Microsoft has released .NET 11 Release Candidate 2 under a go-live license, supported in Visual Studio 2026 Insiders. The release adds incremental CBOR reading, experimental post-quantum cryptography APIs, file-based app directive improvements, NuGet package cooldowns, F# runtime async building blocks, a C# UI option for .NET MAUI, and refined Windows Forms visual styles. By Almir Vuk
Rachel Lee Nabors, former React core team member, dives into the architecture and philosophy behind local-first applications, exploring how small language models (SLMs) running directly on-device can deliver privacy-focused, low-latency, and cost-effective alternatives to cloud-hosted LLM wrappers. By Rachel Lee Nabors
The article examines the transition from microservices to agentic AI architecture in distributed systems. Microservices allow for functional decomposition, while agentic systems focus on decision decomposition. This shift introduces new complexities in observability, reliability, and system design, highlighting the need for updated architectural patterns and practices. By Mallika Rao
Based on Gemma 4 and released under the Apache 2.0 license, Google's EmbeddingGemma 2 is a compact, open-weight, multimodal embedding model designed to make semantic search and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) more efficient while optimizing performance for on-device deployment. By Sergio De Simone
Continuous integration provider Buildkite has introduced pipeline-scoped secrets and new Model Context Protocol tools for validating pipelines, diagnosing failed builds and repairing webhooks. The company has also added Linux arm64 support to its GitHub Actions compatibility layer and expanded OpenTelemetry data in Buildkite Agent v4.1.0. By Matt Saunders
