What's new this week: Avalonia, .NET, Visual Basic, and the Microsoft choices that hit developers

This is a weekly roundup of Avalonia, VB.NET, C#, and anything Microsoft does that I think a working developer should know about. This is a heavy week. Patch Tuesday landed on .NET with an unauthenticated DoS in ASP.NET Core, MAUI publicly committed to dropping Mono on mobile in .NET 11, the VS 2026 May feature update shipped with the Copilot agent UX everyone was waiting on, and Nadella testified in open court about not wanting to become the next IBM.

The structural-pressure thread from the 2026-05-02 edition kept producing. Court testimony confirming the OpenAI restructure, a Microsoft voluntary buyout offer to thousands of employees with the AI organisation explicitly ring-fenced, GitLab cutting staff to fund an agentic-platform rewrite, the EU AI Act simplification deal that quietly favoured incumbents. Same pressure, same direction.

Window for this edition: 2026-05-01 through 2026-05-15. Filter unchanged: would this change what a working developer does on Monday morning. Everything that fails that test got cut.

This week's triage

If you do nothing else this week, do these three things.

1. Install May 2026 Patch Tuesday .NET servicing. 10.0.8, 9.0.16, and 8.0.27 dropped 2026-05-12, rolling four CVEs across the line. The one that matters is CVE-2026-42899, an unauthenticated infinite-loop DoS in ASP.NET Core. Any public-facing Kestrel or IIS-hosted app is exposed. Visual Studio 18.5.3 (security-only) and 18.6.0 (the May feature update) both carry the runtime fix, so taking either VS update closes the gap on the dev machine at the same time.
2. Grep your packages.lock.json and .csproj files for IR.DantUI, IR.OscarUI, IR.Infrastructure.Core, IR.Infrastructure.DataService.Core, and IR.iplus32. Socket caught five malicious NuGet packages typosquatting Chinese .NET UI libraries earlier this month, totalling roughly 65,000 downloads before takedown. The payload is a credential stealer that grabs browser-stored credentials, SSH keys, and crypto wallets. If you mirror NuGet for an offline build environment, refresh the deny list.
3. If you pay for GitHub Copilot, pull the April usage report. It went live 2026-05-12. The June 1 cutover converts Premium Request Units to GitHub AI Credits priced per token, and the April data is the only modelable signal before the meter actually turns on. Pro and Pro+ users get the report on their own account; Business and Enterprise admins pull it for the org.

Detail on each below.

Avalonia

A security drop and a quiet repo elsewhere.

Avalonia 12.0.3 and 11.3.15 both landed on 2026-05-11. The change in each is a single dependency bump: SharpCompress from 0.41 to 0.48 on the 12.x line, and from 0.24 to 0.48 on the 11.x maintenance line. That dependency lives inside the VNC backend and any code path that hands user-supplied archives to IArchive.WriteToDirectory. The CVE it closes (CVE-2026-44788) is a classic zip-slip: a malicious archive can write outside the intended extract directory. Most Avalonia apps do not touch the VNC backend or accept archive input, so the patch is small. If you do hit either path, it is non-optional.

12.0.3 release notes: https://github.com/AvaloniaUI/Avalonia/releases/tag/12.0.3. 11.3.15: https://github.com/AvaloniaUI/Avalonia/releases/tag/11.3.15.

Several fixes merged in the window but did not ship in 12.0.3, so they land in a future patch. Flagging them because they touch surface areas where a regression pass is cheap. Touch and pen capture semantics are being realigned to match Mouse (PR #21325), which matters for any custom input handling on Android, embedded Linux SBC, or Surface targets. The Android system back event handler is getting a double-pop fix (PR #21246). On macOS, GPU interop callers are getting the right DeviceLuid byte order out of the platform layer (PR #21293), which matters if you do Direct3D-to-Metal or Metal interop. And WindowDrawnDecorations is finally getting a transparent background fix (PR #21354), so custom-decorated 12.x windows stop bleeding opaque pixels through.

