The CountryPhonePostalInfoRepository provides an efficient solution for validating phone numbers and postal codes globally, addressing the complexities of varying formats and rules. It offers a centralized API for reliable country-specific validation, enhancing data integrity in applications while simplifying maintenance and development. This tool ensures accurate, consistent validation logic.

Highlights this week include: Agent Skills for Azure Bicep with GitHub Copilot: From Manual Work to Automated Workflows: learn how to create reusable Agent Skills in GitHub Copilot that package domain expertise into automated workflows for Azure Bicep, including four ready-to-use skills for formatting, type conversion, and Azure Verified Modules migration. Writing Effective Prompts for Testing Scenarios: AI Assisted Quality Engineering: a deep dive into prompt design patterns for AI-assisted testing, covering role-based, few-shot, and context-rich prompting techniques that move QA teams beyond shallow test generation toward reliable, high-coverage outputs. Getting more out of Copilot with Copilot Pages: an overview and live demo of Copilot Pages, which turn Copilot Chat outputs into collaborative, editable canvases that support rich content, real-time co-editing, and seamless sharing across M365 apps.

Building Smarter Agents with FoundryIQ: Microsoft's Agentic RAG Platform: introduces FoundryIQ, a fully managed knowledge layer that enables agentic RAG by autonomously decomposing complex queries, planning multi-source searches, and synthesising answers across SharePoint, Blob Storage, OneLake, and the web. Observability in Generative AI: Building Trust with Systematic Evaluation in Microsoft Foundry: explains how Microsoft Foundry supports GenAIOps observability through evaluators for quality, safety, RAG grounding, and agent behaviour across the full lifecycle from model selection through production monitoring.

Serverless workspaces in Azure Databricks (GA): Azure Databricks serverless workspaces are now generally available, offering a fully managed SaaS experience with pre-configured serverless compute and default storage that eliminates the need for manual networking, cluster, and storage setup. Bringing together Fabric Real-time Intelligence, Notebook and Spark Structured Streaming Preview: a new preview integration lets developers access Eventstreams directly inside Spark Notebooks with auto-generated PySpark code and secure, secret-free connectivity, enabling low-latency real-time analytics and AI pipelines within Microsoft Fabric.

Reference Architecture for Highly Available Multi-Region Azure Kubernetes Service AKS: a practical reference architecture for running AKS across multiple Azure regions using Azure Front Door, geo-replicated data services, and regional ingress layers, with detailed trade-off analysis of active/active, active/passive, and cold standby deployment patterns.

Finally, upcoming community events: Join us at SQLCon 2026 (March 16–20) co-locates with FabCon in Atlanta featuring 50+ SQL sessions and shared keynotes, and SQLBits 2026 returns to ICC Wales (April 22–25) covering SQL Server 2025, Microsoft Fabric, AI-powered analytics, and more. Book your tickets now.

If you're interested in all things Microsoft Fabric - don't forget to sign up for our new newsletter - Fabric Weekly - which we'll start publishing in the next month or so. We'll be moving all Fabric content over from Azure Weekly to Fabric Weekly, just as we did with Power BI Weekly 7 years ago.

I spent the past week experimenting with OpenClaw

You can read my full review here.

OpenClaw (Clawdbot / Moltbot) is the open‑source AI agent that can operate your actual computer. And honestly? It's equal parts impressive, terrifying, and a glimpse of where OS‑level AI is heading.

OpenClaw isn't doing anything radically new on its own. What it does get right is packaging everything developers usually duct‑tape together. This includes:

• Unified installer
• Plug‑and‑play integrations
• Browser automation
• Mobile control
• Low‑friction setup

It's the first time I've seen all of this bundled into something you can install in minutes.

What surprised me most

You can control your PC from Slack or Discord. Yes, really. Tell your desktop to edit files or browse the web while you're away.

Free LLMs work, but only if you give very explicit instructions. Vague tasks often turn into JSON dumps instead of actions.

Browser automation is also still tricky. Navigation works, but form‑filling is hit‑or‑miss on Windows.

Trust is the real question. Giving an AI access to your filesystem and browser is a different psychological leap than using ChatGPT or Copilot.

Should you try it?

If you're curious about where AI‑powered operating systems are headed, OpenClaw is worth a weekend experiment. Just be prepared for some quirks, especially on Windows, and think carefully about how much access you're comfortable granting.

I'm still figuring out how it fits into my workflow, but the potential is undeniable. If you've tried OpenClaw, I’d love to hear what worked (or didn't) for you.

Microsoft argues that Copilot+ PCs are also a new class of PCs built for gaming. In fact, the company says these new Windows 11 AI PCs “take gaming performance further,” but how much RAM (memory) do you need in 2026? According to Microsoft, 16GB is plenty for most games, but 32GB is recommended for serious gamers, ironically at a time when memory prices are rising.

Microsoft has a new marketing campaign for Copilot+ PCs where it tries to answer some of the basic questions, such as how fast the AI PCs are compared to older Windows 10 desktops, and pitches Copilot+ PCs as your solution.

As part of the same campaign, Microsoft is now encouraging gamers to consider “Copilot+ PCs” because it’s a headache to “match parts” and build a gaming PC or laptop.

“Copilot+ PCs are the smart choice to bring it all together,” the company argues in a document spotted by Windows Latest. Microsoft added that 16GB of RAM is plenty for most games, but if you’re a serious player who runs demanding titles or heavy mods, you should look for 32GB of RAM PCs.

Now, you have three options: build your own computer, find laptops that meet all your gaming requirements, or just choose one of the new Copilot+ PCs, which are already optimized for gaming.

