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Ryan welcomes McLaren Stanley, Senior Principal Engineer for Amazon Stores, to discuss what it actually takes to make teams AI native, why agentic engineering is shifting code bottlenecks downstream to testing and deployment, and why robust validation is essential to build trust and enable “fearless commits.”
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Sr. Content Developer at Microsoft, working remotely in PA, TechBash conference organizer, former Microsoft MVP, Husband, Dad and Geek.
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Pennsylvania, USA
The PostgreSQL extension for Visual Studio Code now includes a Get Started landing page that helps you discover key features, access helpful resources, and become productive faster after connecting to a server.
The image below shows the Get Started landing page, highlighting quick-action cards, learning resources, and featured updates available after you connect to a server.
Quick Actions
Each entry point applies to the database you have selected, so whatever you click picks up from the connection you just made.
Explore additional resources to navigate to PostgreSQL documentation
View at your Convenience
The landing page is shown only after a new server connection is added. Users who do not wish to see this page can disable it by clearing the "Show this page after adding a new connection" option at the bottom of the landing page.
Open the landing page anytime: Right-click any server in the connections tree and choose Get Started.
Try it out
Head over to PostgreSQL for Visual Studio Code and spin up a new server connection, or right-click a server you already have and choose Get Started.
Your feedback helps us improve. If you have ideas, suggestions, or resources you’d like to see included, reach out to AskAzurePostgreSQL@microsoft.com and help shape the experience for the PostgreSQL community.
Pennsylvania, USA
Back-to-school planning doesn’t stop after the first day of classes. By the second week, your to-do list is already packed with an early dismissal, a practice change, and a form someone forgot to mention until bedtime.
The hard part usually isn’t finding the information – it's remembering to check it again at the right time. Microsoft Copilot can help with this! You can use Copilot Chat to work with calendars you already have, or Copilot Tasks to hand off a one-time or recurring job.
Let’s explore some ways it can streamline this upcoming school year.
NOTE: This article focuses on Microsoft Copilot signed in with a personal Microsoft account. Copilot Tasks is currently in preview, so availability, features, and usage limits may change.
Keep school details in one chat
In Copilot Chat, attach your school handbook, calendar, or supplies list, and when questions come up, you can return to that chat instead of searching through your email again. You can ask when the next half-day is, check a school policy, or find a sports sign-up deadline.
Try this prompt
I’m attaching our school handbook and calendar. Use these files to answer my questions about schedules, policies, and deadlines. If the answer isn’t in the files, tell me.
Schedule reminders for important tasks
Copilot Tasks is useful when the job needs to happen later, or more than once. Describe what you want in everyday language, choose when it should run, and review the result when it’s finished. Tasks can run immediately, later, or on a recurring schedule. You can pause, edit, stop, or delete them from the Tasks view anytime.
For example, you could ask for a checklist for the week every Sunday evening, set a reminder before the next early release day, or create a weekly summary of upcoming school dates. If a task needs access to email, a calendar, or cloud storage, you can choose which connected service to authorize. Copilot will ask for approval before taking sensitive actions, such as sending a message, submitting personal information, or completing a purchase.
Try this prompt
Every Sunday at 6 PM, prepare a checklist for the school week ahead using the dates I’ve shared. Include anything due, schedule changes, and items we need to bring. If I’ve connected an email account, email the checklist to me.
Use class materials for a quick study check
A syllabus and set of class notes can also give Copilot enough context to help your children review for exams. Ask for a short quiz, an explanation of a difficult topic, or a list of upcoming assignments.
This works best as a study aid rather than a replacement for homework: Students should still check source material and do their own work.
Try this prompt
Using this syllabus and these notes, make a five-question practice quiz on this week’s biology unit. After I answer, explain anything I missed and show me where it appears in the notes.
Hand off your research
Choosing an after-school program or a laptop that meets the school’s requirements can take hours and lots of browser tabs. A one-time Copilot Task can collect the options and organize them against the criteria you provide, making the entire process faster and simpler. Always review the original sources before you register, buy, or share personal information.
Try this prompt
Find three after-school programs near me for elementary-age students. Compare cost, days and hours, pickup time, registration deadline, and transportation options. Include the source for each detail and flag anything you couldn’t confirm.
Tips for effectively using Copilot
No matter how you leverage Copilot this school season, keep these tips in mind:
- Use a personal account: Don’t use an employer-managed account to share family and school details.
- Keep what you share limited to the task: A school calendar is one thing; a team roster containing other families’ names, phone numbers, and children’s details is another. Don’t upload or share someone else’s personal information unless you have permission.
- Watch your first task as it runs: Check the sites it visits, review the output, and stop the task if it starts doing something you didn’t expect. Once you’re comfortable with the result, you can decide whether it makes sense to run again.