Nothing from the third-party theme libraries this week. Material.Avalonia 3.16.1 landed 2026-04-30, one day before the window. Semi.Avalonia is still on 12.0.1. FluentAvalonia is still on 2.5.1. AvaloniaRider is still at v1.11.0 from March.

The Avalonia for VS Code extension repo went quiet. The public AvaloniaUI/AvaloniaVSCode last code commit is 2026-04-15 (README-only changes after that), and active development has moved into the closed Avalonia Accelerate repo. This is consistent with the Accelerate licensing announcement from earlier in the year, but it does mean the open-source side of the tooling story is going to drift. The marketplace extension still updates because it is published from the Accelerate side, but anyone tracking the open-source IDE story should know the public repo has effectively been frozen. That is the structural cost of the Accelerate model showing up in observable form.

Where I sit on my own work: still on 11.x. The 11.3.15 patch is the only thing that touches my code this week, and the SharpCompress path I do not use. Holding.

.NET

Two anchor items this week: the May servicing wave, and .NET 11 Preview 4 ahead of Build.

Security: May 2026 Patch Tuesday

.NET 10.0.8, 9.0.16, and 8.0.27 all shipped on 2026-05-12 with four CVEs in the roll-up. The one to read first is CVE-2026-42899, an infinite-loop denial-of-service in ASP.NET Core that is unauthenticated and remotely reachable. Any application that hosts under Kestrel or behind IIS is exposed, which is essentially every production ASP.NET Core app outside of an internal-only network. The other three are local: CVE-2026-32177 is a heap-based buffer overflow in the .NET runtime (CVSS 7.3, elevation of privilege), CVE-2026-35433 is a second EoP in the same affected range, and CVE-2026-32175 is a tampering vulnerability in .NET Core. All four fixes ride together. If you maintain build agents that run untrusted code, the local EoP set matters as much as the network DoS does.

Visual Studio 18.5.3 and 18.6.0 (both dated 2026-05-12) roll in the same runtime patch, so taking either VS update closes the gap on the dev machine at the same time. Servicing announcement: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/dotnet-and-dotnet-framework-may-2026-servicing-updates/. Individual CVE issues: https://github.com/dotnet/announcements/issues/397 (the DoS), and 396, 398, 399 for the rest.

.NET 11 Preview 4

Preview 4 shipped on 2026-05-12 and is the first preview where the runtime-async work crosses from compiler experiment into the libraries. Microsoft published a benchmark on a representative async-heavy library workload: 80 ms down to 32 ms, allocations from 687 MB down to 94 KB. Those numbers are not a synthetic loop, they are from a library that already used async/await and is now running with the lowered call sites. If your codebase has async-heavy libraries (especially anything that does fan-out and re-await), this is the preview to spin up a parallel CI branch on. The closer to GA you start that work, the more likely a real behaviour change ships into your release window without you noticing.

The other library work in Preview 4 is span-based APIs for Deflate, ZLib, and GZip. If you currently route bytes through MemoryStream and arrays to keep the JIT happy, those become legitimate Span<T> calls and drop a layer of allocation. Modest gains, free if you are touching that code anyway.

The Process API got an overhaul. The new surface lets you start a process, capture stdout and stderr, and avoid deadlocks without manually wiring up two reader tasks. Adam Sitnik's deep dive on 2026-05-13 is the practical reference if you maintain any process-launching code, because the old patterns are about to look dated even if they still work. https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/process-api-improvements-in-dotnet-11/

Smaller items in the preview: dotnet watch picked up device selection for MAUI and mobile targets, which makes inner-loop testing on real hardware tractable. SDK telemetry is moving from Application Insights to OpenTelemetry. And VBCSCompiler gets an optional build-server caching mode that should help cold-build times. Preview announcement: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/dotnet-11-preview-4/

