Enterprise Microsoft

Using Inspektor Gadget for Kubernetes observability

An open-source collection of low-level tools helps you troubleshoot cloud-native applications by delivering key data from the heart of the Linux kernel.

By Simon Bisson

Apr 25, 2024 8 mins

Software Development

How Microsoft scales Git for massive monorepos

Microsoft has rolled its Git Virtual File System and Scalar optimizations into a fork of Git designed to support enormous repos and large distributed teams.

By Simon Bisson

Apr 18, 2024 7 mins

Devops Technology Industry Version Control Systems

How Microsoft’s Git fork scales for massive monorepos

Microsoft has rolled its Git Virtual File System and Scalar optimizations into a fork of Git designed to support enormous repos and large distributed teams.

By Simon Bisson

Apr 18, 2024 7 mins

Devops Technology Industry Version Control Systems

Xamarin Forms reaches end of life. What should you do?

It’s time to update your older cross-platform .NET applications. Should you use MAUI or something else?

By Simon Bisson

Apr 11, 2024 7 mins

Development Libraries and Frameworks Microsoft .NET Software Development

Using Neo4j’s graph database for AI in Azure

New techniques make graph databases a powerful tool for grounding large language models in private data.

By Simon Bisson

Apr 4, 2024 7 mins

Generative AI Graph Databases Microsoft Azure

Using Microsoft’s Retina to monitor Kubernetes networks

The open-source Retina brings observability to container networks in Kubernetes using eBPF.

By Simon Bisson

Mar 28, 2024 8 mins

Devops Microsoft Azure Technology Industry

Building a smarter Azure Kubernetes for developers

Microsoft continues to evolve its Azure Kubernetes Service. Kubernetes co-creator Brendan Burns tells us where it’s going next.

By Simon Bisson

Mar 21, 2024 7 mins

Cloud Computing Microsoft Azure Software Development

Securing Azure Kubernetes with Falco

The open-source cloud-native runtime security tool is now a graduated CNCF project. Is it time to use it in your Kubernetes applications?

By Simon Bisson

Mar 15, 2024 8 mins

Cloud Computing Microsoft Azure Software Development

Going passwordless with passkeys in Windows and .NET

It’s time to move away from passwords. Microsoft has tools to help you get started.

By Simon Bisson

Mar 7, 2024 7 mins

Development Libraries and Frameworks Microsoft .NET Software Development

Diving into Microsoft’s dev tunnels

Microsoft has quietly added a cloud-hosted secure tunnel to Visual Studio and VS Code, making it easier to test APIs, web services, and mobile back ends.

By Simon Bisson

Feb 29, 2024 8 mins

Development Tools Software Development Visual Studio

Cloud and AI apps take center stage in .NET 9

A first preview release of the next .NET sets the scene for a year of platform development focused on cloud-native and AI-powered applications.

By Simon Bisson

Feb 22, 2024 6 mins

Generative AI Microsoft .NET Microsoft Azure

FlyteInteractive: Interactive development for machine learning models

LinkedIn needed a better way to test and tune machine learning models, so it wrote its own tool that plugs into Visual Studio Code.

By Simon Bisson

Feb 15, 2024 7 mins

Artificial Intelligence Generative AI Machine Learning

Using Microsoft Graph search with SharePoint Online

Microsoft Graph provides one unified API to search all content in SharePoint, OneDrive, Outlook, and other Microsoft 365 services. That changes how we build SharePoint applications.

By Simon Bisson

Feb 8, 2024 6 mins

Cloud Computing Software Development

Code your infrastructure with Azure Automation

The cloud and automation go hand in hand. Use Azure Automation and runbooks to deploy and manage Azure infrastructure and platform services.

By Simon Bisson

Feb 1, 2024 6 mins

Cloud Computing Devops Microsoft Azure

Running serverless .NET applications in AWS Lambda

Amazon simplifies writing Lambda functions in C# with features like Lambda Annotations, which uses C# source generators to generate code from a REST API path. Support for .NET 8 is coming soon.

By Simon Bisson

Jan 18, 2024 7 mins

Amazon Web Services Microsoft .NET Serverless Computing

Inside Phi 2: Microsoft’s small language model

Microsoft Research is experimenting with the development of tailored AIs that minimize resource usage.

