Sr. Content Developer at Microsoft, working remotely in PA, TechBash conference organizer, former Microsoft MVP, Husband, Dad and Geek.
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Daily Reading List – May 12, 2026 (#782)

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I try say “yes” to customer presentation requests whenever possible. It gives me an excuse to try out new messaging, gather new context from real users, and build demo systems. I might have overdone it this week as I’m doing some new types of talks with little notice. What could go wrong?

[blog] The Android Show: I/O Edition 2026. So many cool updates today! From more proactive AI to new Googlebook laptops, we shipped some fun stuff.

[article] The Best Leaders Embrace the Role of Supporting Character. Main-character energy doesn’t help your team. Serve others, be curious, and yes, still inspire and steer the team the right way.

[article] Symptoms of Bad Software Design. Call it tech debt, or maybe just the wrong decisions. Either way, you want to tackle these areas if you hope to scale or reduce operational cost.

[blog] Google Antigravity beats Claude at coding—but only if you stop acting like a programmer. It’s a great tool. They all have merit. But you’ll want to change your workflow, not cram your existing one into these tools.

[article] How do Next Edit Suggestions in AI-integrated IDEs introduce new security risks? We’ve moved beyond tab completion, but this guidance still holds when you’re generating whole swaths of code at once.

[blog] Debugging Event-Driven Systems: 5 Problems Teams Create. Good pattern, but it’s not your whole architecture, as Derek explains here.

[article] How corporate politics actually work. Your situation could be different, but I’d imagine we all have something to take away from the many lessons shared here.

[blog] MCP Configuration for Google Workspace with Gemini CLI. Useful example with instructions I haven’t seen elsewhere. William also uses this newsletter as an example, so how can I not read the post?

[article] Fighting Tool Sprawl: The Case for AI Tool Registries. The solutions aren’t super mature at the moment, but I buy that shared tool registries are important.

[blog] Top 15 CI/CD Metrics: What to Track & Why They Matter. I can’t imagine that too many people are tracking ALL of these, but it’s a good list to pick from.

[article] What happens when engineering teams reorganize around AI agents. This article offers up quick bursts of advice from different teams adopting AI agents.

[blog] If AI Writes Your Code, Why Use Python? Would you? Or something else entirely suited to the specific use case?

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v1.25.1322.0

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v1.25.1322.0

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v1.24.11321.0

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v1.24.11321.0

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.NET 9.0.16 / 9.0.117

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You can build .NET 9.0 from the repository by cloning the release tag v9.0.117 and following the build instructions in the main README.md.

Alternatively, you can build from the sources attached to this release directly.
More information on this process can be found in the dotnet/dotnet repository.

Attached are PGP signatures for the GitHub generated tarball and zipball. You can find the public key at https://dot.net/release-key-2023

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.NET 8.0.27 / 8.0.127

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You can build .NET 8.0 from the repository by cloning the release tag v8.0.127 and following the build instructions in the main README.md.

Alternatively, you can build from the sources attached to this release directly.
More information on this process can be found in the dotnet/dotnet repository.

Attached are PGP signatures for the GitHub generated tarball and zipball. You can find the public key at https://dot.net/release-key-2023

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Windows App SDK 1.8.8 (1.8.260508005)

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WinAppSDK 1.8.8 is the latest stable servicing release for 1.8, focused on reliability and developer-experience fixes across XAML, package management, Windows AI, and the build-time NuGet tooling.

Bug fixes:

Bug Fix Runtime Compatibility Change
Fixed an issue where windowed popup content opened in a XAML Island did not respect OverrideScale, causing content to appear oversized and clipped (microsoft/microsoft-ui-xaml#11000). Popup_WindowedPopupOverrideScale
Fixed an ACCESS_VIOLATION crash in RenderTargetBitmap.RenderAsync that occurred when the target element left the visual tree (for example, a popup closing) before the capture completed. RTB_CancelRenderOnTreeLeave
Fixed a potential crash in package management when a package was uninstalled prior to being processed. PackageManager_FixCrash
Fixed an issue where GetReadyState could return incorrect error codes when required Windows AI packages were not yet deployed. The API now correctly reports NotReady, improving diagnostic clarity and reducing false-positive failure signals in telemetry. ModelInitialization_GetReadyStateAvailabilityGuard
Improved internal performance diagnostics for LanguageModel.GenerateResponseAsync to better identify sources of latency before the first token is returned. LanguageModelInsights_GetPartialResultLatency
Fixed a fail-fast crash caused by re-entrant dispatch during cross-apartment COM release operations in UIAffinityReleaseQueue::DoCleanup. UIAffinityReleaseQueue_PauseDispatchDuringCleanup
Fixed an issue where Microsoft.Windows.Workloads.dll failed to load on Windows builds prior to 22000 due to static imports of Dynamic Dependencies APIs unavailable on those OS versions. The functions are now resolved dynamically; failures on unsupported OS versions surface as a normal HRESULT instead of a loader error dialog. PackageDependency_ResolveDynamically
Fixed an issue where XAML compiler errors were silently lost when using dotnet build, showing only MSB3073: exited with code 1 instead of the actual error messages (microsoft/microsoft-ui-xaml#9813). N/A (build-time tooling change)
Fixed a design issue in the WinAppSDK NuGet .targets files where %(PreprocessorDefinitions) references inside MSBuild <Target> blocks triggered task batching, causing the same auto-initializer source file to be added to ClCompile multiple times and producing duplicate .obj outputs (MSB8027 / LNK4042 warnings). Definitions are now set via <ItemDefinitionGroup>. An opt-out property (WindowsAppSDK_Arm64EcCompilerWorkaround) is included for ARM64EC+LTCG builds (microsoft/WindowsAppSDK#5395). N/A (build .targets change)

To see everything that's new and changed, see the full Windows App SDK 1.8.8 release notes.

Try it out

Getting started

To get started using Windows App SDK to develop Windows apps, check out the following documentation:


This discussion was created from the release Windows App SDK 1.8.8 (1.8.260508005).
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