Azure SDK Release (January 2026) released - What's new
Microsoft announced its January 2026 update for the Azure SDK today. It adds some new AI features and broadens the services available to developers.
A big part of that is the launch of AI Foundry 1.2.0-beta.1 for .NET. This isn't just a small tweak; it's a major step forward in supporting Microsoft's own Foundry Agents Service. Basically, this update makes it easier and more powerful for folks building AI stuff on Azure to use these agents. They're getting new tools like expanded evaluation, better insights, red teaming support, scheduling options, and more.
Then there's Azure AI Search, which also got a beta update with version 11.8.0-beta.1 for .NET. It now backs the 2025-11-01-preview service layer, bringing in a bunch of new features. Among them are different types of facet aggregations, think average, minimum, and maximum values, or cardinality counts, and expanded knowledge source options covering web data, remote SharePoint, indexed SharePoint, and OneLake.
Speaking of the AI Search update, it also means Azure OpenAI models like gpt-5, gpt-5-mini, and even gpt-5-nano are now integrated into this new version too. So if you're using Azure AI Search, you can potentially leverage these advanced language models directly.
It's important to mention that alongside all the cool new stuff, there are some breaking changes in store. The Knowledge Agent is being renamed to Knowledge Base everywhere, across APIs and model references. If you've got code relying on the old name, now's the time to check your plans; expect a bit of work updating things.
And another thing, Microsoft released a stable Azure Functions extension for Web PubSub and SocketIO, titled version 1.0.0 for .NET. This means developers can now use this library reliably to build real-time chat apps or other interactive services. You get the familiar Socket.IO programming model is plugged into Azure Web PubSub's backend through Azure Functions.
Azure SDK Release (January 2026)
Azure SDK releases every month. This post includes the January 2026's highlights and release notes.
