310 - Stepping away from the cloud to reflect on Microsoft PowerToys in 2025

Microsoft Ignite 2025 is just around the corner. As is tradition by now, we take a look at what to expect from Ignite: the announcements, expectations, and sessions.(00:00) - Intro and catching up.(04:55) - Show content starts.Show links- Microsoft Ignite 2025- Give us feedback!

This week, we unpack the hero announcements from GitHub Universe 2025. Much of this is related to agents, agentic AI, and GitHub Copilot. We reflect on these new announcements as we proceed.(00:00) - Intro and catching up.(03:59) - Show content starts.Show links- Agent HQ- Custom agents examples- Copilot integrations - Agentic code review in Copilot- Plan mode- Agents.md- GitHub Code Quality- Usage metrics and API- Enterprise AI controls and agent control plane- Give us feedback!

This week, we review the Microsoft Digital Defense report 2025. We did the same for 2024 and 2023, so this time we'll look at what's interesting in the report and what to focus on from a security perspective.(00:00) - Intro and catching up.(03:40) - Show content starts.Show links- Microsoft Digital Defense Report 2025- Ctrl+Alt+Azure: Episode 275: Microsoft Digital Defense Report 2024- Ctrl+Alt+Azure: Episode 210: Microsoft Digital Defense Report 2023- HackTheBox- Give us feedback!

In this week's episode, we look at recent Microsoft Tech updates. By popular request, we're expanding the scope beyond just Azure to include Microsoft 365, Power Platform, and similar Microsoft platforms and capabilities. What's new? What's interesting? What's retiring?(00:00) - Intro and catching up.(04:40) - Show content starts.Show links- Public preview: VM Customization in Azure: Disable Multithreading & Constrained Cores- Containerization Assist (GitHub)- Microsoft Azure Migration Hub- Private Link service Direct ConnectFeedback - Give us feedback!

Today, we talk about identity mistakes, with our guest, Stephan van Rooij. We learn about OWASP top 10, his project IdentityProxy and things to avoid when building custom solutions that revolve around identities.(00:00) - Intro and catching up.(02:50) - Show content starts.Show links- Blog: https://svrooij.io- LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/stephanvanrooij - IdentityProxy: https://github.com/svrooij/identityproxy- OWASP Top 10- GitHub servers being migrated to AzureFeedback - Give us feedback!

Today, we go through the three recommended and must-have alerts you should configure in all of your Azure tenants. We touch upon FinOps, security, a bit of WAF and CAF, and find out if we're using these recommendations ourselves.(00:00) - Intro and catching up.(03:20) - Show content starts.Show links- Azure Quota Alerts (Preview): Still overlooked, but incredibly useful | Microsoft Community HubFeedback - Give us feedback!

In this week's episode, we take a tour of Microsoft PowerToys in 2025. What's in there? What's new? Do we actually use these tools, or are they just gimmicks?(00:00) - Intro and catching up.(06:44) - Show content starts.Show links- Microsoft PowerToysFeedback - Give us feedback!

In this week's episode, we talk about our experiences with SharePoint and Project. Now that Project Online is going away, as well as SharePoint 2013-style Workflows, we discuss the options for moving to more modern capabilities, and why these are still very valid tools. (00:00) - Intro and catching up.(03:58) - Show content starts.Show links- Project Online is retiring- SharePoint 2013 Workflow retirement- SharePoint 2013 Workflow Assessment Tool- SharePoint Workflow ManagerFeedback- Give us feedback!

In this week's episode, we share ideas, experiences and lessons learned running AI workloads at home. On a laptop, in a custom-built AI rig, and everything in between!(00:00) - Intro and catching up.(03:37) - Show content starts.Show links- HuggingFace- Ollama & Open WebUI- LMStudio- Azure AI Foundry LocalFeedback - Give us feedback!

This week, we dive deep into security-focused updates from Microsoft. As we've done with more generic tech updates, this time we'll focus on the interesting security updates from Microsoft.(00:00) - Intro and catching up.(04:29) - Show content starts.Show links- RETIREMENT: Migration from Azure China CDN to Azure Front Door- PREVIEW: Custom block response codes and body for Application Gateway WAF- PREVIEW: Azure Bastion now supports connectivity to private AKS clusters via tunneling- PREVIEW: Workspace-level Private Link for Microsoft Fabric workspaces- GA: AKS Security Dashboard- WAF: CAPTCHA, and JS challengeFeedback - Give us feedback!