Azure Weekly

Issue #552 - 22nd February 2026

There are quite a few interesting announcements and updates this week. Here are the highlights: Custom Agents in Visual Studio: Built in and Build-Your-Own agents – Visual Studio now ships preset AI agents for debugging, profiling, testing, and modernisation, alongside a preview framework for building custom agents via .agent.md files with MCP support for connecting to external knowledge sources. Shipping Features Faster with Copilot CLI – An overview of how GitHub Copilot CLI accelerates Azure development by translating natural language into Azure CLI commands, compressing feedback loops, and dramatically reducing context-switching between documentation and terminal. How I Used GitHub Copilot CLI to Build an Azure Governance Web App: From Zero to Maturity Score in One Weekend – A detailed walkthrough of building a comprehensive Azure governance and FinOps web application in a single weekend using GitHub Copilot CLI with the Azure MCP Server, covering budgets, cost management, tagging compliance, security posture, and an improving the overall maturity score.

In Data & Analytics: Microsoft ODBC Driver for Microsoft Fabric Data Engineering (Preview) – A new enterprise-grade ODBC 3.x driver that enables .NET, Python, and other ODBC-compatible applications to connect to and query Spark workloads in Microsoft Fabric via Livy APIs, with deep lakehouse integration and Entra ID authentication. Official support for Microsoft fabric-cicd tool – The open-source fabric-cicd Python library for CI/CD automation across Microsoft Fabric workspaces is now officially supported and Microsoft-backed, addressing cross-workspace deployment challenges including dependency management and parameterisation. Share bundled Fabric Items in Fabric Org Apps – A walkthrough of using the new Fabric Org Apps feature (public preview) to bundle and share multiple Fabric items such as Real-Time Dashboards, Maps, and Notebooks as customisable, read-only packages for consumers within an organisation.

Finally, Unified tooling in the AKS MCP server (Public Preview) – The AKS MCP server now defaults to unified tools (call_az and call_kubectl) replacing legacy specialised tools, with a new --enabled-components flag for granular control over which components are active. Azure Quick Review (azqr) 3.0: Breaking Changes and Migration Guide – Version 3.0 of the Azure Quick Review CLI tool introduces breaking changes, replacing individual boolean flags with a unified --stages flag and changing cost analysis, Defender recommendations, and Arc scans to disabled by default. Azure Bicep Snapshots – Test and Validate Your Code and Deployments – A new preview feature in Bicep v0.36.1 that lets you locally generate and validate ARM resource definitions from parameter files without deploying to Azure, producing what-if style diff output to catch issues before deployment.

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