Conference Dispatch · MS Build 2026
If Day 1 was about the future — big-vision platform announcements over the horizon — Day 2 was about the tools and techniques you can apply immediately to your workflows and your approach to application development. The sessions shifted from "here's what's coming" to "here's what you can do right now."
On the agent side — OpenClaw on a Windows laptop is real. A local agent that runs on your machine, waits for interaction, and helps you automate and agentify your day-to-day workloads and processes. Not a cloud service. Not a managed endpoint. A local agent sitting in your environment, operating within MXC containers with policy-driven security boundaries.
The Hermes session showed the layered architecture: intelligence layer, web front end as the employee boundary, agent operations layer on top — all wrapped in a trust and security boundary. It's the pattern for how enterprise agent deployments will actually work.
On the observability side — .NET Aspire is becoming the single-file source of truth for distributed app deployment. 110+ integrations, all built on the same primitives. What stood out was the OpenTelemetry integration: full tracing, metrics, and logging baked into the Aspire dashboard — including a live telemetry viewer that tracks token usage from your AI agents.
One presenter's entire CI pipeline is now just aspire deploy. When
someone asked about complex DevOps teams, the answer was clear: Aspire generates escape
hatches at every level, but the default path is radically simpler than what most teams are
running today.
On the data side — Amanda Silver's Foundry IQ and WebIQ session reinforced the Day 1 theme. Her framing was sharp:
"Software is evolving from people-driven applications to agents defined by intent."— Amanda Silver
She cited that more than 40% of agentic AI projects are expected to fail — not because the models aren't good enough, but because developers are stitching together fragmented data sources, retrieval systems, and orchestration layers. Foundry IQ and WebIQ are designed to solve that at the platform level.
Work IQ was the standout — it turns M365 context into an agent-accessible intelligence layer. Not a copy of the Graph API. Built for agents, not users. Your agents get the same organizational context your employees have.
Day 2 was skills for survival in the now that will have you ready to apply what's coming in tomorrow's future.
Every demo, every session, every tooling integration I saw across both days pointed in the same direction: GitHub. Foundry for GitHub. Aspire deploying through GitHub workflows. Copilot agents built on GitHub. Azure DevOps isn't going away — it still has support and a massive install base. But the new tooling, the new automation, the new integrations are all GitHub-first.