"PHP 8.5 landed on Thursday with a long-awaited pipe operator and a new standards-compliant URI parser," reports the Register, "marking one of the scripting language's more substantial updates... " The pipe operator allows function calls to be chained together, which avoids the extraneous variables and nested statements that might otherwise be involved. Pipes tend to make code more readable than other ways to implement serial operations. Anyone familiar with the Unix/Linux command line or programming languages like R, F#, Clojure, or Elixir may have used the pipe operator. In JavaScript, aka ECMAScript, a pipe operator has been proposed, though there are alternatives like method chaining. Another significant addition is the URI extension, which allows developers to parse and modify URIs and URLs based on both the RFC 3986 and the WHATWG URL standards. Parsing with URIs and URLs â" reading them and breaking them down into their different parts â" is a rather common task for web-oriented applications. Yet prior versions of PHP didn't include a standards-compliant parser in the standard library. As noted by software developer Tim Düsterhus, the parse_url() function that dates back to PHP 4 doesn't follow any standard and comes with a warning that it should not be used with untrusted or malformed URLs. Other noteworthy additions to the language include: Clone With, for updating properties more efficiently; the #[\NoDiscard] attribute, for warning when a return value goes unused; the ability to use static closures and first-class callables in constant expressions; and persistent cURL handles that can be shared across multiple PHP requests.

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This is a recording of our AI Book Club discussion of Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI by Yuval Noah Harari, held Nov 16, 2025. Our discussion touches upon a variety of topics, including self-correcting mechanisms, alien intelligence, corporate surveillance, algorithms, doomerism, stories and lists, democracy, printing press, alignment, dictator's dilemma, and more. This post also provides discussion questions, a transcript, and terms and definitions from the book.

At Microsoft Ignite 2025, we introduced new capabilities in Microsoft 365 Copilot to help every customer become Frontier—including Work IQ, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint agents in chat, and Agent 365.

The post Microsoft Ignite 2025: Copilot and agents built to power the Frontier Firm appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

Whether your agents are created with Microsoft platforms, open-source frameworks, or third-party platforms, Agent 365 helps you deploy, organize, and govern them securely.

The post Microsoft Agent 365: The control plane for AI agents appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

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