EP35 | What Needs to Exist Around a Model

Richard and David are back together this week, and David has been saving things up. The episode starts with a practical conversation about how both hosts actually manage content discovery, which turns into an honest account of what Richard's Knowledge Hub app does and where it still falls short.

David's segment covers a lot of ground but lands in a consistent place. The MCP release candidate gets the most technical treatment, including a walkthrough of what stateless protocol core actually means in architectural terms and why the previous session-pinning behaviour was a genuine infrastructure problem. He follows that with Azure Container Apps Express, positioned as an agent-first runtime that addresses a real friction point in large organisations, and the AI Red Teaming Agent in Microsoft Foundry, which David uses as a way into one of the more important security concepts for agentic systems: indirect prompt injection. The ZoomIt segment wraps it all together, partly because Mark Russinovich's demo went spectacularly wrong on camera and they kept it all in, and partly because David uses it to pull a connecting thread through everything he covered.

Richard's soapbox landed mid-conversation, prompted by a Microsoft podcast he'd been listening to that week. The argument: the AI adoption conversation is presenting as fresh insight something that was said word for word about Microsoft 365 in 2017. Same language, same frameworks, same metrics. Richard also covers the Copilot Credit Pre-Purchase Plan, which he discovered the night before recording, including the commercial architecture behind it and the ACD stacking question that the documentation does not answer.

The episode closes with computer-using agents going generally available in Copilot Studio, a brief cross-industry tour including Google's shutdown of Project Mariner, the Perplexity/Amazon court case, and what to expect from Build 2026.

Links

• MCP 2026-07-28 Release Candidate
• Azure Container Apps Express (Microsoft Learn)
• AI Red Teaming Agent in Azure AI Foundry
• Microsoft 2026 Work Trend Index
• Windows 365 and Azure Virtual Desktop expanding access
• Modern Azure Resilience with Mark Russinovich
• EventLogExpert on GitHub
• ZoomIt (Sysinternals)
• Mark and Scott Learn
• Microsoft Copilot Credit Pre-Purchase Plan
• Microsoft Agent Factory
• Copilot Studio computer-using agents GA
• Microsoft Build 2026

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Null Invocation, Monochrome Pulse