- Start small: Pick one reminder you already recreate by hand. The Sunday school-week checklist is a good place to start – run it once, check what Copilot produces, and adjust the instructions before you schedule it. This lets you see what the task does before it becomes part of the routine. If the calendar changes, update the task or turn it off.
Happy planning!
Learn about the Microsoft 365 Insider program and sign up for the Microsoft 365 Insider newsletter to get the latest information about Insider features in your inbox once a month!
Pennsylvania, USA
Excel is where people turn data into decisions. But the data you need often lives in other systems, like your engineering backlog, ticketing system, or CRM. Getting that data into Excel usually means exporting files, copying and pasting, or working from CSVs that may already be out of date. Getting the data into Excel is only part of the value. Many source systems are built to store and update records, not analyze them. With Copilot in Excel, you can bring connected data into your workbook to understand, model, and act on it. New Copilot connectors are now generally available in Excel, bringing your organization’s connected content - work items, tickets, database rows, CRM records, and docs - straight into the grid, allowing you to put Excel’s full analytical engine to work on it.
Copilot connectors help remove that extra work. In May, we added previously brought federated Copilot connectors to Excel, which allow users to pull real-time data from providers like LSEG and Moody’s into the grid at query time. Now, synced Copilot connectors index your organization’s own connected content into the Microsoft Graph, allowing Copilot to use that information across Microsoft 365, including right inside Excel.
What synced Copilot connectors bring to Excel
- Access to 70+ prebuilt connectors. Copilot can ground on data from a variety of tools, including trackers like Jira, databases like Azure SQL, and CRM systems like Salesforce. If your organization uses a system that is not in the connector catalogue, you can also use a custom connector to bring in line-of-business data.
- Control over the data source. In Excel, you can open the sources menu and choose the connector you want to use, so Copilot draws from exactly the data you intend.
- A smoother path from records to analysis. Once the data is available in Excel, you can ask Copilot to help analyze and visualize it— all with natural language prompts.
- Permission-aware answers. Copilot honors source permissions, so users only see content they are authorized to access.
See it in action: turn a scattered backlog into an accessibility audit
Meet Emma, an Accessibility Program Manager at Globex running a company-wide WCAG audit. Her accessibility bugs are scattered across Azure DevOps projects owned by a multitude of different product teams.
With the Azure DevOps sync connector, work items from all of those projects are indexed into Microsoft 365. That means Emma can bring the information together and analyze them in Excel with a simple prompt in natural language:
“From our Azure DevOps data, list all open bugs tagged ‘accessibility’ across all projects, with ID, title, project, severity, assignee, and created date, in a table.”
From there, Emma can keep working in natural language to turn the raw list into a review-ready analysis. She can ask Copilot to add an Age column, apply data bars, sort the oldest bugs to the top, and create a dashboard on a separate sheet. That dashboard can include a PivotTable and PivotChart by project and severity, with a filterable table she can use during team reviews.
Emma’s team reviews happen weekly. Thankfully, Emma doesn’t have to rebuild everything from scratch for the next review. She can ask Copilot to pull the latest Azure DevOps data, show which bugs closed since last review, and update the dashboard around what is still open. No exports, no project-hopping, and no manual rebuilding!
Availability
Copilot synced connectors are generally available starting today in Excel for Web, Windows, and Mac for commercial customers with a Microsoft 365 Copilot license. MCP servers and agentic solutions are available through a Bring Your Own License (BYOL) model, with customers licensing directly from partner services. To connect Excel to your data sources, see the links below.
Learn more
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The era of the single best model is over
Microsoft Foundry is no longer just a shelf of foundation models. It is becoming an enterprise model portfolio: frontier models for complex reasoning, cost-optimized models for scale, specialized models for documents and media, and first-party Microsoft AI models for text, image, voice, and speech. That shift changes the operating question for customers and partners.
The question is not simply, “Which model is best?” It is, “Which model is best for this workload, risk profile, latency target, context size, modality, and budget?” In practice, the winning architecture is increasingly a model-routing architecture, where different workloads are routed to different models based on business value and operational constraints.
GPT-5.6: the premium Microsoft Foundry reasoning lane
GPT-5.6 (available in Microsoft Foundry), including gpt-5.6-sol, gpt-5.6-terra, and gpt-5.6-luna, is the model family many enterprises will evaluate first for their most demanding reasoning and agentic workloads. Microsoft positions the family for advanced reasoning, coding, long-context understanding, research, cybersecurity analysis, and sophisticated enterprise workflows. The value is not only raw capability, but the broader Foundry operating model: Azure billing, Microsoft support, enterprise controls, familiar APIs, and integration with the Foundry development experience.
GPT-5.6 is a strong starting point for high-value applications such as codebase analysis, contract and compliance review, complex agent planning, and long-document synthesis. The tradeoff is that premium frontier models typically require more thoughtful quota, latency, and cost planning than smaller or more specialized options.
