Posts tagged with "Entra ID"

Microsoft's Agent Framework Harness and Foundry Hosted Agents reached general availability in early August 2026, wrapping models with function invocation, context compaction, planning, memory, tool approvals and OpenTelemetry in a runtime that runs locally, in containers, or consumption-billed on Foundry. A decision framework for Azure teams weighing the GA runtime against a hand-rolled agent loop, with cost levers and the Swedish compliance picture.

The Model Context Protocol specification version 2026-07-28 shipped on 28 July with a stateless core, Multi Round-Trip Requests, required routing headers, cacheable list results and a hardened authorization model that deprecates Dynamic Client Registration in favour of Client ID Metadata Documents. All four Tier 1 SDKs shipped support on release day, so Azure teams running MCP servers on Container Apps, AKS or behind API Management can start migrating immediately.

Claude Opus 4.8 and Claude Haiku 4.5 are now generally available in Microsoft Foundry, hosted on Azure with Entra ID authentication, prompt caching, extended thinking and billing through Claude Consumption Units on your existing Azure invoice. Deployment steps, the CCU cost model compared with Azure OpenAI, and the data-residency caveats Swedish and EU teams should assess before production use.

MCP's 2026-07-28 release candidate removes the initialize handshake and the Mcp-Session-Id header, so every request is self-contained and Azure-hosted MCP servers can run behind plain load balancers without sticky sessions or Redis session stores. Tasks and MCP Apps land as formal extensions, six SEPs harden authorization around OAuth 2.0 and OpenID Connect, and Roots, Sampling and Logging enter a 12-month deprecation window.