Azure Weekly

Issue #523 - 13th July 2025

In Azure AI developments, see the new Deep Research in Azure AI Foundry Agent Service for enhanced AI capabilities. Joe Filcik asks: what if you could cut AI costs by 60% without losing quality? - Running through the new cost model for Azure AI Content Understanding. Konstantinos Passadis runs through building an AI Assistant for Microsoft Learn Docs MCP. And, Tim Meyers discusses listening at scale: using Gen AI to understand 10,000 voices.

As we highlighted last week, the new shortcut transformations in Microsoft Fabric allow you to keep data fully in-sync. Here, Miquella de Boer runs through some more concrete examples of usage. You can now Access your Delta Lake tables as Iceberg automatically in OneLake (Preview), and Carmel Eve has recorded a short talk How does Delta Lake work?.

Joseph Guadagno discusses how to simplify your .NET development with Aspire. We used Aspire as part of a recent project and found it incredibly useful for managing development of multi-part solutions. you can learn how to build an AI-powered, unified SOC in a new Microsoft e-book!

And finally, this week I was renewed as a Microsoft MVP for the 10th year in a row. For some reason, I was only renewed under the .NET category and not for Azure, which is slightly puzzling, but ho hum! I'm very pleased to have reached this milestone, and especially as Azure Weekly is heading towards its 11th anniversary in November.