.NET MAUI moves to CoreCLR on mobile

Filed under .NET because it is a runtime story, not a UI-framework one. On 2026-05-13 Microsoft announced that .NET MAUI defaults to CoreCLR on iOS, Android, and Mac Catalyst starting in .NET 11. The previous default was Mono. This is the long-rumoured "one runtime everywhere" migration finally landing on the user-facing side, and it is a bigger deal than a normal MAUI release note implies. Code that depended on Mono-specific behaviour (interop edge cases, GC pause patterns, AOT compilation specifics) needs to be exercised on the new runtime before .NET 11 GA. MAUI shops should be running Preview 4 against their app's CI matrix now, not in October. https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/dotnet-maui-moves-to-coreclr-in-dotnet-11/

C# language

The C# language design meeting on 2026-05-13 picked up the "unsafe evolution" thread again. A safe marker, unsafe on types and fields, explicit layout, and constructor edge cases all got LDM discussion. None of it is shippable Monday, but the direction is becoming clear: C# is going to let you opt into more memory-layout control without dropping into pointers. Notes: https://github.com/dotnet/csharplang/blob/main/meetings/2026/LDM-2026-05-13.md

The actionable language item this week is that the partial extension members proposal merged on 2026-05-07 (PR #10126). If you write extension-heavy fluent APIs, this is the syntax change to know about: you can split an extension across multiple files the same way partial classes work today. Two related speclet PRs (#10173, #10180) and a collection-expression spread optimisation (#10179) merged later in the window.

No movement on the discriminated-union work covered in the 2026-05-02 edition. The most recent activity was earlier in April. C# 15 unions remain preview-only, hand-declared UnionAttribute and IUnion still required.

Community

Daniel Roth published "Copilot Studio gets faster with .NET 10 on WebAssembly" on 2026-05-07, a concrete Blazor WASM perf-win case study with numbers worth borrowing. https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/copilot-studio-dotnet-10-migration/. Andrew Lock has a post on Git 2.54 features (rebase, hooks, statistics) from 2026-05-12, not .NET-specific but Git is everyone's. https://andrewlock.net/new-features-in-git-2-54-easier-rebasing-hooks-and-statistcs/. Steve Gordon, Khalid Abuhakmeh, Nick Chapsas, and Maarten Balliauw all quiet in window. Build prep season.

Visual Basic

The honest week is honest again. dotnet/vblang main is still at the same 2024-12-17 commit it was at last edition. Seventeen months of no movement on the language repo, no in-window VB-specific touches inside dotnet/roslyn worth noting, no VB-tagged posts on the .NET devblog, and no community VB content surfacing in search.

The story is the same as the 2026-05-02 edition's. The compiler still gets serviced via Roslyn, the language repo is effectively in archive mode, and that is fine. The remaining VB.NET maintenance work is real and the language is still in production at scale, but Microsoft has nothing new to say about it and the community has run out of fresh things to write. That is the news.

One thing I have been thinking about, though: Avalonia, VB.NET, and the modern runtime. Avalonia is XAML on the surface, but underneath it is straightforward .NET that any language in the family can reference. Nothing in the runtime stops a VB.NET project from pulling Avalonia in, wiring up windows in code, and writing event handlers the same way WinForms taught a generation of us to do. For developers who built a career on the WinForms event-driven model, that combination is the closest thing to a continuation of the language they actually shipped in, on a UI stack that has a future. The same Handles and event-handler patterns the muscle memory already knows, running on the modern runtime, and as a bonus the same VB.NET source compiling to Linux, macOS, and Windows binaries from one project. WinForms was never going to do that. Whether the tooling fully cooperates with a .vbproj is the kind of thing I would have to actually try. Maybe I should.

