Weekly Update 22 December 2025 – AIContextProvider, Copilot AI Insights API GA, VS2026 Debugging

Microsoft Agent Framework: Giving Agents Contextual Memory Using AIContextProvider

Copilot AI Insights (meeting recap) API is now generally available!

Get AI-generated meeting summaries with Meeting AI Insights API

Debugging, but Without the Drama (A Visual Studio 2026 Story)

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Transcript (AI-generated)

Hello and welcome to another weekly update. I hope you’re doing well. We’re in the final couple of weeks of the year. Not loads and loads of news flying around, but there are still some interesting things coming out — and from some unusual places. We’ll talk about that in a moment.

AI Context Provider for Microsoft Agents

First up, I want to highlight a blog post by fellow MVP Jamie Maguire. He’s been publishing a lot of high-quality content recently, especially on the pro-code side of building bots using the Microsoft Agent Framework.

This latest post is about using the AI Context Provider to give your bots contextual memory. It’s a follow-up to a demo he included in an earlier blog. Really useful stuff if you’re working with agent frameworks and want to let your bots remember what users tell them. All the code is included in the post, making it a fantastic resource.

This reminds me of when I was doing similar pro-code work, especially around UCMA. At the time, you had to document everything yourself or risk forgetting it entirely. It’s great that Jamie is putting this knowledge out there publicly.

CoPilot AI Insights API Goes GA

Microsoft’s Copilot AI Insights API (formerly known as the meeting recap API) has reached General Availability. This API gives you access to AI-generated summaries of meetings via API after those meetings have finished.

Now that it’s GA, it has better support, a longer life cycle, and more stability. Microsoft typically gives two years’ notice before deprecating GA endpoints, unlike beta ones which can disappear at any time and aren’t supported. This is a solid step forward.

Oddly, the announcement came in a GitHub Discussion instead of an official blog post. Maybe marketing will catch up in the new year.

Important to note: this API only works for users with a Microsoft 365 Copilot license and currently requires user-delegated permissions — not ideal for headless or large-scale implementations. We’ll need to see if that changes over time.

Also, there are limits: meeting summaries may take up to four hours post-meeting to become available. No real-time data here — developers will need to build around that delay, perhaps with polling logic.

Visual Studio 2026 Debugging Enhancements

Visual Studio 2026 is still on my radar, and a great blog post caught my attention. It’s a kind of narrative walkthrough — like a story — focusing on debugging without the drama. It highlights some genuinely helpful features like enhanced exception analysis, inline values, and better unit testing tools.

If you’re like me, your debugging techniques may be stuck in the past from when you first learned. Tools like conditional breakpoints were life-changing for me when they first came out. Every developer should know about them — but often, they don’t! This blog is a good reminder to revisit and update your knowledge.

Wrapping Up the Year

As the year ends, I’ve been reflecting on what a big twelve months it’s been for AI – particularly Copilot and its developer extensibility. Progress may have been slower than in early hype years, but it’s been steady, with important milestones reached. I’m looking forward to seeing what 2026 brings.

No weekly update from me next week – I’ll see you in the new year. Whatever you’re up to, have a great time. Merry Christmas if that’s your thing!