Microsoft Build 2025: news and announcements from the developer conference

Microsoft’s annual developer conference kicks off today in Seattle, Washington, during the same week Google hosts its own I/O developer event in Mountain View, California. Build will be focused on Microsoft’s latest platform changes for developers, including new AI announcements that are bound to go head-to-head with Google’s own news.

Microsoft is streaming Build online free of charge and developers, students, and engineers will also be able to attend the in-person event at Seattle’s conference center. I’m expecting Microsoft to focus largely on AI this year, with emphasis on its push for AI agents that Microsoft envisions working alongside humans as digital colleagues.

Read Article >

“So the 10,000-foot-level view is that we’ve had three big revolutions in personal computing.” That’s how Ramanathan V. Guha, a technical fellow at Microsoft, begins his explanation of what I had thought was a relatively minor AI announcement coming at this year’s Build developer conference. But Guha continues to make his case that what he has created — a new open protocol for the web called NLWeb — is actually an important part of something truly enormous.

Oh, the three revolutions: graphical user interfaces, the internet, mobile. Guha says we’re in the middle of the fourth, but doesn’t just chalk it all up to artificial intelligence. For him, the new revolution is “being able to communicate with applications, and computers in general, with free-form language.” He loves the trend, but not the way it’s shaping up. Too much of that new communication, Guha thinks, is mediated by products like ChatGPT, Claude, and yes, even Bing. He doesn’t like the idea that the web will be utterly consumed by chatbots, which take all their knowledge and return no value. And he thinks he knows how to fix it.

Read Article >

GitHub is launching an AI coding agent that can do things like fix bugs, add features, and improve documentation — all on a developer’s behalf. The agent is embedded directly into GitHub Copilot, and it will start working once a user assigns it a task, according to an announcement at Microsoft Build.

To complete its work, GitHub says the AI coding agent will automatically boot a virtual machine, clone the repository, and analyze the codebase. It also saves its changes as it works, while providing a rundown of its reasoning in session logs. When it’s finished, GitHub says the agent will tag you for review. Developers can then leave comments that the agent will automatically address.

Read Article >

Microsoft launched its Copilot Plus PC and Windows AI efforts last year, and now it’s going a step further today with native Model Context Protocol (MCP) in Windows and the launch of the Windows AI Foundry. The groundwork is necessary for a future envisioned by Microsoft whereby automated AI agents assist their human companions.

Introduced by Anthropic late last year, MCP is an open-source standard that’s often referred to as the “USB-C port of AI” apps. Just as USB-C connects devices from many manufactures to a variety of peripherals, developers can use MCP to quickly let their AI apps or agents talk to other apps, web services, or even now parts of Windows. Microsoft’s embrace of this protocol is a big part of its ambitions to reshape Windows and make it ready for a world of AI agents to be able to connect to apps and services in ways that haven’t been possible before.

Read Article >

Microsoft is making its Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) open-source today, opening up the code for community members to contribute to. After launching WSL for Windows 10 nearly nine years ago, it has been a multiyear effort at Microsoft to open-source the feature that enables a Linux environment within Windows.

“It has been a consistent request from the developer community for some time now,” says Windows chief Pavan Davuluri in an interview with The Verge. “It took us a little bit of time, because we needed to refactor the operating system to allow WSL to live in a standalone capacity that then allowed us to open-source the project and be able to have developers go and make contributions and for us to ingest those into the Windows pipeline and ship it at scale.”

Read Article >

I reported in my Notepad newsletter earlier this month that Microsoft was getting ready to host Elon Musk’s Grok AI models, and now it’s official. At Microsoft’s Build developer conference today, the company confirmed it’s expanding its Azure AI Foundry models list to include Grok 3 and Grok 3 mini from xAI.

“These models will have all the service level agreements (SLAs) Azure customers expect from any Microsoft product,” says Microsoft. The Grok AI models will be hosted and billed directly by Microsoft, and offered to its own product teams and customers through its Azure AI Foundry service.

Read Article >