Start of a new month means lots of product announcements! Highlights this week include: Fabric April 2026 Feature Summary: roundup of Microsoft Fabric updates including tabbed multitasking GA, AI Auto-Description for semantic models, deeper VS Code integration, notebook retry policies, cross-workspace MLflow logging and Eventhouse remote MCP. Manage failure notifications from the monitoring hub in Fabric (Preview): A new Schedule failures page in the Fabric monitoring hub gives a single place to view, configure and edit failure notifications across all scheduled items, replacing the old per-item approach.
OneLake security (Generally Available): Fine-grained role-based access control for OneLake at the item, folder, table and row or column level reaches GA, with a new role-creation wizard, inline RLS validation and default enablement on supported items. OneLake catalog is now natively available in Foundry (Generally Available): OneLake catalog is built directly into Microsoft Foundry so AI builders can browse governed enterprise data and turn it into knowledge sources for agents without leaving the Foundry workflow. Discover items across workspaces with the OneLake Catalog Search API, MCP and CLI tools (Preview): Cross-workspace discovery of Fabric items is now available programmatically through a REST API, a built-in MCP tool for AI agents and a new fab find Fabric CLI command.

General Availability of Azure Dl/D/Esv7-series VMs based on Intel Xeon 6 processors. The Azure Resource Manager MCP Server: A new public-preview remote MCP server gives AI agents first-class access to Azure infrastructure operations, including generating and executing Azure Resource Graph queries and deploying and managing ARM template deployments.

Foundry Toolkit goes GA: Building agents with code: Ctrl+Alt+Azure podcast episode walking through Microsoft's Foundry Toolkit (formerly the AI Toolkit) for VS Code, which brings model selection, prompt iteration, agent building, evaluation and production tracing into a single extension. AI Subagents 'Coming Soon' to Visual Studio Copilot: Microsoft's Mads Kristensen has confirmed that Copilot subagents, already documented in VS Code for context isolation, custom agents, parallel execution and search, are coming soon to Visual Studio. AI-assisted AWS to Azure migration with GitHub Copilot agents: A framework of eight purpose-built custom GitHub Copilot agents backed by MCP servers automates the full AWS-to-Azure migration lifecycle, from discovery through architecture design, IaC conversion, code refactoring, CI/CD generation and a 15-point validation report. Copilot Cowork Hands-On Experiences: Microsoft Cloud IT Pro Podcast episode 427 covers hands-on experience with Microsoft 365 Copilot Cowork, including custom skills, artifact management, IRM-protected document friction and data-security considerations for early adopters.

Finally, a post we've been working on for the last few months, based on our experience of delivering AI projects: AI Strategy: Think Top-Down, Experiment Bottom-Up: which argues that durable AI progress requires running top-down strategic planning (objective, strategy, tactics) and bottom-up experimentation simultaneously, with a feedback loop between them and a small protected "incubator" team that sits alongside the everyday performance engine. An audio version of this post is also available.

Under the nonprofit Linux Foundation, "a new Sustaining Package Registries Working Group will seek to identify concrete funding, governance, and security practices," reports ZDNet, "to keep code flowing as download counts grow.... Because software builds, continuous integration pipelines, and AI systems hammer registries at machine speed rather than human speed, the sites can't keep up. "That growth has brought a surge in bot traffic, automated publishing, security reports, and outright abuse, exposing what the working group bluntly calls a 'sustainability gap'." Sonatype CTO Brian Fox, who oversees the Maven Central Java registry, estimates open-source registries saw 10 trillion downloads in 2025. And "The same pattern is appearing across ecosystems. More machine traffic. More automation. More scanning. More expectations around uptime, integrity, provenance, and policy enforcement. More cost. More support burden. More dependency on infrastructure that the industry still talks about as though it runs on goodwill and spare time." ZDNet reports that "To tackle that, Sonatype has teamed up with the Linux Foundation and other package registry leaders, including Alpha-Omega, Eclipse Foundation (OpenVSX), OpenJS Foundation, OpenSSF, Packagist, Python Software Foundation, Ruby Central (RubyGems), and the Rust Foundation (Crates)." The idea is to give operators a neutral forum to discuss money, governance, and shared operational burdens openly. Once that's dealt with, they'll coordinate how to explain those realities back to companies and organizations that have long assumed registries are "free." No, they're not. They never were. As the Linux Foundation pointed out, "Registries today run primarily on two things: (1) infrastructure donations and credits; and (2) heroic efforts from small paid teams (themselves funded by donations and grants) and unpaid volunteers that operate and maintain registry services. The bulk of donations and grants comes from a small set of donors and doesn't scale with demands on the registry." The working group is explicitly positioned as a venue where registry leaders and ecosystem stakeholders can align on "practical, community-minded" ways to sustain that infrastructure, rather than each operator improvising its own survival plan in isolation. ZDNet says the group will also coordinate security practices and information, and craft frameworks "that make it politically and legally possible to introduce sustainable funding models without fracturing communities." And they will also "align messaging and educational content so developers, companies, and policymakers finally understand what it costs to run these services."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Summary

In this episode, Andy welcomes Dr. John La Puma, a board-certified internal medicine physician, professionally trained chef, regenerative organic farmer, and two-time New York Times bestselling author of The Indoor Epidemic.