Microsoft choices that affect developers

Visual Studio 2026

The May feature update landed in window. 18.6.0 shipped 2026-05-12 with the Copilot UX work the prior Update was teasing. The headline items are Planning Mode (plan-before-code, the same pattern Cursor and Claude Code's plan tools popularised), Agent Skills management for the inline-agent experience, and a multi-file diff view for accepting Copilot-generated changes across more than one file at once. The auto-switching system dark and light theme follow is a small thing that has been on the request list for years. MSVC Build Tools also ticked to v14.51 with continuing C23 work, which only matters if you live on the C side.

18.5.3 dropped the same day as a security-only servicing release for shops not ready to jump to 18.6. It carries the same four .NET CVEs from the May Patch Tuesday roll-up plus a SQLite CVE (CVE-2025-6965). If you are pinned to the 18.5.x channel, that is the floor.

No 18.4.x LTSC servicing in window. Release notes: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/releases/2026/release-notes.

VS Code

VS Code 1.120 shipped 2026-05-13. The headline is that the Agents Window is promoted to Stable, so what was the experimental multi-project agent orchestration surface is now a default-on feature. The release also adds a configurable "thinking effort" knob for reasoning models, a BYOK token-usage meter (essential context if you are modelling Copilot bills, see below), and the new terminal risk badges: any command an agent is about to run gets tagged Safe, Caution, or Review-carefully before execution. That last one is the agent-era guardrail that finally makes "let the agent run commands" defensible in a serious shop. 1.119 shipped earlier in window and was a normal monthly drop; 1.120 is the one that matters. Release notes: https://code.visualstudio.com/updates.

GitHub Copilot

The June 1 usage-based billing cutover is two weeks out and the in-window news is mostly that the preparation tooling now exists. The April usage reports went live on 2026-05-12. Pro and Pro+ users can pull their own activity mapped to AI Credits, with model breakdown, top consumers, and projected monthly cost. Business and Enterprise admins pull it at the org level. This is the only window to model the bill before the meter turns on, and if you have not done it on Monday, you have run out of grace. Changelog: https://github.blog/changelog/2026-05-12-april-reports-are-now-available-to-prepare-for-usage-based-billing/.

The other Copilot release this week is the cross-family critic that landed on 2026-05-07. Rubber Duck in Copilot CLI now reviews a GPT session with Claude and vice versa, so you get a second-opinion model coverage with no setup. For working developers this is the closest thing to a free sanity check on a model's answer before you commit to it. https://github.blog/changelog/2026-05-07-rubber-duck-in-github-copilot-cli-now-supports-more-models/

The Copilot-in-VS-Code April recap (releases 1.116 through 1.119) summarises the work that was bedded down before 1.120: semantic search across repos and orgs, an experimental /chronicle chat-history query, agent inline diffs, browser-tab sharing, terminal read and write for the agent, and BYOK extended to Business and Enterprise. https://github.blog/changelog/2026-05-06-github-copilot-in-visual-studio-code-april-releases/

Copilot code review on private repos also starts consuming GitHub Actions minutes on 2026-06-01, same cutover.

Windows tooling

Quiet week. The headline drop is Windows Terminal 1.24.11321.0 stable and 1.25.1322.0 preview, both 2026-05-13. The interesting addition is a new safeUriSchemes setting that makes the URL warning behaviour configurable rather than all-or-nothing. If your terminal pastes URLs from agent output or LLM-generated content, this lets you tighten the warning surface without turning it off. The same release fixes Sixel memory allocation, disables the Store licensing check that was slowing launch, and corrects tab-title reset behaviour. https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/releases

WSL had nothing. The current latest tag in the public repo is 2.7.3 from 2026-04-25. A correction to the previous edition while I'm here: the 2026-05-02 roundup listed WSL "2.8.3" and "2.8.4" as April releases. Those versions do not exist in the microsoft/WSL repo. I had bad data that week, and the actual latest tag is 2.7.3. Apologies for the noise.

winget has nothing stable in window. Preview builds 1.29.160 and 1.29.170 ticked through but 1.28.240 remains the stable for production boxes. PowerShell is in the same shape: 7.7.0-preview.1 dropped 2026-05-01 and the supported GA lines (7.6.1, 7.5.6, 7.4.15) remain on the April servicing drop.

