Azure Weekly

Issue #534 - 5th October 2025

Unsurprisingly, the Fabric announcements and content are still coming in strong: Firstly, here's Carmel's summary of day 1 at FabCon! And then, on the Fabric blog, here's a run through of the new Fabric MCP features (Preview). Take a first look at Fabric Map on top of Fabric Real-Time Intelligence. An overview of what's new in Fabric Data Factory for mission critical integration.

Here's an intro to the Fabric CLI: "open source, AI-ready, and more powerful". Virginia Roman runs through how to accelerate data transformation with AI Functions in Data Wrangler (Preview). And, Colby Ford discusses getting started with Agentic AI with Azure Foundry Agent Service on Fabric Data. Also on the endjin blog, James runs through reliably refreshing a Semantic Model from Microsoft Fabric Pipelines. And also, in Synapse / Data Factory, reliably refreshing a Semantic Model from Azure Data Factory or Synapse Pipelines and batch processing triggered pipeline runs in Azure Synapse.

Elsewhere, there are the upcoming changes to SQL Server on Linux Virtual Machine (VM) provisioning in Azure. Heman Kumar provides "The Ultimate Guide to Microsoft's AI Agent Ecosystem". Chris Paoli describes how Microsoft introduces Agentic capabilities in Sentinel for smarter threat defense. And John Waters highlights that Microsoft expands Copilot with Anthropic Claude AI Models - important to note as it may have an impact on policy (as it changes the Copilot policies around data protection!).

A library we used for doing real-time data processing in the cloud gets a new release: Rx.NET v6.1 Now Available, with three new features: TakeUntil(CancellationToken), DisposeWith(), and ResetExceptionDispatchState().

Finally, an interesting case study - transforming emergency response: How AI is reshaping public safety.