Did you know most of us spend about 93% of our lives indoors? Dr. John makes the case, backed by more than 2,200 studies, that where we spend our time may matter just as much as the soft skills and productivity systems we so often focus on. In this conversation, Andy and Dr. John dig into what he calls digital obesity and analog wellness, the science of morning sunlight and circadian rhythm, why looking at the horizon for just one minute per hour can improve focus and eye health, and what forest bathing actually does to your immune system. They also explore loneliness as a health crisis, the social dimension of outdoor time, and practical ways to build a 17-minute daily nature habit that doesn't require moving to Santa Barbara.

If you're looking for science-backed ways to boost your energy, focus, and long-term wellbeing, this episode is for you!

Sound Bites

• "Digital obesity is when you consume more pixels than you can metabolize."
• "What people don't understand about this is that it's not a character flaw, that it's a biological mismatch."
• "People don't appreciate that nature is actually social, and that social part is good for you."
• "And loneliness is what? 15 cigarettes a day in mortality."
• "Nature works through your senses. You touch, you listen, you see, you smell, you taste."
• "You have a 56% higher function and number of natural killer cells because you are in the company of trees that are making these chemicals, alpha-pinene, D-limonene in citrus trees, many other trees, that improve your ability to kill tumor cells and kill virus infected cells."
• "But immersion in the forest means that you're immersing your senses in it, and the forest is, is the therapist, and the walk is the therapy."
• "Rest is actually self-preservation and capital investment."
• "Often you can upgrade the thinking in a room just by opening a window."
• "But you don't need a forest, and you don't need a park even. You just need a sky view."

Chapters

• 00:00 Introduction
• 01:56 Start of Interview
• 02:06 Background: Origins of the Indoor Epidemic
• 07:03 Digital Obesity and Analog Wellness
• 10:33 Dr. John's Morning Outdoor Routine
• 13:21 The Benefits of Looking at the Horizon
• 17:22 Experiencing Vastness and Awe
• 22:47 Forest Bathing: More Than Just a Walk
• 24:32 Walking Habits and Nature Recalibration
• 26:52 Loneliness and Outdoor Social Connection
• 30:04 Practical Tips for Parents
• 32:03 End of Interview
• 32:39 Andy Comments After the Interview
• 35:15 Outtakes

Learn More

You can learn more about Dr. John and his work at drjohnlapuma.com.

For more learning on this topic, check out:

• Episode 461 with Dr. Patricia Grabarek. We talk about why our typical approaches to wellness are missing the mark.
• Episode 421 with Dr. Bijoy John. He's a practicing sleep doctor and I think you'll find some practical ideas from our discussion.
• Episode 200 with Jeffrey Pfeffer. He's the author of a book entitled Dying for a Paycheck and I think you'll find his insights challenging enough to look at work differently.

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Thank you for joining me for this episode of The People and Projects Podcast!

Talent Triangle: Power Skills

Topics: Nature, Digital Obesity, Analog Wellness, Productivity, Loneliness, Forest Bathing, Morning Sunlight, Wellbeing, Leadership, Sleep

The following music was used for this episode:

Music: On Point by Steven OBrien
License (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

Music: Energetic Drive Indie Rock by WinnieTheMoog
License (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

Download audio: https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/peopleandprojectspodcast/508-JohnLaPuma.mp3?dest-id=107017

Learn LINQ projection in C# with Select, SelectMany, and the .NET 9 Index() method. Covers anonymous types, records, flattening nested collections, and real examples.

