Weekly Update 6 October 2025 – Agents in 365 Copilot, Hello Judson, AI Roadmap for Visual Studio

This week:

Empower your workforce with agents in Microsoft 365 Copilot

Know Your Microsoft Execs: Meet Judson Althoff

Sort Lines in Source Code

Roadmap for AI in Visual Studio (October)

You can also listen to the audio-only version: Thoughtstuff Podcast – Tom Morgan on Teams Dev: Weekly Update 6 October 2025.

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Transcript (AI-Generated)

Hello and welcome to another weekly update. I hope you’re doing well.

This week’s a bit of a mixed bag — no big standout stories but plenty of interesting things to cover.

To start, there’s a blog post titled “Empowering Your Workforce with Agents in Microsoft 365 Copilot.” It’s written by Srini Raghavan, CVP for the Copilot ecosystem. The main point is the rebranding of the agent store to the “Microsoft Marketplace.” While that’s mostly a naming change, the takeaway is the growing importance of agents — especially third-party ones — to the Microsoft 365 ecosystem.

Agents, developed by partners, ISVs and indie developers, are key to driving engagement and usage of Copilot. It’s a familiar story — we saw it play out previously with Skype for Business and Teams where apps and integrations increased stickiness and user engagement. Microsoft benefits from enabling developers to create and publish these tools, and the blog closes with a helpful set of links if you’re just starting out.

Next, I called out a recent organizational change at Microsoft. Judson Althoff has taken on a broader role within the company’s executive structure. For those unfamiliar with him — myself included — Mary Jo Foley from Directions on Microsoft has published a great post titled “Know Your Microsoft Execs: Meet Judson Althoff.” It’s a handy resource, especially when these names come up socially, and you want to know the backstory.

Jumping over to the Google Testing Blog, I wanted to share a fun and low-key post from their “Tech on the Toilet” series. These are small bits of technical advice — historically posted in restrooms at Google — and one recent piece talks about the benefits of keeping variables alphabetically sorted in source code. It’s a simple idea that helps prevent logical errors like duplicate variable declarations, which are much easier to spot in sorted lists.

Lastly, I reviewed a roadmap update for big Visual Studio — yes, full Visual Studio, not VS Code. As we move toward Visual Studio 2026 (now available as a preview), it’s worth remembering how many new capabilities are being added, particularly AI-powered features. From debugger agents to performance improvements and newer Copilot models, this roundup is a fantastic reminder to step back and check if you’re making use of the latest features. It’s too easy to get stuck in old ways of working on legacy projects — I’m guilty of that myself.

That’s it for this week. Thanks for watching or listening, and I hope you have a fantastic week — whatever you’re working on. See you next time.