Building useful coding agents takes more than generating code. Agents need to analyze an existing codebase, work across files and dependencies, use tools reliably, and keep making progress as a task evolves.

Muse Spark Open, a coding-optimized open-weight model from Meta, is available today in Microsoft Foundry Models through Hugging Face collection. Trained specifically for agentic coding workflows, Muse Spark Open combines a focus on first-attempt accuracy with reliable tool calling and deep codebase understanding, giving developers another option for building agents around the repositories they work in every day.

Built for the way developers work

Real development work spans debugging sessions, multi-file refactors, and changes that reach across an entire project. Muse Spark Open is trained on these workflows, with capabilities across code generation, debugging, and codebase understanding.

A 1M-token context window allows developers to bring extensive project context into a task, including legacy code, complex dependencies, and large collections of files. That broader context helps the model connect a local change to the surrounding codebase and reduces the need to split work into disconnected pieces. For teams building coding agents, this supports workflows such as investigating a bug across services, understanding an unfamiliar repository, or coordinating changes across multiple components. Learn more about this model.

Designed to sustain progress across complex tasks

Muse Spark Open is built to plan, act, observe results, and adjust its approach over extended workflows. Its training encompasses long-running tasks that require multiple steps, tools, and interactions across websites. With an appropriate agentic harness, Muse Spark Open can spawn and coordinate subagents for work that can be divided into separate tasks. It also supports web browsing, including multimodal browsing, and computer use across desktop, mobile, and browser environments. Separate commentary lets Muse Spark Open outputs a planned action before taking action, giving developers visibility into what the agent is doing and why as work progresses.

Understand more of the context behind the code

Software development draws on more than source files. Requirements arrive in documents, interfaces appear in screenshots, and issues may be captured in recordings. Muse Spark Open combines image and document understanding with audio and audio-video perception. As a reasoning model, it can work across what it sees, hears, and reads, creating opportunities for agents to connect these inputs with the code and tasks they support.

Open weights, more developer choice

Muse Spark Open is shared under the permissive Muse Model License with narrow commercial terms. Its open weights give developers flexibility to pursue cloud and on-premises deployments, as well as fine-tuning for specialized needs, subject to the license.

Availability through Hugging Face in Microsoft Foundry brings that choice into Foundry Models. Hugging Face models use a managed compute deployment path with dedicated GPU-backed inference endpoints, helping teams move from model discovery to integration with their applications.

Get started in Microsoft Foundry

Explore Muse Spark Open through the Hugging Face collection in Microsoft Foundry today and evaluate it against your own coding workflows. Start with the repositories, debugging tasks, and multi-file changes that matter to your team, then assess how the model performs within your agent’s tools and harness. Try it today Model Catalog | Microsoft Foundry.

 

 

 

Join our monthly calls to learn more about driving user enablement of Microsoft 365 services. All are welcome. Our next call is October 27, 2026, where we'll dive into Brand kits and Skills in Copilot in PowerPoint.

Please note that our community calls are in the Teams webinar format, so you must register to receive the link to join. The join link will be sent to you in email with your webinar registration confirmation. The calls start at 5 minutes past the hour for both sessions (at 8:05 AM and 5:05 PM PT) and end at the top of the hour (9:00 AM and 6:00 PM PT, respectively).

• https://aka.ms/M365ChampionCallAM
• https://aka.ms/M365ChampionCallPM

The on-demand recording will be available on our Driving Adoption > Events pages, as well as on our Microsoft Community Learning YouTube channel. While our calls are open to everyone, you must be a member of the Microsoft 365 Champion Program in order to access the presentation materials - the access link is in the initial welcome email and the monthly newsletter emails sent the week before the community calls.

If you have not yet joined our Champion community, sign up here to get access to the monthly newsletters, calendar invites, and program assets (e.g., the presentations).

Is there a topic you want us to bring? Share your feedback here: https://aka.ms/Microsoft365ChampionCallFeedback.

We're introducing an updated Photos experience on Windows 11 that makes it easier to browse, organize, and find photos and videos across a user's PC and OneDrive. The experience will begin rolling out to Windows Insiders on Windows 11 today and expand to all Windows 11 users later this year. As the rollout progresses, we want you to understand what's changing for managed devices and how existing management policies apply.

What's changing

The updated Photos experience on Windows 11 provides a streamlined experience for organizing and finding photos across local and cloud libraries.

Users will continue to see a single Photos entry in Start, with a refreshed Photos experience for browsing and organizing their library. Photos that users store locally on a PC remain supported. Signing in to OneDrive isn't required to use Photos with local content.

What's changing?

• Individual images from File Explorer or elsewhere in Windows now open in the updated native Photo Viewer, the default for opening image files.
• An updated editing experience now includes a fully native photo editor and a refreshed user experience with tools organized around photo-editing workflows.

