Visual Studio Magazine

Threats from the Shadows: Securing the CI/CD Pipeline Against Modern Attacks -- Visual Studio Magazine A deep dive into how attackers exploit overlooked weaknesses in CI/CD pipelines and software supply chains, and how .NET and DevOps teams can use automation and modern practices to detect and mitigate...

Ken Muse (@atlantabass) and Mickey Gousset (@mickey_gousset) of GitHub talk about how CI/CD pipelines are now a top attack target 🔐 and what teams can do about it.
visualstudiomagazine.com/articles/202...

Hands on with New Multi-Agent Orchestration in VS Code -- Visual Studio Magazine A proof of concept shows how multi-agent orchestration in Visual Studio Code 1.109 can turn a fragile, one-pass AI workflow into a more reliable, auditable process by breaking long tasks into smaller,...

Tried VS Code 1.109 multi-agent orchestration on a real-world task 🧪📄
Breaking a long formatting workflow into subagents + a QA pass made results more reliable, even if slower ⏱️
Audit trails > magic ✨
visualstudiomagazine.com/articles/202...

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Final Days to Save: Early Bird pricing ends Friday!

VSLive! Las Vegas (March 16-20 at Planet Hollywood) is your time for focused, practical training in .NET 9, #Azure, #Blazor, GitHub Copilot, Generative #AI, .NET MAUI, C#, modern data and more.

Save $300! Register by Friday: buff.ly/NugFInY

Why Copilot's Auto Mode for AI Models Ignores Your Actual Task -- Visual Studio Magazine Copilot's 'Auto' model picker in VS Code and Visual Studio currently routes to whatever model is most available and policy-compliant--not the one best matched to your prompt--while Microsoft/GitHub sa...

Copilot’s “Auto” mode doesn’t actually choose based on a coding task 🤖
In VS Code & Visual Studio 2026, availability & policy come first ⚙️
Task-aware selection is still a roadmap item 📍
visualstudiomagazine.com/articles/202...

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VS Code 1.109 Deemed a Multi-Agent Development Platform -- Visual Studio Magazine The January 2026 release of Visual Studio Code expands AI-assisted development with structured planning agents, parallel subagents, and unified orchestration across local and cloud environments.

VS Code 1.109 adds structured planning agents,🤖 parallel subagents, and unified session management. VS Code is now built for multi-agent development workflows 🧠
visualstudiomagazine.com/articles/202...

Beyond the Magic Word: Testing VS Code v1.109's New Workspace Priming -- Visual Studio Magazine The January 2026 update to VS Code (v1.109) transforms the editor into a multi-agent orchestration hub, allowing developers to automate complex, rule-based editorial workflows with proactive context r...

🚀 Multi-agent orchestration, parallel subagents, and /init workspace priming turn your editor into a proactive teammate. Automated complex workflows with zero friction. 🤖💻
visualstudiomagazine.com/articles/202...

Estimates Are Lies (And What to Do Instead) -- Visual Studio Live!: Training Conferences and Events for Enterprise Microsoft .NET and Azure Developers Instead of wasting hours in estimation meetings with story points that rarely prove accurate, teams can use simple throughput metrics -- counting completed items per week -- to make faster, more relia...

Estimates Are Lies (And What to Do Instead)

Benjamin Day (@benday): Stop wasting time in estimation meetings 🎯 Throughput metrics beat story points every time. Just count what you finish each week -- it's embarrassingly simple and actually accurate. 📊

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VS Code Team Member Blames User Trust Decisions in Repo-Based Attacks -- Visual Studio Magazine In a a robust Hacker News thread sparked by Jamf Threat Labs research, a VS Code team member defended the editor's Workspace Trust model as the primary safeguard against repo-based malware -- while ac...

🧑‍💻 Pushback on Jamf-linked repo attack concerns, saying Workspace Trust is "literally the protection" 🔒. The thread also hints at changes to tasks defaults + more sandboxing work. ⚠️
visualstudiomagazine.com/articles/202...

What Is AI Scheming ('When AI Turns Evil') and Why Should You Care -- Pure AI AI scheming occurs when AI systems use strategies to achieve objectives in ways that are misaligned with human intentions, including hiding true goals, exploiting loopholes, and manipulating environme...

🤖 AI scheming isn't sci-fi anymore -- it's real! ⚠️ From reward hacking to deceptive behavior, AI systems can pursue hidden goals that bypass human oversight. Understanding these risks is crucial for everyone. 🔒

pureai.com/articles/202...

Linear Regression with Pseudo-Inverse Training Using JavaScript -- Visual Studio Magazine Dr. James McCaffrey presents a complete end-to-end demonstration of linear regression with pseudo-inverse training implemented using JavaScript. Compared to other training techniques, such as stochast...

🔍 Master linear regression with pseudo-inverse training in JavaScript! No hyperparameters needed -- just pure, direct computation. Perfect for datasets under 2,000 items. 📊✨
visualstudiomagazine.com/articles/202...

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Hands On with New GitHub Agents Tab for Repo-Level Copilot Coding Agent Workflows -- Visual Studio Magazine GitHub's new Agents tab centralizes Copilot coding agent sessions in a repository, making it easier to launch tasks, track progress, and review the resulting pull requests in standard tooling such as ...

🤖 It makes it easier to run Copilot coding agent tasks per repo -- and get a PR back. I tried it on a small Node/Express app, reviewed the diffs in VS & merged. ✅
visualstudiomagazine.com/articles/202...

Hands On Comparison: Building a Dynamic Web App in VS Code and Google Antigravity with Prompts Only -- Visual Studio Magazine A hands-on test compared Visual Studio Code and Google Antigravity on generating and refining a simple dynamic Ticket Desk web application through prompts, revealing that workflow differences became m...