.NET MAUI

.NET MAUI 11.0.0-preview.4 dropped 2026-05-13. Headline additions are the Blazor Web App template refresh for .NET 11, a Completed command on Editor, and Shell and ToolbarItem badge support (BadgeText, BadgeColor, BadgeTextColor), which is a long-requested feature that finally has a public API. Android adaptive icons pick up the MonochromeFile property, an iOS map NullReferenceException is fixed, and the NativeAOT IL3050 WebView warnings go away. https://github.com/dotnet/maui/releases

No SR7 servicing on the 10.0.x line in window. The bigger MAUI story this week is the CoreCLR-on-mobile runtime switch covered above in the .NET section, not the preview release notes.

Azure

Busy week. Six items below.

CVE-2026-40379 is an ESTS spoofing vulnerability in Entra ID with a CVSS score of 9.3 (critical). Microsoft mitigated it server-side before public disclosure on 2026-05-07, so there is no patch to apply, but the right defensive move is to audit Entra sign-in logs for the pre-disclosure window and look for anomalies. Advisory: https://msrc.microsoft.com/update-guide/vulnerability/CVE-2026-40379

The NuGet typosquat situation in the triage above (five malicious packages, ~65,000 downloads) is the second supply-chain incident in two months that has hit .NET on .NET-specific lookalike packages, after the late-April Axios story. The pattern is now established: attackers are targeting Chinese-language UI library namespaces because the typo distance is high and the search-result confusion is real. If you have a deny list, refresh it. If you do not, this is the week to add one. Socket write-up: https://socket.dev/blog/5-malicious-nuget-packages-impersonate-chinese-ui-libraries

System.ClientModel 1.12.0 went GA on 2026-05-12, adding a credential configuration indexer on ClientPipelineOptions. The Azure.Storage suite shipped a coordinated drop on the same day (Blobs 12.28, Queues 12.26, Files.Shares 12.26, DataLake 12.26, Common 12.27) that fixes a long-standing double-slash in token scopes bug. If you saw silent 401s on bearer-token storage calls, upgrade and re-test. Releases land on https://github.com/Azure/azure-sdk-for-net/releases.

PostgreSQL 18 went GA on Azure Database for PostgreSQL Flexible Server on 2026-05-02. Three reasons to read the announcement even if you are not on Postgres today: async I/O, OAuth 2.0 (so you can authenticate apps through Entra without password rotation), and an in-place major-version upgrade path that does not require dump and restore. pgvector ships in the 80+ extensions list. https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/adforpostgresql/postgresql-18-now-ga-on-azure-postgres-flexible-server/4469802

AI_GENERATE_EMBEDDINGS and CREATE EXTERNAL MODEL are GA in Azure SQL DB and Managed Instance as of 2026-05-04. Native T-SQL embeddings against Azure OpenAI or OpenAI without an embedding pipeline. Combined with the existing native VECTOR type, that closes the gap for shops that want vector search inside Azure SQL without standing up a separate vector store. https://devblogs.microsoft.com/azure-sql/generate-embeddings-function-and-external-model-object-support-are-now-generally-available-in-azure-sql/

One Entra change to test this week: Conditional Access "All resources" enforcement changed on 2026-05-13. Policies targeting "All resources" are now enforced even when resource exclusions are configured, for OIDC-only and limited-directory-scope sign-ins. The practical effect is that custom apps requesting only openid and profile may now hit MFA prompts they did not before. If you maintain custom OIDC clients, test before users hit it on Monday. https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/microsoft-entra-blog/upcoming-conditional-access-change-improved-enforcement-for-policies-with-resour/4488925

Two preview drops to smoke-test if they overlap with your work: Azure Container Apps Express (no-environment deploy mode, 2026-05-13, targeting feature parity by Build) and the Azure Cosmos DB Shell with built-in MCP server (2026-05-06).

