Microsoft Developer Blogs

If you ship an application with Native AOT, a green managed test run leaves a gap. Native AOT compiles ahead of time, removes unused code, and requires alternatives to runtime code generation and unrestricted reflection. The published application can therefore behave differently from the code exercised by the managed test process. Starting with MSTest 4.4, MSTest supports publishing and running test projects as Native AOT executables.

A user asked for per-solution color themes. It already ships, and it goes further than they asked. You run several instances of Visual Studio side by side, one per solution, and they all look identical. Same taskbar icon, same alt-tab thumbnail, same chrome. So, you land in the wrong one, start typing, and realize thirty seconds later you just edited the wrong repo. Could each solution get its own color theme? It can. It already does.

Today I will show you how we can tackle one of the most common tasks when working in a development team or managing an open-source project, and that is working with Pull Requests. While we’re going to be using the GitHub tooling within Visual Studio for this, the approach would be very similar with Azure DevOps. Start by opening the pull requests for your repository. Select Git → GitHub → View Pull Requests. You can also search for the command in the Command Palette with Ctrl+Shift+P.

Move Azure DevOps repositories to GitHub Enterprise Cloud with data residency while minimizing disruption Over the last several years, we’ve encouraged customers to move their repositories from Azure Repos to GitHub to take advantage of the latest AI-powered and agentic development experiences. We know that making this move at enterprise scale isn’t always straightforward.

When you need to move an entire database or move the objects in a database, bacpac and dacpac files often come up because of all of the tooling options to interact with them. Bacpac and dacpac files share some core similarities as well as some major differences in how they’re used in SqlPackage and other SQL tools, but their flexibility can create a bit of confusion.

How to read this article This article picks up where my January piece left off. My catch phrase is still the same: “only believe what you can validate”. This article is about validation. If you are new to agentic AI (in modernization contexts), I would highly recommend reading The Realities of Application Modernization with Agentic AI first. Start there, then come back. The problem with “looks good to me” I have had a version of the same conversation many times over the last months.

The 2002 release of the original .NET Framework shipped ADO.NET and System.Data.SqlClient, the driver for SQL Server that gave .NET applications a standard connection approach. Over the years, updates, enhancements, and patches solidified these BCL classes as an integral dependency for millions of line-of-business applications that fueled innovation, business, and the world economy.

We’re back after the summer break, and August picks up right where June left off. We’ve shipped , the  public preview – the capability we announced in June as SharePoint Copilot Apps – is open to everyone, and we’re now working toward . More on that name change in a moment. There’s more.

Welcome to the August 2026 edition of the Azure Developer CLI (azd) release blog. This post covers releases 1.30.0, 1.31.0, 1.31.1, 1.31.2, and 1.32.0. To share your feedback and questions, join the August release discussion on GitHub. Highlights: The azd extension framework is generally available. Azure Functions services can deploy from a Dockerfile, a prebuilt image, or an Azure Container Registry remote build.

This is a guest post by Sam Basu. Sam is a technologist, author, speaker, Microsoft MVP and Developer Advocate for Uno Platform. If you’ve spent any time building software in the last couple of years, you’ve felt the shift. AI is no longer a novelty sitting on the sidelines – it’s right there in the editor, the terminal, the build pipeline. And for .NET developers, this moment is particularly exciting. The ecosystem is deep, the tooling is stellar, and AI just keeps getting better at navigating both.