Azure Dev Summit 2025: 10 Takeaways Shaping the Future of Cloud and AI Development

Last weekend, from October 13 to 16, the Leobit team joined thousands of developers in Lisbon, Portugal, for the Azure Dev Summit, Microsoft’s premier European conference for software engineers, architects, and tech leaders. For four days, participants joined hands-on sessions, live demos, and standout keynotes from Microsoft’s top minds.

Our team came back buzzing with ideas and insights, and in this article, we’re sharing the 10 key takeaways that stood out the most.

But first, let’s take a closer look at what the Azure Dev Summit is all about.

The Azure Dev Summit is a Microsoft-powered conference, focused on Azure, .NET, and AI. This year’s summit brought together more than 2,000 developers and representatives from over 500 companies eager to learn, collaborate, and see what’s next in the Microsoft ecosystem.

This year’s conference included 70 speakers, among whom were Scott Hanselman, Microsoft’s Vice President for Developer Communities, Scott Hunter, Vice President of Product for Azure Developer Experience, and Amanda Silver, Corporate Vice President of Microsoft’s Developer Division. Amanda Silver opened the conference with a keynote that looked ahead to the future of coding, one where AI acts not as a replacement but as a creative partner. In her speech, she highlighted that the developer’s role is currently evolving, and, together with it, the very nature of custom software development.

Beyond the insightful keynotes, the summit buzzed with energy. Participants and visitors could join technical breakout sessions and full-day workshops, led by industry leaders and technical experts.

Being a long-term Microsoft partner, Leobit was proud to join a global community of innovators shaping the future of cloud and AI development. Our company was represented at the summit by Oleksa Stelmakh, CEO & Founder of Leobit, together with Serhii Harntsarik, SDO & IT Director, and Diana Kemeniash, Lead Business Development Manager.

Over the four days of the summit, our team gathered key lessons, announcements, and takeaways that reflect where the developer world is heading. Here are 10 of the most impactful insights from Azure Dev Summit 2025.

This year made one thing unmistakably clear: AI is no longer an add-on. At the Azure Dev Summit 2025, Microsoft showcased how GitHub Copilot has evolved from a coding assistant into a full-fledged AI coding agent. It is now deeply embedded across the company’s development ecosystem, from Visual Studio and VS Code to Azure itself.

Thanks to this evolution, developers can rely on Copilot for intelligent code suggestions, troubleshooting, resource optimization, and DevOps automation. The new Agent Mode, unveiled earlier this year, marks a pivotal shift in what developers can expect from AI. In this mode, Copilot can autonomously orchestrate multi-step DevOps workflows, including:

• Provisioning infrastructure
• Generating deployment scripts
• Managing Azure environments end-to-end

As of June 2025, the Visual Studio Magazine reported nearly 475,000 installs of GitHub Copilot for Azure just months after release. These numbers act as a strong signal that developers are embracing AI-driven automation at scale.

GitHub Copilot for Azure is designed to streamline cloud development workflows directly within the Azure environment, integrating seamlessly with both Visual Studio Code and Azure Resource Manager. It enables developers to interact with their cloud infrastructure in natural language (i.e., generating ARM templates, managing deployments, or diagnosing issues) all without leaving the editor. Such behavior showcases the evolution of Copilot from a smart autocomplete tool into a real AI collaborator.

As agentic AI continues to mature, it’s clear that the developer’s role is shifting from writing every line of code to orchestrating and guiding intelligent systems that can now handle much of the heavy lifting.

One of the standout announcements at this year’s Azure Dev Summit was the in-depth presentation of Microsoft’s new unified platform, Azure AI Foundry. According to Microsoft’s official announcement, Azure AI Foundry serves as the “home for all AI development on Azure”. It gives engineers the flexibility to work with both foundation models (like GPT, Phi, and Llama) and custom fine-tuned models.

The platform integrates Azure OpenAI Service, Azure Machine Learning, Prompt Flow, and AI Studio capabilities into a cohesive environment that simplifies every stage of the AI development lifecycle. It also introduces Azure Model-as-a-Service (MaaS), which allows teams to securely integrate, govern, and scale models in production.

Beyond model management, Azure AI Foundry provides a complete suite of agentic development tools. For instance, the integrated Prompt Flow feature allows teams to visually design and debug multi-step AI workflows, monitor performance metrics, and refine model behavior — all without leaving the Azure environment.

At the Summit, it became clear that Azure AI Foundry will serve as the foundation for building and deploying the next generation of AI-driven applications. More than 10,000 organizations, including leaders like Heineken, Fujitsu, and Carvana, have already used Azure AI Foundry to automate complex business processes with their own data and knowledge.

Microsoft envisions a future where the software development lifecycle transforms into an AI-driven process empowered by agentic intelligence. This new model shifts the role of developers from executing tasks to orchestrating intelligent systems that can now manage much of the operational complexity on their own. This means that very soon, a traditional development pipeline characterized by manual coordination between tools and teams will be giving way to self-orchestrating workflows, where AI agents take on the heavy lifting while humans guide direction.