For organizations that use OneDrive, users can sign in with a work or school account to access OneDrive photos alongside local content.

What this means for managed devices

The updated Photos experience is rolling out to both consumer and commercial Windows 11 devices. In managed environments, deployment respects existing controls for app installation, updates, and OneDrive access.

App installation and updates

If your organization restricts the Microsoft Photos app, the following management controls are available:

• If the DisableStoreApps policy disables or removes Store-originated apps, affected devices won't install this update.
• If you previously blocked the Microsoft Photos package through AppLocker packaged-app rules, add the updated app package, Microsoft.OneDrive.Photos, to your AppLocker rules.

OneDrive restrictions

If you restrict OneDrive sign-in or synchronization in your organization, continue using the following existing OneDrive policies:

• DisablePersonalSync prevents users from signing in to personal OneDrive accounts.
• DisableNucleusSync prevents users from using any OneDrive accounts in Photos.

These restrictions apply to OneDrive functionality within Photos rather than preventing use of the app.

No new or immediate action required by IT administrators

For most organizations, no new configuration is expected specifically for the updated Photos experience.

We encourage you to review your existing Windows app-management and OneDrive policies. Confirm that they reflect your organization's intended configuration, including any rules that intentionally block or remove Microsoft Photos.

We'll continue to share additional deployment and management guidance as the updated Photos experience becomes more broadly available.

 

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Continue the conversation. Find best practices. Join the Windows Tech Community.

For updates on new releases, tools, and resources, bookmark the Windows IT Pro Blog and follow @WindowsUpdate on X. For the latest on how Windows is evolving for organizations and the people who support them, follow Windows at Work on LinkedIn.

Comment

Hello, iOS Dev Weekly readers 👋 It’s me Konsta.

I keep being surprised by how quickly AI is changing the way we work. This week, Anthropic shared why it replaced Git in its monorepo with Scion: source control was struggling to keep up with all the code being produced. They acknowledge earlier work like Google’s Piper, but seeing Git become the bottleneck still made me pause. I can understand familiar tools becoming less suited to the way a team now works. At the same time, duttish’s comment on Hacker News raises a fair question: how does review keep up with that pace when they still regularly find problems in Claude’s output?

On the mobile side, more stories about teams moving back to native have been catching my eye. Shopify’s move back to native caught my attention last month, and now I’ve come across Coinbase and ResortPass. A few examples don’t necessarily make a trend, but I’m interested to see where this goes.

There’s something else I can’t stop thinking about. Everyone seems excited to write new skills for agents, and the pile of AGENTS.md files, instructions, and documentation keeps growing. It brings to mind Uncle Bob’s warning that comments are future lies. I think these instructions can become future lies too. Each project’s codebase keeps evolving, and what made sense when we wrote a skill might no longer hold a few months later. So how do we get to a point where those instructions stay up to date automatically, with agents spotting what needs to change and proposing updates? Some of that context lives in the code, but some lives in conversations and meetings, where teams discuss where a project is heading and what problems they expect to face. My guess is that an agent would need to be able to listen to those discussions too, to understand when our intentions have changed. I haven’t figured out what that would look like yet, but the question keeps coming back to me.

Enjoy this week’s issue!

– Konstantinos

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News

Meet Apple HomeView, a new way to enjoy entertainment and manage the home

Apple released HomeView, and not everyone is convinced?. For developers, Apple’s updated design guidance is worth a look, Widgets now covers HomeView, and Live Activities includes advice for limited-width layouts.

Personally, I suspect Apple will invest heavily in making Siri stand out over the next few years, with devices like this becoming more ways to interact with it throughout the day. I am looking forward to seeing how that develops. BUT the million-dollar question for those of us in Europe is: when will we get the full Siri experience?

And if you’re reading this aloud, I hope I haven’t just activated Siri on your iPhone. 😅

Code

Swift Actor Reentrancy: Stop Duplicate Network Requests

Actor reentrancy means that while an actor method is suspended at an await, other work can run on that actor and change its state before the method resumes. My old coworker Stavros, a staff iOS developer, recently told me that most developers he spoke to in his latest interviews weren’t aware of this problem. Give Mohit Agrawal’s article a read to understand how it happens, how it can lead to duplicate network requests, and how to prevent them.

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Exploring _UILiquidLensView

Livsy Code explores _UILiquidLensView, the private UIKit view behind an interactive glass lens, looking at its resting and lifted states and how Telegram uses it. The sample menu makes those interactions easier to understand, and it’s worth a look for that alone. As the article makes clear, this is an experiment: private APIs don’t belong in production App Store code.

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How I Architect SwiftUI Apps for Swift Concurrency – So the Compiler Stays Quiet

I suspect plenty of teams have reached the point where adding a single await feels like an invitation to a bunch of Sendable and actor-isolation diagnostics. It can be frustrating, especially in an existing codebase, but I’d much rather have the compiler catch a threading issue than discover it at runtime.

