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I have arrived at Microsoft Commons on Microsoft Redmond, Washington campus at around seven thirty in the morning after a very easy commute through Woodinville and Redmond with practically no traffic. It me around half an hour.

I have arrived at a giant underground parking garage which was mostly empty and free to park without Microsoft employee parking permit. I had to find building 98 which was more challenging than it sounds as the garage was surrounded by Studio A, B, C, D, etc...

The registration process was pretty easy and I got some swag such as the VS Live backpack and a sixty dollars in a form of a debit card for buying food during the conference. There was also breakfast that I had on the balcony.

Then at eight in the morning the first session of the conference started.

This was a really good session that talked about the most important part of Agentic development: the Harness. The Harness is why I have switched from Visual Studio 2026 this year to VS Code.

Microsoft Visual Studio team basically threw away their inferior custom Harness and replaced it with a much better Copilot CLI SDK Harness. The Harness is more important than the LLM model that you are using such as Claude or GPT.

Some of the attendees were a bit furry and four legged 😀
I was surprised that the amount of conference attendees was a lot less than in the past.

One great tip I got from the first session of the day was to ask the GitHub Copilot agent to save a great session which you just had as a skill. Also provide feedback to your agent like this was no good and that was really good. The agents improve with the feedback.

The second session was not quite as good, as it was too focused on Microsoft specific technologies and too low level.

Some of the ideas and general architecture concepts from this session could be used for my Wife's Agent now that it needs to be migrated off of Open AI Agent Builder that has been deprecated.

Then it was time for the keynote of the day:

This was a more high level session talking about how quickly things change in AI, for example who is still hiring Prompt Egineers 😀?

In general there are a couple tracks going at the conference and I was able to pick an AI session for every single session that I am in.

After the keynote we had a lunch break, the debit card was a bit problematic as it created confusion as there was a screen where you had to pick credit or debit card. Turns out you had to pick Credit and not debit card and you didn't have to enter a pin we setup during the activation.

For lunch we had about eight restaurants in the building to pick from.