Published: 2026-05-20
Source: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/5-highlights-thursday-21st-may-2026-111-edition-taswar-bhatti-kwige
Here is the #111 edition of 5 Highlights Thursday. I hope this newsletter will help you in your Azure journey and keep you informed. Feel free to forward this along to anyone who you think may enjoy or better ask them to subscribe.
1. STATE-Bench – Memory-agnostic Benchmark
Join Jorge Arteiro, Lewis Liu, Pablo Castro and Nishant Yadav where they introduce STATE-Bench is a new open-source benchmark designed to measure whether memory actually improves AI agent performance on realistic, stateful enterprise tasks. Instead of testing simple recall, it evaluates how agents handle procedural workflows, reliability across repeated runs, efficiency, and user experience in domains like customer support, travel, and shopping. In this episode, we’ll explore why traditional memory benchmarks fall short, how STATE-Bench closes that gap, and what it means to “bring your own memory” to a benchmark built for production readiness.
2. Estimate costs with confidence using the new Sentinel Cost Estimator
Join Product Manager Shubh Khandhadia who introduces the new Microsoft Sentinel Cost Estimator, a web-based tool on the Microsoft Sentinel pricing page that helps sellers, customers, and partners estimate costs before deployment. Learn how to access and use the estimator, model ingestion, storage, and query costs, understand key meters and included benefits, and build 3-year projections to support more effective long-term planning.
3. Grok 4.3 in Microsoft Foundry: A Practical C# Guide for Developers
Content: Grok 4.3 in Microsoft Foundry: A Practical C# Guide for Developers – Taswar Bhatti
Here is a blog post I wrote about Grok 4.3 with sample code in C# on how to use it. Check it out and tell me what you think?
4. Security Copilot chat experience in Microsoft Defender
Join Senior Product Manager Yuval Derman for this episode to discuss the Security Copilot chat experience in Microsoft Defender and how assistive AI is transforming modern security operations. Learn how Security Copilot serves as the AI layer across Microsoft’s integrated security platform, enabling SOC teams to work faster and more effectively through context-aware, natural language experiences embedded directly into their workflow. Discover how analysts can investigate incidents, correlate signals across alerts, identities, and devices, and accelerate response actions using real-time Defender telemetry.
5. Azure MCP and Azure Skills
Explore Azure MCP Server and Azure Skills working together to extend AI capabilities across Azure services. In this video, we walk through the developer experience in VS Code, showing how to configure, run, and interact with Azure Skills seamlessly.
As always, please give me feedback on LinkedIn. Which bullet above is your favorite? What do you want more or less of? Other suggestions? Please let me know.
Last by not least, know someone who might be interested in this newsletter? Share it with them.
Have a wonderful Thursday 🙂
Taswar