Weekly Update 17 November 2025 – App Hovercards, WindowsEdgeLight, Azure MCP Sever for VS26

This week:

Add app profile hovercard to your agent or app.

WindowsEdgeLight: A lightweight WPF application that adds a customizable glowing edge light effect around your primary monitor

Azure MCP Server Now Built-In with Visual Studio 2026: A New Era for Agentic Workflows

You can also listen to the audio-only version here: Thoughtstuff Podcast – Tom Morgan on Teams Dev: Weekly Update 17 November 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. Hope you’re doing well. Apologies in advance for any technical weirdness on this video. Bit of excitement this week – I turned on my main desktop computer on Friday, and nothing happened. So, I’m recording this on a backup rig. Hopefully it all sounds and looks mostly okay.

New Microsoft Teams Hover Card Experience

Let’s talk about some of the things going on this week. First up — there’s a new feature in Microsoft Teams for developers which allows better advertising of what your app does before users even install it. This is thanks to a new hover card experience.

Now when users hover over your app’s icon in Teams, they’ll see a bit more than just the name and short description. Developers can embed richer details simply by updating the app manifest. This feature is currently in developer preview, so you can start experimenting now. It’s good news for discoverability, always a challenge for Teams apps.

This may also hint at broader changes on the horizon — potentially increased integration with agentic workflows or even a more aggressive app roll-out strategy leading up to Ignite.

Scott Hanselman’s “Edge Light” Clone for Windows

In the hardware-meets-software niche: Scott Hanselman took inspiration from a Mac-only feature called Edge Light — essentially using the outer edges of your monitor as a virtual ring light to improve video conference quality. He recreated it using WPF in Windows and open-sourced the tool on GitHub. It wraps white lighting around your screen and improves your on-camera image for Teams or Zoom calls.

I think it’s a great example of vibe coding — when you know what you want to make and use AI tools to accelerate the process. There are also some interesting technologies in Scott’s implementation, particularly ones for auto-updating WPF apps. Definitely something I want to look deeper into.

Visual Studio 2026 to Integrate Azure MCP Server

One more big announcement this week — Visual Studio 2026 will ship with built-in integration for an Azure MCP (Microsoft Copilot Platform) server. This means Visual Studio will have deep, native integration with Azure services, letting developers deploy more efficiently using AI assistance.

This isn’t just about automation — developers will have granular control over what the tooling can do, such as filtering out certain Azure permissions to avoid overreach. I like this direction a lot — it makes the development-to-deployment lifecycle smoother while still respecting developer intent.

Looking Ahead to Microsoft Ignite

It was a quieter news week overall, which is expected with Microsoft Ignite kicking off tomorrow. I didn’t do an agenda pick this year — mostly for time reasons — but also because this year’s Ignite feels different. There are rumors that Satya Nadella won’t be delivering the keynote, which might be a sign that something interesting is happening strategically.

As expected, AI and agentic behaviors will be front and center. The big question is: can Microsoft keep the momentum going? Many internal folks are feeling the burn from a big year. But there have been some great launches — like the Visual Studio Azure tools mentioned above — so I’m hopeful the announcements this week continue that trend.

That’s all for now. Enjoy Ignite, and I’ll see you next week with a full roundup of the top announcements and analysis. Have a great week!