patience! TL;DR December 2025 was one of the biggest months in Microsoft Foundry history. Here's everything that shipped: GPT‑5.2 (GA): New enterprise reasoning standard — top benchmark scores across math, science, coding, and multimodal tasks; available as gpt-5.2 and gpt-5.2-chat-latest . GPT‑5.1 Codex Max (GA): 77.9% on SWE-Bench, 400K context, 50+ languages — built for autonomous multi-agent coding pipelines, PR generation, and CI/CD integration. Mistral Large 3 (Public Preview): Apache 2.0, 41B active / 675B total parameters; $0.50 / $1.50 per million tokens. Strong instruction following and multimodal rea...

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is announcing the general availability of Amazon EC2 X8i instances, next-generation memory optimized instances powered by custom Intel Xeon 6 processors available only on AWS. X8i instances are SAP-certified and deliver the highest performance and fastest memory bandwidth among comparable Intel processors in the cloud. They deliver up to 43% higher performance, 1.5x more memory capacity (up to 6TB), and 3.3x more memory bandwidth compared to previous generation X2i instances. X8i instances are designed for memory-intensive workloads like SAP HANA, large databases, data analytics, and Electronic Design Automation (EDA). Compared to X2i instances, X8i instances offer up to 50% higher SAPS performance, up to 47% faster PostgreSQL performance, 88% faster Memcached performance, and 46% faster AI inference performance. X8i instances come in 14 sizes, from large to 96xlarge, including two bare metal options. X8i instances are available in the following AWS Region...

Kiro brings agentic AI development capabilities to workloads with elevated compliance needs in AWS GovCloud (US-East) and AWS GovCloud (US-West) Regions. Kiro is an agentic AI with an integrated development environment (IDE) and command-line interface (CLI) that helps you go from prototype to production with spec-driven development. From simple to complex tasks, Kiro works alongside you to turn prompts into detailed specs, then into working code, docs, and tests—so what you build is exactly what you want and ready to share with your team. Kiro's agents help you solve challenging problems and automate tasks like generating documentation and unit tests. With native Model Context Protocol (MCP) support, Kiro connects to documentation, databases, APIs, and other enterprise resources, providing capability for mission-critical development workflows. Kiro in AWS GovCloud (US) Regions uses enterprise authentication via AWS IAM Identity Center. To learn more about building with Kiro in ...

For decades, DBAs relied on linked servers to stitch data together. If you needed data from two places, you wired them up and moved on. It worked. It was straightforward. It felt native to SQL. But what if linked servers are not an option? What if policy blocks them? What if one of the systems is not SQL or lives in another cloud? How do you cross engines, environments, and ownership boundaries without turning your architecture into a science project? In most modern enterprises, the limitation is not SQL. It is usually more hidden things like governance, separation of duties, or risk management policy. Application developers often can't alter schemas, enable cross database features, or introduce new trust relationships. They typically need to introduce composition at the app or API level without refactoring databases. Keep it Simple This is where Data API Builder chaining becomes super interesting. Slightly unconventional, yes, but extremely practical. DAB can already target m...