Feeds

Every modern application, from a ride-hailing service to an e-commerce platform, relies on data, and behind that data sits a database. Whether it's storing customer profiles, tracking inventory, or logging user actions, the database is more than just a storage engine. It's the core system that holds an application’s state together. When the database fails, everything else (APIs, front-end, business logic) comes tumbling down. Therefore, choosing the right kind of database is critical, but it isn't a one-size-fits-all decision.  ...

Build 2025 is a wrap! We packed this year’s conference with tons of cool stuff around AI-powered coding, cloud-native apps, and the future of .NET. If you missed the live event or just want to revisit the good parts, here’s a roundup of can’t-miss content you’ll want to check out. Note All sessions are now available on-demand! The complete .NET at Build 2025 playlist is ready whenever you are. No need to binge it all at once – though you might be tempted! ...

Top Links Cloud Academy: Unlock Your Azure Skills and Accelerate Your Career (Jim Harrer) RunAs Radio Episode #987 – Fixing a Security Vulnerability in Active Directory with Steve Syfuhs (Richard Campbell) Stack Exchange knowledge is for everyone (and now available on Snowflake Marketplace) (Janice Manningham & Ryan Donovan) Researcher and Analyst are now generally available in Microsoft 365 Copilot (Jared Spataro) Create Visually Rich Content Easily with Blazor Rich Text Editor! No HTML (Thangavel E.) Using AI Foundry with .NET MAUI (David Ortinau) ...

In an era of accelerating regulatory scrutiny, organizations must ensure that their cryptographic infrastructure meets the appropriate standards of security and compliance. One of the key standards in the U.S. is the Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) 140-3, which defines the requirements for cryptographic modules used by federal agencies and contractors. HashiCorp Vault, a leader in secrets management and data protection, now supports FIPS 140-3 level 1 in version 1.19.4. This advancement enables organizations to modernize their security posture while meeting the latest compliance mandates. ...

This is a guest post by Chris Bell, CTO of Knock There’s a lot of talk right now about building AI agents, but not a lot out there about what it takes to make those agents truly useful. An Agent is an autonomous system designed to make decisions and perform actions to achieve a specific goal or set of goals, without human input. No matter how good your agent is at making decisions, you will need a person to provide guidance or input on the agent’s path towards its goal. After all, an agent that cannot interact or respond to the outside world and the systems that govern it will be limited in the problems it can solve. ...

In this post I provide an introduction to the MonoGame framework. I start by looking at the history of MonoGame and the XNA framework and then show how to get started with MonoGame. Finally we take a look at a default sample app. In my next post I will show how I used MonoGame to port a Microsoft XNA game from 2009 to run on .NET 8 in just a few hours. ...

Top Links Extension Manager updates in Visual Studio (Javier De la Garza) What’s new in SQL Server 2025 | Microsoft Mechanics (Bob Ward & Jeremy Chapman) Less TODO, more done: The difference between coding agent and agent mode in GitHub Copilot (Andrea Griffiths) Rockford Lhotka: Software Architecture & Strategy – Azure & DevOps Podcast Episode #352 (Jeffrey Palermo) Updates to Windows for the Digital Markets Act (Windows Insider Team) 50+ TechBash 2025 Sessions Announced (TechBash Team) ...

Did you know? The Original Name of .NET Was “Next Generation Windows Services (NGWS)“. Before Microsoft officially named it “.NET,” the platform was internally referred to as NGWS: Next Generation Windows Services. The name “.NET” was adopted in the late 1990s to emphasize the platform’s focus on web-based development and interoperability, as opposed to being tightly coupled to Windows-specific services. Welcome to dotInsights by JetBrains! This newsletter is the home for recent .NET and software development related information. ...