Karin Prater shares how she structures her SwiftUI apps to keep the compiler quiet. I recommend spending some time with her earlier articles and videos too. She has a lot of good material that helps these ideas fit together.

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enumerated() Gives You an Offset, Not an Index. On a Slice Those Are Different Numbers.

Using the offset from enumerated() as an index feels like a future bug waiting for a small refactor: it works with an Array, then switching to an ArraySlice can expose the assumption. It reminds me of Juan Marin’s comment in issue 767, calling UIScreen.main.bounds “a bug waiting for a device” before discussing the iPhone Duo. It’s easy to rely on assumptions that hold until something changes. This article explains the difference and shows when to use the element directly, iterate over .indices, or pair indices and elements with zip.

Tools

Blueprint

This is the kind of tool I can imagine adding to a team’s CI/CD pipeline and having people notice straight away. Blueprint, by Mustafa Natur, turns your app icon into a blueprint-style version, with colours and badges and custom labels(thanks for that) that give testing builds and release candidates their own character. It makes them easier to tell apart and adds a little fun to the work.

It reminds me of the fastlane badge plugin, which adds a badge or overlay to your icon. What appeals to me here is the straightforward command-line workflow: install it, point it at an Icon Composer file or an app icon set, and generate a variant for your build configuration.

Article

AI-Friendly Frameworks: As Abstraction Moves Up, How Can Verification Keep Pace?

How does an agent know that the SwiftUI screen it just built actually works as intended? That’s the question that stayed with me after reading Fatbobman’s article. He explores how frameworks can give agents useful feedback, with SwiftFairy and InnoDI as examples. I’d much rather give an agent a way to check its work than keep asking it, “Are you sure?”

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Pragmatic Testing for Agents

This connects nicely with the question of quality in my introduction. An agent can write plenty of passing tests, but which bugs would they actually catch? Serg Dort shares how he trimmed his Swift app’s test suite by focusing on behaviour rather than tests that repeat the implementation. What caught my attention was that the agent also deleted a test that mattered. Checking coverage exposed the gap, and he shows how he repaired it. There’s a reusable skill included, but the reasoning behind it is the part I would spend time with.

And finally...

You can now say ‘hello’, Apple-style.

Hello Windows Insiders, Today, we’re releasing new Windows 11 Insider Preview builds to the Beta, Experimental, and Release Preview channels. New builds this week Select your channel below to view its release notes:

• Beta: Build 26220.9739
• Experimental: Build 26340.9750

For those on other specific Windows build versions, here are today’s new builds and release notes:

• Beta (26H1): Build 28020.3262
• Experimental (26H1): Build 28120.3272
• Experimental (Future Platforms): We do not have an Experimental (Future Platforms) build today

We also have Release Preview for Windows 11, version 26H1 and Windows 11, version 25H2/26H2 going out today:

• Release Preview (25H2/26H2): Build 26200.9807/Build 26300.9807
• Release Preview (26H1): Build 28000.3351

NVIDIA RTX Spark launch Today we also see the launch of the new range of Windows 11 devices powered by the NVIDIA RTX Spark chip. There's never been a better time to join the Windows Insider Program, and we look forward to welcoming a new group of Insiders and devices into the program to provide feedback and continue help shape the future of Windows.

Notable new features:

[Gaming]

Release channel: Beta, Experimental

• We're introducing a refreshed Gaming Task View experience in XBOX mode, featuring a new navigation bar that provides quick access to Exit to Desktop and Power Options. This update makes key system actions easier to access while gaming.

[caption id="attachment_179233" align="aligncenter" width="1920"] Gaming Task View showing the new navigation bar with Exit to Desktop and Power options.[/caption]

[Windows Hello]

Release channel: Experimental

• Windows Hello facial recognition can temporarily brighten your screen to help you sign in when you're in a dark or dimly lit room.
• To turn on this feature, go to Settings > Accounts > Sign-in options > Facial recognition (Windows Hello) and turn on Automatically adjust screen brightness during face recognition.

[caption id="attachment_179234" align="aligncenter" width="1171"] The setting to automatically adjust screen brightness during Windows Hello facial recognition.[/caption] Thanks, Stephen and the Windows Insider Program team

I’m aware that home automation is a deep topic, so my app today is more of an experiment than anything. Does having a small ephemeral tray utility to control lights make sense? I have some Wiz lights at home and they are built to be easily controlled on the network. Making them easy to talk to when on the same network without complex APIs.

Like Tray Clock, this app also opens the ability to add small tray icons into the system tray for things like swapping toggling a light on or off, or swapping between colors. The way I see it, that little area is a users’ quick action area; we should be able to make it work the way we want to.

If you’re a fan of the XAML lighting APIs then this will be a fun code sample for you to check out!

Happy Tray-tober!

Joe