Microsoft Build 2026 Lands in San Francisco, PowerShell Conference Europe 2026 Wraps Up in Wiesbaden
+ Tony Redmond on Container Management Labels for Security Groups
Microsoft Build 2026 Lands in San Francisco
Build returned outside Seattle for the first time since 2016, with Satya Nadella opening at Fort Mason on Tuesday morning to about 2,500 developers in the room. The framing this year was AI agents finally maturing from demo to deployment, and the announcement list reflects that shift. GitHub Copilot now has a native desktop app with agentic workflows in preview, Project Rayfin offers a managed backend on Microsoft Fabric using workflows defined in GitHub, the Surface RTX Spark Dev Box puts one petaflop of compute and 128 gigabytes of unified memory on a developer’s desk for running 120 billion parameter models locally, and Microsoft introduced seven new MAI models including MAI-Thinking-1 for reasoning and MAI-Code-1 tuned for GitHub and VS Code. Foundry Local reached general availability, Azure AI Foundry can now route across models per task, Agent 365 expanded its enterprise governance footprint, and GPT-5.5 arrived with Tier 5 and 6 quota. A lot to digest.
https://build.microsoft.com/
PowerShell Conference Europe 2026 Wraps Up in Wiesbaden
The tenth edition of PSConfEU ran June 1 through June 4 at the Dorint Pallas Hotel in Wiesbaden, drawing more than 300 attendees, around 40 speakers, and roughly 70 sessions across four packed days. SynEdgy pulled off another solid year with deep technical content from the usual heavyweights, the return of PoshaKucha at twenty slides by twenty seconds each, and the Monday bike tour winding 30 kilometers along the Rhine to Eltville. Steven Bucher delivered three sessions including State of the Shell, Thorsten Butz took the stage with another fresh AI talk, and the broader Devolutions team showcased work on PowerShell Universal that included the first public demo of their AI integration since acquiring the platform. Ten years in, the community still feels like the heart of why this event matters.
https://psconf.eu/
Argument Completers, Dynamic Parameters, and More from Ben Reader at PSConfEU 2026
Ben Reader, the pipeline daddy at Patch My PC, walked through how to build better PowerShell functions in his PSConfEU 2026 session, framed around a database access problem that he kept needing to extend across four revisions of the same script. He starts with the basics that most of us already use like validate set, validate range, and validate pattern, then moves into the more advanced ground of custom validate classes, registered argument completers, inline completers, dynamic parameters, and finally his preferred approach of building completers as their own .NET classes that the function parameter references through a clean attribute. The walkthrough is the kind of thing you can drop right into your next module, and the recording landed alongside the rest of the PSConfEU 2026 sessions this week.
Devolutions Brings AI to PowerShell Universal at PSConfEU
Adam Driscoll took the stage at PSConfEU to walk through what has shipped in PowerShell Universal since the Devolutions acquisition, and the headline was the first public demonstration of AI capabilities integrated into the platform. Marc-André Moreau followed with a separate session on implementing PSRemoting at Devolutions covering PowerShell SDK limitations, WinRM quirks, TrustedHosts behavior, and the practical realities of NTLM and Kerberos authentication in production software. The booth ran live demos throughout the conference, and if you missed Adam’s session in person it should land in the public recording archive in the coming weeks.
Foundry Local Reaches General Availability at Build
Among the busy slate of Build announcements, Foundry Local stepping into general availability stood out for anyone running model inference closer to the user. The runtime now ships as a supported product rather than a preview, and pairs naturally with the new Surface RTX Spark Dev Box for developers who want to actually run models that previously had to live in the cloud. Together with the seven new MAI models and Azure AI Foundry’s new ability to route across models, the story Microsoft is telling is one of choice across local and cloud and across providers, which is a welcome shift.
https://www.tomsguide.com/news/live/microsoft-build-2026
Tony Redmond on Container Management Labels for Security Groups
Tony Redmond walks through Microsoft’s new preview that brings container management labels to Entra ID security groups. The scope is currently narrow with just one control available, the AllowToAddGuests setting that determines whether guest accounts can be members. Tony makes the case that even this single lever is meaningful because guest access to sensitive security groups has long been a quiet risk that nobody had a clean way to prevent.
https://office365itpros.com/2026/06/03/security-groups-labels/
Tracking Distribution List Changes with PowerShell
A reader question about reporting distribution list changes prompted Tony Redmond to walk through how to do it properly given that distribution lists are Exchange Online objects rather than Entra ID groups. The same general PowerShell structure used for Microsoft 365 group change reporting applies, but the audit records and the actual code look quite different. Worth a read if you have ever opened a ticket asking who removed a manager from a critical list.
https://office365itpros.com/2026/06/02/distribution-list-changes/
MicrosoftPlaces PowerShell Module Hits 2.1.9
Andres Bohren posted at Icewolf about Microsoft pushing version 2.1.9 of the MicrosoftPlaces PowerShell module to the gallery. The release notes are thin since 2.1.8, but the headline is that the Object reference not set to an instance of an Object error that plagued 2.1.7 and 2.1.8 has been fixed. If you skipped the last two releases for that reason, this is the version to install.
What’s New in Microsoft Entra June 2026
The Entra team published their June roundup with a handful of items that admins will want to track. Passkey policies now get their own dedicated 20 kilobyte allocation in the authentication methods policy rather than sharing a single bucket with everything else, and the maximum number of passkey profiles per tenant goes from three to ten. There is also a reminder that the MFA enforcement for passwordless credential registration completes rollout by July 13, 2026, so if you have not finished your conditional access work for that, the clock is real.
Handling Loop Workspaces for Departed Users
Tony Redmond covers Microsoft finally rolling out a workflow to deal with personal Loop workspaces left behind when employees leave a tenant. The process is unfortunately manual with limited automation possible, but at least the framework now exists to review and preserve workspace content rather than losing it. Two years from announcement to rollout is not fast, but it is finally here.
https://office365itpros.com/2026/06/04/user-owned-loop-workspaces/
Office 365 for IT Pros June 2026 Update and 2027 Plans
The 132nd monthly update for the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook is now available for subscribers, and Tony Redmond used the post to share what is coming for the 2027 edition. The book is being renamed, a new chapter on Copilot and agents is being added, and two topics are being split out into their own books covering Microsoft Purview and the Power Platform. If you have been wondering when the ecosystem would finally outgrow a single volume, the answer is now.
https://office365itpros.com/2026/06/01/office-365-for-it-pros-132/
Upcoming Events
Experts Live UK (formerly Workplace Ninjas UK, rebranded for 2026) June 11-12, 2026 at CodeNode, London. That’s next week, not late summer.
https://eluk26.expertslive.co.uk/
MMS Midway Edition 2026 October 25-28, 2026 in San Diego. That’s fall, not late summer.
https://mmsmoa.com/