Three EOL clocks running in the background: Azure Functions v1.x EOL 2026-09-14, in-process Functions model EOL 2026-11-10, Linux Consumption v3 stops 2026-09-30. If you have not started the migration, the calendar is shorter than it looks.

Microsoft Build 2026

June 2-3 in San Francisco at Fort Mason, online keynote streams free. The session catalogue has been live since April. Two sessions on the .NET-developer watch list: BRK207 "GitHub Copilot in Visual Studio: Agents That Debug, Profile, and Test" and BRK202 "Azure DevOps meets GitHub, the path to AI-powered SDLC." Worth filtering and queueing now if you plan to watch on demand.

The bigger picture

The 2026-05-02 edition argued that Microsoft's consumer surfaces (Xbox, Windows quality push, OpenAI exclusivity ending, Copilot pricing) were all pivoting under the same pressure. Profitability has caught up with the AI-segment ROI story and a single-supplier dependency was no longer survivable. The 2026-05-16 window produced more of the same, in court and on the org chart.

Nadella testified in Musk v. Altman on 2026-05-11 through 2026-05-13. The numbers that surfaced are large enough to reshape the mental model of the partnership. Microsoft's total commitment to OpenAI (investment, infrastructure, hosting) is projected to exceed $100 billion by June 2026. Nadella's 2022 internal email entered the record explicitly: "we don't want to be the next IBM," meaning the cautionary tale of a company that built a market and then watched another company own it. The April restructure that ended Azure's exclusivity is now confirmed in court testimony, not press release. OpenAI is free to ship via AWS and GCP. The revenue share Microsoft has been collecting from OpenAI continues through 2030 but is now capped. If your architecture still treats Azure OpenAI Service as a one-way arrow from your app to a closed model, you are betting on a partnership that both sides are publicly hedging. https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/13/microsoft-feared-openai-reliance-musk-altman-trial-testimony-reveals.html

The Copilot Cowork April update on 2026-05-05 added mobile, Skills, and third-party plugins. iOS and Android apps shipped, Skills land as reusable instruction sets, and the first connector wave covers HubSpot, LSEG, Moody's, and Notion, with Miro, monday.com, and S&P Global queued. This is Microsoft's agent-platform play built without saying MCP out loud. The plugin slot is where third-party software lives inside the enterprise's AI fabric or gets routed around. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2026/05/05/copilot-cowork-from-conversation-to-action-across-skills-integrations-and-devices/. The same day Microsoft made Microsoft 365 E7 and Agent 365 GA, and PowerPoint Premium picked up the Claude option in its model picker. The Anthropic landing-in-Copilot story from the previous edition is no longer a back-room integration. It is at the surface a CIO actually sees first.

Pavan Davuluri posted the first follow-up to the March 20 Windows quality commitment on 2026-05-01. The Experimental channel has shipped measurable wins on start and navigation speed, Home stability, and the taskbar customisation work. The post explicitly signals Build 2026 as the next milestone for developer-facing detail. https://blogs.windows.com/windows-insider/2026/05/01/windows-quality-update-progress-weve-made-since-march/. Xbox followed the same template two weeks later. Asha Sharma committed to biweekly Xbox console and PC updates through year-end, and the first visible drop on 2026-05-13 cut cold-start from roughly 12 seconds to roughly 7. Second division this month to commit to a public cadence with measurable deliverables. The pattern is not coincidental.

