Weekly Update 16 June 2025 – Edit Suggestions in VS, Sharing Links, Enterprise App Updates, Freedom

This week:

Microsoft Docs MCP Server

Next edit suggestions available in Visual Studio

Find All Sharing Links in SharePoint Online

Microsoft Is Changing the Way It Delivers M365 Enterprise App Updates

My favorite distractions blocker is still Freedom

You can also listen to the audio-only version here: Thoughtstuff Podcast – Tom Morgan on Teams Dev: Weekly Update 16 June 2025.

Find all my videos at thoughtstuff.co.uk/videos. You can also subscribe to the audio-only version of these videos, either via iTunes, Spotify or your own podcasting tool.

Transcript (AI-generated):

Hello and welcome to another weekly update.

Oh, what a week! And the coming one is set to be even busier. A couple of things to cover—

Microsoft Learn MCP Server

Kind of late news—only just found out about this last night. Microsoft Learn has released an MCP server for Microsoft Docs. Right now, there’s no blog post, just a GitHub page. I imagine once marketing gets involved, there will be a more formal announcement.

This MCP server provides real-time access to Microsoft Learn documentation. It’s interesting because it’s the first time, to my knowledge, that Learn has had an API for direct access. An MCP server essentially acts as an API plus metadata on how to use that API. If standardizing on MCP is what motivates internal teams to finally expose APIs—I’m all for it. Even though I don’t have a personal use case for this yet, it’s exciting to see.

Also worth noting—there are still devs inside Microsoft not solely focused on Copilot. It’s great to see engineering efforts going into things like this API, even if they’re not obvious marketing wins.

Visual Studio’s New “Next Edit Suggestions”

Visual Studio is rolling out a new feature called Next Edit Suggestions, or NES. There’s a blog post detailing this. It’s like IntelliSense leveled up—it suggests a range of changes across functions, and you get a preview interface similar to what you see when renaming methods.

It allows you to tab through changes and accept them while understanding them in context. This slows things down just enough to stay clear and controlled, especially amidst growing concerns around how quickly agent-led tools can mutate codebases into unfamiliar shapes.

This is now live in the latest Visual Studio build—check it out!

PowerShell Script to Find SharePoint Online Sharing Links

This one isn’t super developer-heavy but useful in enterprise scenarios. There’s a great PowerShell script to find all sharing links in SharePoint Online. It’s something I get asked about often. If that sounds useful to your org, check out the linked blog post.

Microsoft 365 Enterprise Channel Update

Mary Jo Foley wrote a great breakdown of lifecycle changes to Microsoft 365 enterprise app updates. There’s a subtle but important change: Microsoft is no longer overlapping support cycles for the semiannual channel preview.

This means enterprises using the Semiannual Enterprise Channel now need to perform at least two deployments per year to stay in support—instead of one. The semiannual channel will stay active primarily for headless setups (servers, etc.), but otherwise, organizations will need to move faster.

It’s probably a win overall, though I understand enterprise hesitations around frequent updates. Still, this is where Microsoft’s heading—they’re bringing organizations along with them.

Focus Tool: Freedom

Something totally different now—a distraction blocker called Freedom. I’d forgotten about it until Chris blogged about it with some great screenshots. It’s easy to use—you set a session length and choose what gets blocked. It’s incredibly helpful when you’re juggling work and your brain starts to wander to LinkedIn, Teams, etc.

Give it a try if staying in the zone is a challenge for you.

Wrapping Up

It’s a big week—we’ve got Commsverse coming up and EPPC in Europe as well. If you’re attending either, have a great time. Let me know how it goes if you’re in Europe. Otherwise, have a fantastic week and I’ll see you all next time!