[REVISION HISTORY]

Microsoft platform adds research and hosting tools

Updated 4 times since CLSTR started tracking revisions of this situation.

What changed

2026-08-17 14:05 UTC → 2026-09-04 22:03 UTC · added ~~removed~~

Microsoft’s AI development platform has continued to mature since the April 2026 launch of the Unified Agent Framework, which merged the Semantic Kernel and AutoGen SDKs into a GA-ready offering for .NET and Python. That launch also introduced an Agent Host Protocol in Visual Studio Code, moving AI coding agents such as GitHub Copilot, Claude and Codex into dedicated host threads to enable shared sessions across windows and machines. In early August, Microsoft announced the general availability of its Discovery platform, providing a production-ready environment for scientists and research teams to coordinate data analysis, hypothesis generation, experimentation and knowledge management. At the same Build 2026 event, the Agent Framework was promoted to version 1.0 GA, adding the Agent Harness and Foundry Hosted Agents as a supported runtime for multi-step AI agents. The harness includes built-in function invocation, history persistence, tool approval and OpenTelemetry, while the hosted service is billed on consumption. A graph-based knowledge engine links proprietary research data with external scientific information, and a preview desktop app is offered via GitHub. On 5 August, Visual Studio Code 1.132 was released with an enhanced Agent Host process that isolates Copilot, Claude and Codex, supports remote connections over SSH or dev tunnels, and introduces side-chat interactions, browser-based element annotation, and on-device multilingual dictation powered by the Nemotron 3.5 model. On 11 August, Visual Studio Code 1.133 introduced a significant architectural shift by decoupling AI agent operations from the editor’s extension host via a dedicated Agent Host process. This ~~allows agent sessions to run in the background even after an editor window is closed and enables shared access across multiple windows, web dashboards, or CLI tools. This~~ release also introduced the Agent Host Protocol (AHP) as an open MIT-licensed specification. On 4 September, Microsoft released Visual Studio Code 1.136, further refining the management of AI coding agents through the dedicated Agent Host process. This update supports the Agent Host Protocol (AHP), an open, agent-agnostic protocol based on JSON-RPC.

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