The "Rule of 70" voluntary buyout offer reached employees on 2026-05-07. Roughly 8,750 US workers (7% of US headcount) are eligible. The opt-in window closes 2026-06-08 and last day is 2026-07-01. The detail that matters for working developers is the exemption list: Azure OpenAI, GitHub Copilot, and Turing research are explicitly excluded from the offer. Microsoft is paying long-tenured infrastructure, sales, and ops generalists to leave while ring-fencing the AI engineering side. Read the org chart accordingly. The parts of the company you sell into or build on top of are being thinned. The parts you compete with for AI mindshare are being fattened. https://dnyuz.com/2026/05/07/internal-microsoft-document-spells-out-the-companys-buyout-offer/

GitLab announced "Act 2" on 2026-05-11, which is layoffs to fund an agentic platform re-architecture. The stock dropped 9% the next day and Raymond James downgraded. If you self-host GitLab in production (and many of us do), expect the runtime and UI to shift toward agent-native workflows over the next two quarters. Architectural rewrites under restructuring stress have a known set of rough edges, and self-hosters historically eat the worst of those edges. https://www.thestack.technology/gitlab-layoffs-architecture-overhaul-agents-ai/

The EU AI Act omnibus deal closed on 2026-05-07. The high-risk obligations slip to 2027-12-02, which mostly helps incumbents because they get an extra year of runway before the heavy compliance burden lands. The transparency grace period for AI-generated content was cut from six months to three (deadline 2026-12-02). Article 50 watermarking and disclosure obligations land 2026-08-02. If you ship anything that generates text, images, or audio into the EU, the disclosure clock is now half of what it was. https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/press/press-releases/2026/05/07/artificial-intelligence-council-and-parliament-agree-to-simplify-and-streamline-rules/

The hardware footnote. The RTX 3060 12 GB re-release rumour from leak channels is still uncorroborated by Nvidia, with partner production reportedly targeting July. Strix Halo (Ryzen AI Max+ 395) numbers continue to firm up: 97 tokens per second on Qwen3-Coder 30B via Vulkan RADV, and 70B Q4 fits inside 128 GB of unified memory with headroom. The "local 70B without a $2K discrete GPU" claim now has reproducible benchmarks rather than vendor slides. For shops where data cannot leave the building, the Line of Business (LOB) economics of inference shifted again this week. https://www.amd.com/en/developer/resources/technical-articles/2026/how-to-run-a-one-trillion-parameter-llm-locally-an-amd.html

Taken together: court testimony making the OpenAI hedge official, plugin platforms going live, Windows and Xbox committing to public quality cadences, buyouts pruning everything but the AI org, GitLab betting the platform under restructuring stress, the EU writing the rules incumbents preferred. Same pressure, same direction. Build 2026 in two weeks is the next datapoint. If the Build keynote is structurally about agent infrastructure and AI-segment monetisation rather than developer-platform breadth, the pattern is the message.

What I'm watching for next week

Build 2026 pre-event coverage. Session announcements, blog teasers, the usual May-into-June ramp. The track distribution between developer-platform sessions and Copilot or agent sessions will be the early signal on what Microsoft thinks the headline category is.

Whether MAUI 11 Preview 4 CoreCLR-on-mobile turns up issues fast enough to matter for the GA timeline. If big things break in the public CI matrix during the next sprint, the ship date gets interesting.

Anything from Nvidia direct on the RTX 3060 12 GB. The leak is consistent across enough channels to be plausible but Nvidia has neither confirmed nor denied, and Build is the natural place to either land it or kill it.

In lighter news

If you drop one of Valve's new Steam Controllers from about three feet onto something soft, it will sometimes scream at you. The Wilhelm scream, specifically, the same stock effect every Hollywood sound designer has been using since 1951. Reddit user RF3D19 spotted it in r/SteamController earlier this week and it has been confirmed by enough other owners to call real. There is a roughly one-minute cooldown between screams.

The actually interesting bit: the Steam Controller has no speaker. The scream plays through the haptic motors. That those motors can render recognisable mid-band speech audio is the real story. Every other haptic-rich controller on the market, DualSense included, leaves that capability on the table for game-driven effects only. Valve shipped one in a hardware Easter egg.