Azure Weekly

Issue #540 - 16th November 2025

First up, happy 11th Birthday to Azure Weekly! Also this week .NET 10 went GA, along with a new and much improved Visual Studio 2026: faster, smarter, and a hit with early adopters - Visual Studio 2026 is now generally available featuring significant performance improvements, AI-native capabilities with new C# and C++ agents, decoupled build tools, and backward compatibility with Visual Studio 2022 projects and extensions. Visual Studio 2026 introduces a refreshed user experience with improved typography and iconography, a redesigned settings system with JSON backing, 11 new tinted themes with enhanced accessibility, and customizable editor appearance options. .NET Conference 2025 also happened, and I wanted to give a shout-out to Ian Griffiths, who provided an update about the last few years of work we've done on the Reactive Extensions for .NET.

Staying withe Developer Tools: Copilot auto model selection (preview) - GitHub Copilot now features automatic model selection that intelligently chooses between GPT-5, GPT-4.1, Sonnet 4.5, and other models to optimize performance, reduce rate limiting, and provide paid users with a 10% discount on premium requests. Demystifying GitHub Copilot Security Controls: easing concerns for organizational adoption - A comprehensive guide explaining GitHub Copilot's security features including data retention policies, intellectual property indemnification, content exclusions, duplicate detection filters, and compliance certifications to help organizations adopt AI coding tools confidently.

Ignite is almost here: Top Sessions for Developers at Microsoft Ignite - A curated guide highlighting must-attend sessions at Microsoft Ignite 2025 covering AI development, GitHub Copilot, Azure AI Foundry, and building multi-agent systems. Your guide to Azure Compute at Microsoft Ignite 2025 - A comprehensive guide to Azure Compute sessions at Ignite 2025, featuring updates on VM performance, resiliency, Azure Boost, and cost optimization strategies. Mission Agent Possible: Your Chance to Build, Solve, and Win at Microsoft Ignite 2025! - A developer contest at Microsoft Ignite 2025 where participants create AI agents to solve simulated crises, with prizes for both in-person and global attendees. And The Microsoft SQL Community Conference - Announcement of the Microsoft SQL Community Conference event for database professionals and developers.

I've been tracking Flatcar since Microsoft acquired Kinvolk in 2021, so I'm excited to see it making its way into Azure: Flatcar Container Linux on AKS: First Look - A hands-on exploration of Flatcar Container Linux as a new OS option for AKS node pools, highlighting its immutable filesystem, minimal attack surface, and multi-cloud consistency benefits for containerized workloads, currently available in preview. Also AKS Gets an AI Sidekick: a Deep Dive into the Agentic CLI - Azure Kubernetes Service introduces an AI-powered command-line agent that enables users to troubleshoot and manage AKS clusters using natural language queries, built on HolmesGPT and the AKS Model Context Protocol server.

Finally, an interesting post from Scott Guthrie: Infinite scale: The architecture behind the Azure AI superfactory - Microsoft unveils its second Fairwater AI datacenter in Atlanta, connected to Wisconsin to create a planet-scale AI superfactory featuring hundreds of thousands of NVIDIA GB200/GB300 GPUs, liquid cooling, two-story design, and a dedicated AI WAN for unprecedented AI training capabilities.