Kimi: what it is and why it matters
Kimi is a family of models from Moonshot AI that is now available in Microsoft Foundry for coding, reasoning, and agentic software engineering scenarios. The most important model for this blog is Kimi-K2.7-Code, which Microsoft describes as a coding-focused agentic model built on Kimi-K2.6. In plain language, Kimi is not just trying to answer one prompt well. It is designed for work where an AI system needs to reason, use tools, follow instructions across a long context, and keep making progress across multiple engineering steps.
That makes Kimi relevant for long-horizon coding: refactoring across a codebase, implementing a feature across multiple files, debugging a complex issue, generating tests, or helping an agent plan and execute a workflow. Microsoft’s Kimi K2.7 Code materials call out improvements in end-to-end task completion, multi-step execution, and long-context coding. Moonshot also reports that K2.7 Code reduces thinking-token usage by about 30 percent compared with K2.6, which is why Kimi is often discussed as a price-performance option rather than only a quality benchmark.
For partners and customers, the practical positioning is simple: evaluate Kimi when the workload is coding-heavy, agentic, high-volume, or cost-sensitive. It may not replace GPT-5.6 or Claude for every high-stakes enterprise workflow, but it is exactly the kind of model that can lower cost or increase throughput when the task is narrower, measurable, and repeatable. Kimi is especially worth testing for developer copilots, DevOps automation, internal engineering agents, software lifecycle workflows, and partner demos where strong coding performance and cost discipline both matter.
Claude and DeepSeek: strong alternatives for agents and scale
Claude remains a trusted enterprise comparator for agentic workflows, coding, financial analysis, security operations, and long-running knowledge work. In Foundry, Claude models are available through Foundry and are often the model to benchmark next to GPT-5.6 when quality, safety posture, and enterprise readiness matter more than lowest unit cost.
DeepSeek is best framed as a reasoning-at-scale option. DeepSeek-V4-Pro and related models are designed for math, scientific reasoning, coding analysis, multilingual reasoning, and large-context processing. For teams running heavy evaluation pipelines or high-throughput reasoning workloads, DeepSeek should be part of the bake-off, especially when operational scale is as important as answer quality.
Microsoft MAI: the first-party multimodal stack
The other important addition is Microsoft AI’s MAI model family. MAI expands Foundry beyond general-purpose chat into a first-party multimodal stack across reasoning, image generation and editing, voice generation, and transcription. Microsoft has announced MAI-Thinking-1 for text and reasoning, MAI-Image-2.5 and MAI-Image-2.5 Flash for image generation and image-to-image editing, MAI-Voice-2 for multilingual text-to-speech, and MAI-Transcribe-1.5 for speech-to-text.
For enterprise builders, MAI matters because many AI applications are not just chatbots. A customer-facing experience may need reasoning, branded visuals, localized voice, and high-accuracy transcription in one workflow. MAI should sit in the routing matrix as the first place to look for Microsoft-first multimodal workloads, especially when the app needs tight alignment with Microsoft product experiences, Foundry deployment, and enterprise-grade governance.
Specialized models still matter
The broader Foundry catalog also includes specialized options such as Mistral for OCR and document intelligence, Llama for open-model and portability-sensitive scenarios, Grok for additional reasoning and coding evaluations, and FLUX for image generation. These models matter because not every workload should be forced through a frontier reasoning model. A cheaper specialized model can often produce a better business outcome when the task is narrow and measurable.
Recommended routing matrix
|
Workload |
First model to test |
Why |
|
Most demanding enterprise reasoning and agents |
GPT-5.6 |
Premium Foundry reasoning lane, long context, enterprise controls |
|
Enterprise coding and trusted agents |
Claude Sonnet 5 |
Strong quality and enterprise fit for coding and agent workflows |
|
Cost-sensitive coding agents |
Kimi-K2.7-Code |
Long-horizon coding, multi-step execution, and price-performance |
|
High-throughput reasoning |
DeepSeek V4-class |
Reasoning-heavy workloads and large-scale evaluation pipelines |
|
Microsoft-first multimodal apps |
MAI models |
Reasoning, image, voice, and transcription across a first-party Microsoft stack |
|
OCR and document extraction |
Mistral OCR / Document AI |
Purpose-built document intelligence capabilities |
|
Open-model or portability-sensitive workloads |
Llama / Kimi |
Flexible evaluation path and portability options |
Bottom line
For most enterprises, the right answer is not model standardization. It is model routing. Benchmark real prompts, measure quality, latency, cost, safety behavior, tool-call accuracy, context handling, and operational fit, then route by task.
