Microsoft is continuing to improve generative AI across Windows with new updates to Microsoft 365 Copilot. The company has announced that the ability for users to create their own autonomous agents in Copilot Studio is moving from private to public preview next month. Agents can be triggered by specific events and act on their own, … continue reading
Microsoft is making it easier to use passkeys on Windows 11 by introducing a way for third-party passkey providers to integrate with Windows’ passkey system, improving the user experience for creating and using passkeys, and adding the ability to sync passkeys across multiple Windows 11 devices. Passkeys are a safer alternative to passwords where users … continue reading
Microsoft has announced and is open-sourcing a new data processing system called Drasi that can detect and react to changes in complex systems. This new project “simplifies the automation of intelligent reactions in dynamic systems, delivering real-time actionable insights without the overhead of traditional data processing methods,” Mark Russinovich, CTO, deputy chief information security officer, … continue reading
Microsoft has released the first public preview of the upcoming SharePoint Framework 1.20 release, which is expected to reach general availability in September. SharePoint Framework enables developers to build applications or experiences in other Microsoft 365 apps that utilize data from SharePoint. The 1.20 preview includes two main additions, both related to building for the … continue reading
Earlier this week, Microsoft introduced the Agent Framework to its open source project Semantic Kernel, an SDK that integrates LLMs with C#, Python, and Java so that developers can incorporate AI features into their apps. With this new experimental framework, agents are now supported in the platform. According to Microsoft, agents are AI entities that … continue reading
Last month, Microsoft announced an official .NET library for OpenAI, which included full support for the OpenAI API. Now, the company is revealing that its Semantic Kernel team has been working on upgrading its connectors to use version 2 of the OpenAI library and Azure.AI.OpenAI library. According to the company, there were significant updates to … continue reading
This morning, a number of major systems suffered an outage due to a bad CrowdStrike update. CrowdStrike is an endpoint protection system that runs in the background of a lot of enterprise computers to secure them, and the update caused Windows machines running the updated software to crash. The software update only affected Windows operating … continue reading
GraphRAG is an open source research project out of Microsoft for creating knowledge graphs from datasets that can be used in retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). RAG is an approach in which data is fed into an LLM to give more accurate responses. For instance, a company might use RAG to be able to use its own … continue reading
Yesterday Microsoft announced that it was giving up its observer board seat at OpenAI, a company it has invested over $10 billion in and whose AI models are heavily integrated across the Microsoft product line. Microsoft’s board seat was a nonvoting seat, meaning they were only on it to observe what the board was doing. The … continue reading
Microsoft has released Fluid Framework 2, the latest version of its platform for building collaborative experiences across the Microsoft 365 suite. Fluid Framework 2 includes four major updates, the first of which is a new SharedTree Distributed Data Structure (DDS) that provides a programming interface for working with data. It supports many different data types, … continue reading
This morning the European Commission issued a Statement of Objections to Microsoft for violating antitrust rules by bundling Teams into its SaaS subscription platform Microsoft 365, which also includes products like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and OneDrive. “The Commission is concerned that, since at least April 2019, Microsoft has been tying Teams with its core … continue reading
Microsoft has announced that the .NET MAUI extension for Visual Studio Code is now generally available, allowing developers to now build cross-platform apps using .NET MAUI within their editor. Microsoft created .NET MAUI in 2022 to be a replacement for Xamarin, which reached end-of-life last month. A number of new features were also announced alongside … continue reading