Azure Ignite Special: New AI Tools, Security, and MCP Integration

The recent Microsoft Ignite event (November 18–21, 2025) delivered a massive wave of Azure updates, heavily focused on integrating AI and enhancing security across cloud services. A major highlight is the widespread adoption of the Model Context Protocol (MCP), allowing AI agents to seamlessly interact with various Azure services, including Azure API Management, Azure API Center, and Azure Managed Lustre.

Key announcements include:

Agentic Services: Microsoft Foundry has new capabilities, including data connections for Azure Databricks and enhanced integration with the Microsoft Agent Framework. There is also an "Agent Service Connector v2" now in public preview for the AI Foundry.

Aspire and ASP.NET Core 10: The release brings improvements to .NET Aspire for building resilient, cloud-native apps. ASP.NET Core 10.0 focuses on Blazor improvements (like WebAssembly preloading), minimal API enhancements, and native passkey support for Identity, simplifying modern web development.

Streamlined Tooling: The .NET 10 SDK standardizes CLI commands, improves container image generation for console apps, and enhances native AOT (Ahead-Of-Time) compilation capabilities.