By Simon Bisson

Jan 11, 2024 7 mins

Artificial Intelligence Generative AI Machine Learning

What Microsoft’s custom silicon means for Azure

Microsoft is laying the groundwork for a hardware-accelerated Azure cloud with its own custom AI silicon, Arm server processors, virtualization offload, and more.

By Simon Bisson

Jan 4, 2024 7 mins

Cloud Computing Microsoft Azure Technology Industry

LinkedIn open sources its Developer Productivity and Happiness Framework

How do we measure developer productivity, and how do we use that to improve products and the workplace?

By Simon Bisson

Dec 27, 2023 6 mins

Careers Developer Software Development

A first look at Windows AI Studio

Available in an early preview, Microsoft’s AI development environment for the desktop lets you build small language models that run on PCs and mobile devices.

By Simon Bisson

Dec 21, 2023 8 mins

Artificial Intelligence Generative AI Software Development

Confidential computing in Microsoft Azure gets a boost

Hardware-backed confidential computing in Microsoft Azure now includes protected environments for VMs, containers, and GPUs, without the need to write specialized code.

By Simon Bisson

Dec 14, 2023 6 mins

Cloud Computing Cloud Security Microsoft Azure

Accelerating cloud native development in Microsoft Azure

From GPU support to reference implementations, the latest updates to Azure Container Apps combine Microsoft’s commitment to developer productivity with its latest AI development tools.

By Simon Bisson

Dec 7, 2023 7 mins

Cloud Computing Microsoft Azure Software Development

Building GPT-boosted chatbots with Copilot Studio

Microsoft’s low-code and copilot-driven AI builder makes it easy to train chatbots on internal data, and ‘boost’ them with GPT and external data sources when appropriate.

By Simon Bisson

Nov 30, 2023 7 mins

Generative AI Machine Learning No Code and Low Code

Simplifying AI development with Azure AI Studio

Microsoft’s cloud-based AI development environment, now in public preview, takes a more streamlined approach to building AI-powered applications.

By Simon Bisson

Nov 23, 2023 8 mins

Deep Learning Generative AI Microsoft Azure

What’s new and improved in Microsoft’s .NET 8

Leaner container images, simpler code syntax, and a welcome surprise—.NET Aspire, an opinionated stack for building cloud-native applications with .NET.

By Simon Bisson

Nov 16, 2023 7 mins

Development Libraries and Frameworks Microsoft .NET Software Development

Using Swift with WinUI on Windows

A new open-source tool from The Browser Company sets us on the road to bringing Swift apps from iOS and macOS to Windows.

By Simon Bisson

Nov 9, 2023 7 mins

Microsoft .NET Small and Medium Business Swift

Uno Platform updates to 5.0

A new release of Uno in advance of .NET 8 adds support for MVUX and C#-based markup.

By Simon Bisson

Nov 2, 2023 6 mins

C# Microsoft .NET Visual Studio Code

Microsoft’s Radius and the future of cloud-native development

Build, manage, and deploy Kubernetes applications using infrastructure-as-code techniques, with separation of concerns and dependency graphs.

By Simon Bisson

Oct 26, 2023 10 mins

Cloud Computing Software Development

BI meets data science in Microsoft Fabric

Microsoft’s cloud-hosted data lake and lakehouse platform gains new data science tools and opens up Power BI datasets to Python, R, and SparkSQL.

By Simon Bisson

Oct 19, 2023 6 mins

Apache Spark Microsoft Azure Python

Using Visual Studio Code for C# development

Microsoft’s new C# Dev Kit extension for Visual Studio Code turns the programmer’s editor into a complete development environment for .NET.

By Simon Bisson

Oct 11, 2023 8 mins

C# Integrated Development Environments Visual Studio Code

Using Azure Migrate to move on-premises systems to Azure

Microsoft’s free cloud migration tools simplify the process of bringing applications and services out of your data center and into the cloud.

By Simon Bisson

Oct 5, 2023 6 mins

Cloud Computing Microsoft Azure

Building for Linux and Android on Windows

Updates to Windows Subsystem for Linux and Windows Subsystem for Android make cross-platform development on Windows easy.

By Simon Bisson

Sep 28, 2023 6 mins

Small and Medium Business Software Development Technology Industry

Send a message with Azure Notification Hubs

Azure Notification Hubs can deliver notifications to any device from any platform anywhere, without your having to manage all aspects of the messaging stack.