Microsoft lists several hardware specs recommended for gaming, including at least 16GB of RAM (32GB ideal for serious gamers), an AMD Ryzen 5 5600 or Intel Core i5-12400, NVIDIA GTX 1660 Super or AMD Radeon RX 6600, SSD, and a high-end monitor. If you have these features, it’s supposedly gaming certified.

Most power gamers prefer to build their own gaming rig. However, Microsoft argues that part-matching is a ‘headache’ and it’s just better to buy a Copilot+ PC, which comes pre-configured with the latest CPU, GPU, thermal, and memory.

“If you’d rather skip the part-matching headache, Copilot+ PCs come pre-configured with the latest CPUs, GPUs, and thermal designs tuned for gaming, so you can dive straight into the action,” Microsoft noted.

Microsoft is making bold claims that its new AI PCs also have the best “thermal designs tuned for gaming,” which makes them a worthy alternative to a full-fledged gaming PC. But it doesn’t tell us how a Copilot+ PC performs in real games, at real settings, against a similarly priced custom build.

Copilot+ PCs are not just “AI” PCs anymore for Microsoft’s marketing team

Also, it looks like Microsoft is slowly selling a new dream for Copilot+ PCs. While originally these PCs were “AI” first because they include an NPU for processing locally, Microsoft is now claiming that AI PCs are also gaming PCs and mixing the message in a way that can confuse regular customers.

In the same campaign, Microsoft lists “recommended” gaming parts like a GTX 1660 Super or RX 6600 and mid-range CPUs. That is fine advice for entry-level gaming, but it does not prove anything about Copilot+ PCs as a “new class” for gaming.

The company also claims these Copilot+ PCs are “faster than MacBook Air M4” and “up to 5x faster than a 5-year-old Windows device,” but it won’t comment on M4 Max or even M5 (base).

The post Microsoft says 32GB RAM is ideal for serious gamers on Windows 11, recommends Copilot+ PCs for gaming appeared first on Windows Latest

Has the rise of hyper-addictive digital technologies really shattered our attention spans and driven books out of our culture? Maybe not, argues social psychologist Adam Mastroianni (author of the Substack Experimental History): As a psychologist, I used to study claims like these for a living, so I know that the mind is primed to believe narratives of decline. We have a much lower standard of evidence for "bad thing go up" than we do for "bad thing go down." Unsurprisingly, then, stories about the end of reading tend to leave out some inconvenient data points. For example, book sales were higher in 2025 than they were in 2019, and only a bit below their high point in the pandemic. Independent bookstores are booming, not busting; at least 422 new indie shops opened in the United States last year alone. Even Barnes & Noble is cool again. The actual data on reading, meanwhile, isn't as apocalyptic as the headlines imply. Gallup surveys suggest that some mega-readers (11+ books per year) have become moderate readers (1-5 books per year), but they don't find any other major trends over the past three decades. Other surveys document similarly moderate declines. For instance, data from the National Endowment for the Arts finds a slight decrease in the percentage of U.S. adults who read any book in 2022 (49%) compared to 2012 (55%). And the American Time Use Survey shows a dip in reading time from 2003 to 2023. Ultimately, the plausibility of the "death of reading" thesis depends on two judgment calls. First, do these effects strike you as big or small...? The second judgment call: Do you expect these trends to continue, plateau, or even reverse...? There are signs that the digital invasion of our attention is beginning to stall. We seem to have passed peak social media — time spent on the apps has started to slide. App developers are finding it harder and harder to squeeze more attention out of our eyeballs, and it turns out that having your eyeballs squeezed hurts, so people aren't sticking around for it... Fact #2: Reading has already survived several major incursions, which suggests it's more appealing than we thought. Radio, TV, dial-up, Wi-Fi, TikTok — none of it has been enough to snuff out the human desire to point our pupils at words on paper... It is remarkable, even miraculous, that people who possess the most addictive devices ever invented will occasionally choose to turn those devices off and pick up a book instead. The authors mocks the "death of reading" hypothesis for implying that all the world's avid readers "were just filling time with great works of literature until TikTok came along."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Despite urgent pleas to Americans to save the honeybees, "it was all based on a fallacy," writes Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank. "Honeybees were never in existential trouble. And well-meaning efforts to boost their numbers have accelerated the decline of native bees that actually are." "Suppose I were to say to you, 'I'm really worried about bird decline, so I've decided to take up keeping chickens.' You'd think I was a bit of an idiot," British bee scientist Dave Goulson said in a video last year. But beekeeping, he went on, is "exactly the same with one key difference, which is that honeybee-keeping can be actively harmful to wild-bee conservation." Even from healthy hives, diseases flow "out into wild pollinator populations." Honeybees can also outcompete native bees for pollen and nectar, Milbank points out, and promote non-native plants "at the expense of the native plants on which native bees thrive." Bee specialist T'ai Roulston at the University of Virginia's Blandy Experimental Farm here in Boyce warned that keeping honeybees would "just contribute to the difficulties that native bees are having in the world." And the Clifton Institute's Bert Harris, my regular restoration ecology consultant in Virginia, put it bluntly: "If you want to save the bees, don't keep honeybees...." Before I stir up a hornet's nest of angry beekeepers, let me be clear: The save-the-pollinator movement has, overall, been enormously beneficial over the past two decades. It helped to get millions of people interested in pollinator gardens and wildflower meadows and native plants, and turned them against insecticides. A lot of honeybee advocacy groups promote native bees, too, and many people whose environmental awakening came from the plight of honeybees are now champions of all types of conservation... But if your goal is to help pollinators, then the solution is simple: Don't keep honeybees... The bumblebees, sweat bees, mason bees, miner bees, leafcutters and other native bees, most of them solitary, ground-nesting and docile, need your help. Honeybees do not. The article calls it "a cautionary tale about the unintended consequences that emerge when we intervene in nature, even with the best of intentions."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.