Built the same dynamic Ticket Desk web app 🧪 in VS Code and Google Antigravity using prompts 💻 The real differences 📄showed up after it ran -- validation, fixes and refactoring 🔧
visualstudiomagazine.com/articles/202...

Navigating Career Choices in Software Engineering -- Visual Studio Magazine Veteran Microsoft MVP Allen Conway brings over 20 years of experience designed to help developers navigate key career decisions -- from job changes to leadership vs. technical roles. Learn how to eval...

Stuck in a dev rut? 👨‍💻 Whether it's choosing between consulting vs. corporate or moving into leadership, your career needs a map. 🗺️

Microsoft MVP Allen Conway shares how to navigate the software engineering maze with intention. 🧭✨

visualstudiomagazine.com/articles/202...

Happy Data Privacy Day! 🔒

Privacy is not abstract. It is who can access what, what gets shared, and how accounts are protected. Today is a good reminder to tighten the basics and keep trust intact.

What is your go-to privacy habit?

#DataPrivacyDay #Cybersecurity

What a Difference a VS Code Fork Makes: Antigravity, Cursor and Windsurf Compared -- Visual Studio Magazine VS Code forks like Cursor, Windsurf, and Antigravity may share a common foundation, but hands-on testing shows they reflect sharply different philosophies around AI autonomy, workflow structure, and d...

Hands-on testing shows Cursor, Windsurf, and Google Antigravity diverging sharply in how they plan work, execute changes, and hand control to AI 🤖
visualstudiomagazine.com/articles/202...

Hands On: Testing Cursor, Windsurf and VS Code on Text-to-Website Generation -- Visual Studio Magazine A hands-on comparison shows how Cursor, Windsurf, and Visual Studio Code approach text-to-website generation differently once they move beyond the basics and begin redesigning and extending their own ...

🧪The real differences showed up late when each critiqued its own work & decided what to fix, add or rethink 🤖they didn’t just build differently — they thought differently.🧭

visualstudiomagazine.com/articles/202...

Last day: Extended Super Early Bird pricing ends tonight!

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Buzz About VS Code Extension for Codebase Visualization -- Visual Studio Magazine A new Visual Studio Code extension called Nogic sparked a wide-ranging Hacker News discussion, with commenters praising its graph-based approach to understanding complex codebases while also raising c...

New VS Code extension visualizes code as a graph 🕸️ Big HN buzz 💬 Devs like the idea 🧠 but raised flags on speed ⚠️ and closed source 🔒
visualstudiomagazine.com/articles/202...

Copilot Studio Extension for VS Code Goes GA -- Visual Studio Magazine Microsoft has released the Copilot Studio extension for Visual Studio Code to general availability, enabling teams to build, version, review, and deploy Copilot Studio agents using standard software d...

Copilot Studio’s VS Code extension is now GA 🚀 Build and manage agents locally 🧠 with Git workflows 🔁 and AI assist 🤖 — without leaving your editor.
visualstudiomagazine.com/articles/202...

How to Use the 'Prompt Coach' AI Agent to Create Effective Prompts for Copilot -- Visual Studio Magazine A recursive vibe journalism experiment in which Microsoft 365 Copilot's 'Prompt Coach' agent is used to wholly create an article on how to use 'Prompt Coach' agent to prompt M365 Copilot.

Writing better Copilot prompts starts with structure 🧠🤖
Prompt Coach helps refine goals, context, sources & expectations to deliver cleaner, more useful results ✍️💡
visualstudiomagazine.com/articles/202...

Microsoft Expands Quantum Development Kit with New Open-Source Tools, VS Code Integration -- Visual Studio Magazine Microsoft released new open‑source quantum development tools that deepen VS Code and Copilot integration while targeting real‑world hybrid quantum workloads in chemistry, optimization, and machine lea...

New tools land in VS Code ⚛️💻
GitHub Copilot 🤖 now helps write, test, and run hybrid quantum apps, with new libraries for chemistry 🧪 and error correction.
visualstudiomagazine.com/articles/202...

Quadratic Regression with SGD Training Using C# -- Visual Studio Magazine Dr. James McCaffrey presents a complete end-to-end demonstration of quadratic regression, implemented from scratch, with SGD training, using C#. Compared to standard linear regression, quadratic regression is better able to handle data with a non-linear structure, and data with interactions between predictor variables.

Quadratic regression is a simple upgrade when linear regression is not cutting it.

Dr. James McCaffrey walks through C# implementation trained with SGD, including squared and pairwise interaction terms, plus evaluation with accuracy and MSE.

Dive deeper: https://ow.ly/lJZO50Y1aiN

#SGD

The Tech Debt Trap (And the Rewrite Trap That Makes It Worse) -- Visual Studio Live!: Training Conferences and Events for Enterprise Microsoft .NET and Azure Developers Benjamin Day explains how technical debt quietly compounds business risk, why full rewrites often make the problem worse, and how incremental testing-focused improvements provide a safer path forward.

The Tech Debt Trap (And the Rewrite Trap That Makes It Worse) -- Visual Studio Live!

Benjamin Day 🧠 explains how technical debt 🧱 slows teams & why big rewrites 🔄 often fail. The fix 🛠️: incremental improvements with tests of code that changes ⏳.

vslive.com/blogs/news-a...

Quadratic Regression with SGD Training Using C# -- Visual Studio Magazine Dr. James McCaffrey presents a complete end-to-end demonstration of quadratic regression, implemented from scratch, with SGD training, using C#. Compared to standard linear regression, quadratic regre...

Dr. James McCaffrey 🧠 walks through quadratic regression 📈, adding squared and interaction terms ➕🔢 to linear models. He shows a from-scratch C# implementation 💻 trained with SGD ⚙️ on synthetic data 🤖
visualstudiomagazine.com/articles/202...