At the foundation of this transformation is agentic development, Microsoft’s emerging framework for building and operating intelligent software systems. It consists of several AI-powered tools that work in a sequence:

• GitHub Spec Kit, a structured, AI-assisted blueprint, is the first step. It captures the full scope and intent of a project in natural language
• GitHub Copilot in Agent Mode takes over much of the coding process, handling routine code reviews and maintaining a contextual understanding of the entire codebase
• Azure SRE Agents step in to monitor system health, automate incident resolution, and optimize cloud resource usage in real time once the code is in motion
• Agentic DevOps, a concept highlighted throughout the Summit, powers autonomous AI agents to manage deployment pipelines, configuration management, and environment provisioning

The result is a fully integrated lifecycle that continuously improves itself through observation and feedback loops.

Microsoft’s leadership, including Scott Hunter and Amanda Silver, emphasized that this evolution doesn’t replace developers but rather strengthens their capabilities. The future of development, according to Microsoft, is one where humans focus on creativity and decision-making while AI agents handle the repetitive, the predictable, and the tedious tasks.

Special attention during the conference was given to .NET Aspire, Microsoft’s new cloud-native application orchestration framework. While it was first introduced in preview last year, Aspire has now matured into a production-ready toolkit designed to make microservices development and multi-project orchestration significantly easier.

At its core, .NET Aspire acts as a developer-first orchestrator that streamlines the setup and management of complex solutions composed of multiple interconnected projects. Whether you’re building a distributed microservices system, an event-driven architecture, or a cloud-native application spanning multiple APIs and front ends, Aspire eliminates much of the manual wiring, configuration, and local debugging overhead that traditionally slows teams down.

Microsoft engineers described Aspire as a “life-saver” for developers working on multi-component systems. It offers a consistent, opinionated structure for service discovery, configuration, health checks, and logging integrated seamlessly into the .NET ecosystem. Instead of managing countless Docker-Compose files or local Kubernetes setups, developers can spin up a complete distributed environment with a few lines of configuration, then observe and troubleshoot everything from a single dashboard.

As Microsoft’s product team emphasized, .NET Aspire represents a shift from configuration-heavy development to insight-driven orchestration. It encapsulates best practices for distributed app development while still allowing teams to customize and scale to their specific needs. At the Summit, many attendees described .NET Aspire as one of the most practical announcements, since this tool removes real-world pain points developers face when building for the cloud.

The upcoming .NET 10 was one of the most anticipated topics at the Azure Dev Summit. According to Visual Studio Magazine, .NET 10 Release Candidate 1 already ships with “go-live” support, meaning that developers can confidently start using it in production environments.

Among the standout themes of .NET 10 is performance. As in previous .NET releases, developers get substantial performance improvements “for free” simply by upgrading their projects. The .NET team has continued to refine the runtime, garbage collector, and JIT compiler, which will result in faster startup times, lower memory consumption, and overall smoother execution across workloads. Benchmarks presented during the Summit showed that even without code changes, companies can achieve measurable gains for web APIs, Blazor apps, and cloud-native workloads.

Beyond speed, .NET 10 brings a wealth of modern web, mobile, and cloud enhancements. ASP.NET Core continues to evolve with tighter integration into Blazor United. It, in turn, will enable a unified development model for both client-side and server-side web applications. .NET MAUI has been further refined, giving developers better performance and stability for cross-platform mobile and desktop software development.

Another area of innovation is the expanded support for AI and cloud-native development. The framework now includes:

• Improved integration with Azure AI SDKs
• OpenTelemetry for observability
• Container-first deployment models

All these features make it easier to build intelligent, distributed applications out of the box.

Developers attending the Summit also praised Microsoft’s commitment to backward compatibility and incremental upgrades. Thanks to it, migrating from previous versions remains straightforward without code rewrites.

The upcoming C# 14 release continues Microsoft’s steady refinement of one of the most beloved and widely used programming languages in the world. According to Microsoft’s official documentation, C# 14 builds on the foundations laid in versions 12 and 13. The new language features are designed to reduce boilerplate, improve code readability, and make everyday development faster and more intuitive.

The long-awaited property extension syntax is one of the most requested features from the developer community. This new syntax will allow developers to directly extend existing properties, without having to modify the original class. This will make it easier to safely evolve APIs or frameworks. It’s a subtle but powerful change that simplifies object composition and improves maintainability in large-scale codebases.

Another forward-looking feature that drew Leobit’s attention during the Summit was an early preview of discriminated unions, a key building block for more functional and pattern-based programming in C#. Discriminated unions allow developers to model data more precisely, capturing all possible states of a value within a single type. This enhances code safety and also opens new possibilities for clean, expressive control flow that’s easier to reason about and test. For businesses, that means faster releases, fewer regressions, and higher confidence in the systems that power their operations.

