Visual Studio Magazine readers have selected their favorite third-party tools, components and services across 43 categories in the 2026 Reader's Choice Awards.

Update adds multi-window agent sessions, side-by-side chats, conversation search and an integrated HTML preview workflow.

SQL Server 2025 gives developers new ways to work with text, JSON, real-time data changes and AI-ready vector data. Microsoft MVP Leonard Lobel explains why he considers it the most significant SQL ...

Microsoft's MSSQL extension v1.45 previews a configurable T-SQL formatter while two existing features reach GA.

Microsoft's seventh .NET 11 preview expands runtime-async, developer tooling, libraries, C#, Blazor, MAUI, EF Core and Windows Forms.

Angela Dugan explains why judgment, curiosity, shared context and leadership become more valuable as AI accelerates software delivery, and previews her Live! 360 Tech Con session on using AI as a ...

Model Context Protocol gives AI clients a standardized way to discover and use external tools and data, and Microsoft's Power BI MCP servers bring that approach to semantic models. Ginger Grant's Live ...

At Visual Studio Live! San Diego 2026, Tony Champion explains why valuable developers can remain unseen, and how engineering visibility can be learned, practiced and systematized like any other ...

Dr. James McCaffrey from Microsoft Research presents a complete end-to-end demo of Poisson regression, where the goal is to predict a count of things arriving, such as the number of telephone calls ...

GitHub's AI usage reports now show input, output, cache-read and cache-write token counts for each model. The report already identified models and AI Credit consumption; the token-level breakdown is ...