GPT-5.6 may become the premium default for difficult reasoning; Claude may serve as a trusted enterprise comparator; Kimi may become the coding-agent value play; DeepSeek may power high-volume reasoning; MAI may become the Microsoft-first multimodal layer; and specialized models will continue to handle OCR, images, extraction, and targeted workflows. Foundry’s model wave is not just about more models. It is about giving builders enough model diversity to optimize for quality, cost, throughput, modality, and governance at the same time.
Get Started
Ready to build your routing architecture?
Start with the Foundry Model Catalog to compare models side-by-side, or try our Deploy Microsoft Foundry Models in the Foundry portal - Microsoft Foundry | Microsoft Learn quickstart guide to deploy your first model in minutes.
Additional Resources
- Microsoft Learn: Foundry Models sold by Azure
- Microsoft Learn: Claude models in Microsoft Foundry
- Microsoft Tech Community: Introducing Kimi K2.7 Code in Microsoft Foundry
- Microsoft Foundry Model Catalog: Kimi-K2.7-Code
- Microsoft Learn: DeepSeek reasoning model tutorial
- Microsoft Tech Community: New MAI models in Microsoft Foundry
- Microsoft Learn: Deploy and use MAI image models in Microsoft Foundry
- Microsoft AI: Building a hill-climbing machine, launching seven new MAI models
- Microsoft Foundry Model Catalog
Pennsylvania, USA
What happens when passionate community leaders, technical experts, and innovators from around the world come together to solve problems, explore new ideas, and build something meaningful?
The answer is the Microsoft Global Hackathon 2026.
Last year, MVPs and RDs brought that same spirit of innovation to the event, collaborating across communities and technologies to turn bold ideas into meaningful solutions. Revisit the highlights in MVP & RD Impact at the 2025 Microsoft Global Hackathon.
This September, MVPs and RDs will once again join Microsoft employees from across the globe for a week of creativity, experimentation, collaboration, and learning. Beginning the week of September 14, Microsoft Global Hackathon 2026 will bring together people with diverse experiences, skills, and perspectives to turn ideas into reality.
A Community Built on Curiosity and Impact
MVPs and RDs are known for sharing knowledge, helping others grow, and creating opportunities within their communities. Through conference talks, open-source contributions, technical content, user groups, mentoring, and peer support, they consistently demonstrate the power of community-driven impact.
That same spirit comes to life during the Microsoft Global Hackathon. Each year, participants bring their unique experiences, passions, and perspectives to projects that explore new technologies, address real-world challenges, and inspire new ways of thinking.
Where Great Ideas Meet Great People
One of the most exciting aspects of the Hackathon is the opportunity to connect with people you might never otherwise meet.
During the event, MVPs and RDs can:
- Create and lead their own projects
- Join existing project teams
- Collaborate with Microsoft employees and Product Groups
- Share technical expertise and community insights
- Explore emerging technologies and new ideas
- Build relationships with innovators around the world
From AI-powered solutions and developer tools to accessibility initiatives and community-focused projects, Hackathon teams bring together a remarkable variety of talents and perspectives.
Bringing Community Experience to the Table
MVPs and RDs bring a valuable connection to the broader technology ecosystem. Every day, they engage with developers, architects, IT professionals, security specialists, data practitioners, students, business leaders, and technology enthusiasts around the world. Through these interactions, they gain firsthand insight into real-world challenges, emerging trends, and the needs of diverse communities.
Those experiences help shape Hackathon projects in meaningful ways, whether by identifying customer pain points, validating ideas, sharing practical knowledge, or helping teams consider new perspectives.
The result is a richer, more inclusive environment where ideas can be challenged, refined, and strengthened.
More Than a Hackathon
For many participants, the greatest outcome is not just the project itself. It's the relationships built, the lessons learned, the unexpected conversations, and the opportunity to work alongside people from different backgrounds who share a passion for technology and continuous learning.
The Microsoft Global Hackathon creates space for curiosity, experimentation, and collaboration at a global scale. It encourages participants to step outside their comfort zones, explore new possibilities, and work together to create something remarkable.
And that mindset feels right at home within the MVP and RD communities.
Looking Ahead to Hackathon 2026
As preparations continue for Microsoft Global Hackathon 2026, we're excited to see the ideas, projects, and connections that emerge from this year's event. Whether they're launching a new concept, contributing specialized knowledge to an existing project, mentoring teammates, or helping transform an idea into reality, MVPs and RDs continue to demonstrate the incredible impact that passionate technology communities can have.
We look forward to celebrating the ideas, achievements, and innovations from this year’s Hackathon and sharing how MVPs and RDs are helping shape the future through collaboration, creativity, and community.
Join the Conversation
Have you participated in a Hackathon before? What idea would you love to bring to life? We'd love to hear from you in the comments.
Want to Learn More About the MVP Program?
To find an MVP and learn more about the MVP Program visit the MVP Communities website and follow our updates on LinkedIn or #mvpbuzz.
Pennsylvania, USA
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