Other notable language improvements include enhancements to collection expressions, interpolated string handlers, and ongoing refinements to primary constructors and record structs. Together, these features move C# closer to a hybrid paradigm, where the best elements of object-oriented and functional programming seamlessly coexist.

One of the most inspiring themes at the Azure Dev Summit 2025 was how AI is moving from experimental prototypes into practical, everyday applications. Several speakers showcased real-life examples of how AI can meaningfully improve daily user experiences.

What drew our team’s attention was a .NET MAUI mobile application that functions as a true “companion in your pocket.” It employs embedded AI models to help users plan trips and provide personalized recommendations based on analyzing contextual information. This app not only responds to commands but also understands intent and adapts to the user’s behavior.

Another powerful example centered around AI-powered speech recognition and natural language interfaces. Instead of relying on traditional manual form inputs and menus, developers demonstrated applications that allow users to speak naturally to fill out complex forms, perform searches, or navigate interfaces.

The open-source end-to-end testing framework Playwright, maintained by Microsoft, took center stage at the Azure Dev Summit 2025 with one of its most significant updates to date. Debbie O’Brien, Principal Technical Program Manager at Microsoft, highlighted Playwright’s evolution from a test automation tool into a fully agentic testing platform that uses AI to autonomously plan, generate, execute, and repair tests.

The latest release introduces three groundbreaking AI-driven components: Planner, Generator, and Healer agents. They are designed to make testing more intelligent and self-sustaining. For instance:

• Planner Agent analyzes the structure and behavior of an application to identify what needs to be tested and in which scenarios.
• Generator Agent automatically creates the necessary test scripts, using natural language understanding to translate user stories, requirements, or design specifications into executable Playwright tests.
• Healer Agent monitors test runs in real time, detecting flaky or broken tests and autonomously repairing them by updating selectors or adapting test logic.

A key enabler of this new functionality is the Model Context Protocol (MCP), Microsoft’s emerging interoperability framework that connects AI agents and development tools within a shared context (will share insights on it later in the article).

Through MCP, Playwright can now integrate seamlessly with Figma and other design systems, enabling pixel-perfect UI validation. It means tests can verify not only functionality but also visual accuracy. This, in turn, ensures that user interfaces match design specifications down to the pixel. This will allow teams to bridge the gap between design and development with automated precision.

A recurring theme throughout the Azure Dev Summit 2025 was the rapid rise and growing adoption of the MCP, a new open standard that’s quietly becoming the backbone of modern agentic AI development. MCP enables seamless communication between AI models, development tools, and data sources.

In traditional workflows, AI assistants like Copilot or other LLM-based tools often operate in isolation and are limited by the data or context immediately available to them. MCP has the power to entirely change that dynamic. It introduces a shared context layer that lets different tools exchange structured data, intent, and state in real time. In practice, that means an AI agent debugging code in Visual Studio can instantly access related issues in GitHub, deployment logs in Azure, and even design specifications in Figma within the same contextual thread.

According to data from the Glama MCP Server Directory, as of June 2025, there are 5,867 registered MCP servers worldwide, spanning a wide variety of industries and use cases. This growth highlights how quickly the developer ecosystem is embracing MCP as a foundational protocol for connecting AI tools and services.

Speakers at the Summit described MCP as the “HTTP of the AI era,” naming it a universal bridge that lets models and systems talk to each other in a structured, secure, and context-aware way. It’s what allows AI agents to move beyond simple prompts and responses toward continuous, multi-tool collaboration.

Microsoft has always been committed to accessibility. In spring, they hosted the 15th annual Microsoft Ability Summit, with over 20,000 attendees from 164 countries coming together virtually to discuss the future of AI and accessibility. This year’s Azure Dev Summit also emphasised Microsoft’s ongoing commitment to accessibility and inclusive design. Multiple speakers noted that the next generation of intelligent applications will be more human-centered and universally accessible.

Tools like Azure AI Speech, Azure OpenAI Service, and Language Understanding (LUIS) can help break down barriers that once limited how people interacted with technology. For instance, several demonstrations at the summit showcased how AI-driven speech recognition can help users with motor or visual impairments to interact with software as seamlessly as anyone else.

Azure Dev Summit 2025 was strongly focused on AI integration into every aspect of software development. From Copilot’s contextual intelligence to Azure AI Foundry’s unified platform, Microsoft is building an ecosystem where tools seamlessly work together and let developers build new software faster and smarter.

The major takeaway was that the era of AI-driven development has already begun, and it will continue to transform the way we create software. The boundaries between coding, testing, deployment, and design will continue to blur thanks to the MCP interoperability framework. These intelligent systems, which understand context and work alongside developers, will help deliver better and more meaningful results.

Leobit, as a software development company, has already embraced this shift and used AI to transform our internal processes and help our customers improve their business workflows. Leobit’s achievement in implementing a corporate LLM with AI agents tailored for sales, marketing, and HR functions resulted in the company’s recognition as a winner of the Global Tech Award in the AI category.

Contact us and we’ll help you enter the AI era with flying colors.