September 2025? January 2026? Delivery dates keep slipping for the Trump Organization's "Trump Phone" — a gold-coloured Android smartphone priced at $499 (£370). But in March the Verge spotted signs the phone was moving forward: FCC listings for a smartphone with the trade name "T1" show that it was tested late last year, and granted certification by the FCC in January... [T]he phone was submitted for testing by another company entirely: Smart Gadgets Global, LLC... Smart Gadgets Global's website promises "Top Quality Electronics created for 'YOUR' customer!" But in April the Trump phone revised its "Terms and Conditions" for preorders. The new language? A preorder deposit provides only a conditional opportunity if Trump Mobile later elects, in its sole discretion, to offer the Device for sale. A deposit is not a purchase, does not constitute acceptance of an order, does not create a contract for sale, does not transfer ownership or title interest, does not allocate or reserve specific inventory, and does not guarantee that a Device will be produced or made available for purchase.... Estimated ship dates, launch timelines, or anticipated production schedule are non-binding estimates only. Trump Mobile does not guarantee that: the Device will be commercially released... Trump Mobile will not be responsible for delay, modification, or failure to release a Device due to causes beyond its reasonable control, including but not limited to regulatory review, carrier certification delays, component shortages, labor disruptions, governmental orders, acts of God, transportation interruptions, or third-party supplier failures... If Trump Mobile cancels or discontinues the Device offering prior to sale, Trump Mobile will issue a full refund of the deposit amount paid... If Trump Mobile cancels, delays, or does not release the Device, your sole and exclusive remedy is a full refund of the deposit amount actually paid, and you waive any claim for equitable, injunctive, or specific performance relief relating to preorder priority or Device allocation. There was an unconfirmed report on social media that the updated Terms were also emailed to customers (cited by the International Business Times). And the new language also hedges that for the gold T1 phone, "Images, prototypes, beta demonstrations, and marketing renderings are illustrative only and may not reflect final production units...." But then eight days ago The Verge reported that phone "has just passed another milestone on its slow road to release," described as "a requirement for any phone launching in the US..." "The phone has received the little-known PTCRB certification, a first step toward being certified to work on major networks and be issued with IMEI numbers." [A]t least, I think it's been certified. What's actually been certified by the PTCRB is the SGG-06, a smartphone from Smart Gadgets Global, LLC, with support for 5G, 4G, 3G, and 2G networks.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Welcome to the first alpha for the 5.2 update! This new version is focused on performance, quality-of-life, and infrastructure improvements which prepare for the big 6.0 version that will be coming later. The two biggest changes are the new FileType plugin system and the rewritten high-precision layer rendering engine.

New FileType Plugin System

The original FileType plugin system dates back to 2005 with the v2.5 release. It has withstood the test of time in the sense that it still works and has provided a lot of value for a lot of people, but it has also noticeably aged poorly in ways that have prevented progress in other areas of the app. It was written at a time when .NET itself was just 3 years old and hitting its 2.0 release with generics and 64-bit support. The modern systems used in Paint.NET for component management and isolation were nowhere to be found back then. I had no clue that the project’s longevity would stretch so far into the future, nor that so many plugins would be developed!

The old FileType plugin system is tightly coupled with the Document, Layer, and Surface classes which Paint.NET also uses internally for UI and rendering purposes. They only support the 32-bit BGRA UI8 pixel format and a flat list of bitmap layers. The new FileType system works through interfaces such as IFileTypeDocument<TPixel> and ILayer<TPixel>, along with a rich and strongly-typed imaging framework providing support for a wide variety of pixel formats, pooled bitmap allocation, scaling/interpolation, quantization/dithering, format conversion, color management, and more.

Decoupling the FileType system from the internal classes means that these two systems can now evolve independently, and internal details can be abstracted away from plugins. The new plugin system has been designed to support versioning, meaning that functionality can be added or changed in the programming interfaces that are provided to plugins while maintaining compatibility for plugins that have already been published. New layer types and topologies (e.g. layer folders) can be added without breaking existing plugins, new blend modes can be introduced, and bitmap layers will finally be able to migrate to a tiled storage system.

Note to plugin authors: In general, plugins should provide pixel data in the image file’s original format without converting it to BGRA32. In other words, let Paint.NET handle the conversion, whether you’re supplying pixels as RGBA64, BGR24, or even an HDR format such as RGBA FP32. Paint.NET will figure out the best conversion for pixel format and color profile handling, and when expanded pixel format support is rolled out your plugin can automatically benefit from it. Note that plugins can also determine at runtime which pixel formats are supported and which are native, in case they do want to do the conversion themselves for whatever reason.

New Layer Rendering Engine

The old layer rendering engine has its roots going all the way back to the 1.0 release in 2004. Over the years it has migrated from C# to C for performance reasons, and then back to C# once the language and JIT had finally caught up to the performance of the native code. However, it has no SIMD optimizations, it only has 8 bits per channel of precision (“UI8”), and the code was very messy and difficult to make changes to. Working with many layers can result in incorrect colors or banding artifacts as off-by-1 errors accumulate across multiple layers. 

With 5.2, this has been completely rewritten and upgraded to use 32-bits of floating-point precision per channel (“FP32”). It is fully optimized for AVX2, AVX512, and even ARM64 NEON thanks to .NET’s new platform-agnostic intrinsics support. Because FP32 uses a lot more memory bandwidth than UI8, many tricks have been employed to cut down on that to the point that there is no perceptible performance reduction from previous versions (the old renderer not using any SIMD also helps this comparison). The bottleneck is compute, not memory bandwidth, and performance really shines on CPUs with AVX512 support even with standard dual channel memory.