By Simon Bisson

Sep 21, 2023 7 mins

Cloud Computing Microsoft Azure Software Development

How Microsoft uses walkthroughs to guide open source development

Often the hardest part of contributing to an open source project is learning where to start. Microsoft has a cure for that.

By Simon Bisson

Sep 14, 2023 5 mins

Open Source Software Development Technology Industry

Building collaborative apps with Microsoft Loop components

Adaptive Card-based Loop components are live and portable chunks of functionality that you can embed in Outlook, Teams, business apps, and your own code. Here’s how to get started.

By Simon Bisson

Sep 7, 2023 7 mins

Cloud Computing Development Libraries and Frameworks Technology Industry

Launch into satellite applications with Microsoft Azure

Microsoft’s Azure Space platform and Azure Orbital Space SDK are taking edge computing to the final frontier, starting with satellite image processing, geospatial, and communications applications.

By Simon Bisson

Aug 31, 2023 6 mins

Analytics Cloud Computing Microsoft Azure

The key new features and changes in .NET 8

With Microsoft’s yearly .NET release just around the corner, it’s time to start thinking about the changes you will need to make to your code.

By Simon Bisson

Aug 24, 2023 7 mins

C# Microsoft .NET Web Development

Building LLM applications with vector search in Azure Cognitive Services

Microsoft’s Cognitive Search API now offers vector search as a service, ready for use with large language models in Azure OpenAI and beyond.

By Simon Bisson

Aug 17, 2023 8 mins

Generative AI Microsoft Azure Technology Industry

Understanding OneLake and lakehouses in Microsoft Fabric

Microsoft Azure’s new, unified data platform aims to be your one-stop shop for analytics and machine learning at scale.

By Simon Bisson

Aug 10, 2023 8 mins

Data Architecture Machine Learning Microsoft Azure

Tame your wild LLM with TypeChat

Large language models mean not having to use complicated regular expression handlers to turn text into data. Using TypeChat, you can ensure that that data is type-safe JSON.

By Simon Bisson

Aug 3, 2023 8 mins

Artificial Intelligence Generative AI Natural Language Processing

The power of process mining in Power Automate

Process mining is now part of Microsoft’s process automation suite, giving you the KPIs and visualizations you need to identify bottlenecks in both manual workflows and software processes.

By Simon Bisson

Jul 27, 2023 7 mins

Artificial Intelligence Cloud Computing No Code and Low Code

Customizing Microsoft Dev Boxes with code

Configuration as code is coming to Microsoft’s Azure-hosted workstations, allowing us to use WinGet, YAML files, and PowerShell DSC to deliver ready-to-run toolchains to developers.

By Simon Bisson

Jul 20, 2023 7 mins

Cloud Computing Development Tools Integrated Development Environments

Build custom actions for Power Automate for Windows

Bundled with Windows 11, Power Automate for Windows lets you wrap low-code workflows around your desktop applications. A new SDK supports custom actions.

By Simon Bisson

Jul 13, 2023 7 mins

Cloud Computing No Code and Low Code Technology Industry

Build accelerated AI apps for NPUs with Olive

Microsoft’s open-source, hardware-aware optimization tool for ONNX models is an essential part of its AI application development tool chain.

By Simon Bisson

Jul 3, 2023 6 mins

Deep Learning Development Libraries and Frameworks Machine Learning

Getting started with MQTT in Azure Event Grid

The addition of MQTT protocol support paves the way to bringing SCADA control systems and other industrial IoT deployments to Azure. Here’s how to get started.

By Simon Bisson

Jun 5, 2023 7 mins

Cloud Computing Software Development Technology Industry

Azure Cosmos DB joins the AI toolchain

Microsoft has introduced a spectrum of new tools to make it easier to customize and focus the output of GPT-based AI models. Cosmos DB plays an important role.

By Simon Bisson

May 23, 2023 8 mins

Artificial Intelligence Machine Learning

KAN: A Kubernetes edge environment for computer vision

Microsoft’s open-source KubeAI Application Nucleus is a low-touch, Kubernetes-based system for building and running machine learning applications for edge devices.

By Simon Bisson

May 22, 2023 8 mins

Artificial Intelligence Machine Learning Microsoft Azure