A driving factor behind this change was to prepare for future versions of Paint.NET that will expand pixel format support beyond BGRA UI8. In order to do this in a sane and maintainable manner, having a canonical pixel format became important so that each rendering kernel only needs to be written once. All of the rendering kernels can now operate exclusively on FP32 data, with high-performance format conversion and color transform kernels at the beginning and end of the rendering pipeline. This will make it much easier to add support for RGBA UI16, RGBA FP16, and even RGBA FP32 — the layer rendering engine already supports it, the rest of the app just has to catch up.

What’s coming in 6.0?

This update will introduce a new .PDN file format that will finally enable the ability to add new features to the document and layering systems. High bit-depth pixel formats, new blend modes, and layer folders are planned to be the first use of these. Later on, features such as adjustment layers, text layers, and HDR will also be added (to name a few).

Change Log

Changes since 5.1.12:

• New modernized FileType plugin system
  • Support for a wide variety of pixel formats. The classic BGRA32 is of course available, as well as RGBA64, CMYK, or even RGBA128Float (which will be more useful with upcoming HDR support).
  • Decoupled from the internal Document and Layer classes, thus affording flexibility for more comprehensive changes to the document and layer object model.
• Rewritten layer rendering rendering engine.
  • Now uses 32-bit floating point (FP32) instead of 8-bit integers (UI8).
  • Much higher precision eliminates artifacts and incorrect colors that can result from the old low-precision 8-bit rendering code
  • Fully optimized for AVX2 and AVX512. Significant performance gains on systems with AVX512 support due to a high compute:memory ratio.
• Renamed Edit -> Copy Merged to Edit -> Copy Flattened.
• Improved copy-to-clipboard (Edit -> Copy and Edit -> Copy Flattened) performance by up to 95%. See also: https://x.com/rickbrewPDN/status/2039850858935140449
• Reduced temporary memory usage by 50% for Edit -> Paste into New Image.
• Paint Bucket and Color Picker now support holding Ctrl as a shortcut key for specifying Image sampling mode.
• Substantial performance improvements for larger images. Fluidity of zooming and scrolling will be significantly better. A lot of lag and hitching has been eliminated.
• Save Configuration dialog renamed to Save Options.
• Fixed some cases of metadata not being preserved correctly.
• PNG tEXt/iTXt metadata is now preserved, which includes prompt and parameter information for images generated by Stable Diffusion et. al.
• Expanded and improved the imaging framework for plugins.
  • Better color management
  • New interpolation modes (BitmapInterpolationMode2)
  • Channel extraction and channel replacement. This makes it easier to work with a variety of non-standard pixel formats (e.g. Gray+Alpha) that do not have direct support in the imaging framework.
  • Support for generic 2-channel pixel formats (ColorGenericXY[16, 32, 32Half, 64Float]). These are meant to be used with the aforementioned channel extraction and replacement support.
  • Support for alpha formats beyond 8-bits: 16-bit integer, as well as 16- and 32-bit floating point.
  • Better CMYK pixel format support, which enables importing CMYK32, CMYKA40, CMYK64, and CMYKA80 images
• Improved reliability of some GPU effects/adjustments on certain older or low-end systems.
• Optimized the Median Blur effect by 10-50% depending on the selected quality value.
• Optimized histogram calculation for Levels and Auto-Levels by about 20%.
• Updated to use .NET 10
• “Classic” (aka legacy) effect plugin system is now fully deprecated. Old plugins will still continue to work forever, but new ones can no longer be compiled.
• Updated bundled AVIF FileType plugin to use the new FileType plugin system.
• Updated bundled DDS FileType Plus plugin to use the new FileType plugin system.
  • The Save Options dialog will now auto-select the DDS format that the original file was encoded with if it was also a DDS file.
• Updated bundled JPEG XL FileType plugin to use the new FileType plugin system.
• Updated bundled WebP FileType plugin to use the new FileType plugin system.
• Converted the SetupDownloader EXE from C# to C++, thus eliminating the last dependency on .NET Framework 4.8. This executable is used for the small “Any CPU” / “Web” installer.
• Fixed a scaling issue with the “compass” mouse cursor used by various tools (Move, Shapes).
• Fixed an uncommon cosmetic glitch with the selection outline when the selection quality is set to “pixelated”
• Fixed an ultra-rare hang that could happen after opening an image or when the “Committing changes” progress bar was at 70%.

Download and Install

This build is available via the built-in updater as long as you have opted-in to pre-release updates. From within Settings -> Updates, enable “Also check for pre-release (beta) versions of paint.net” and then click on the Check Now button. You can also use the links below to download an offline installer or portable ZIP.

You can also download the installer here (for any supported CPU and OS), which is also where you can find downloads for offline installers, portable ZIPs, and deployable MSIs.

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