Auto-generate contributor attribution in CHANGELOG compilation

[Copilot]

Community feedback requests recognizing external contributors in release notes, avoiding manual changelog conflicts from concurrent PRs.

Changes

Contributor extraction

• Added Get-ContributorFromPR: Extracts GitHub usernames from commit emails (123456+username@users.noreply.github.com)
• Filters Microsoft employees and bot accounts
• 6-month lookback window for performance

Inline attribution

• Enhanced Format-ChangelogEntry to append by @username in [[#123](link)] for external contributors
• Applied to all changelog entry formatting paths (new entries and merged sections)

New Contributors section

• Added Get-ExistingContributors: Scans CHANGELOG for previously mentioned usernames
• Generates "New Contributors" section listing first-time contributors: @username made their first contribution in [[#123](link)]
• Placed after all other sections in version block

Performance & safety

• Regex with lookahead to avoid false positives (e.g., @azure/mcp@1.0.0)
• Null-safe PR number lookup for first contributions
• Pipeline-based collection instead of array concatenation

Example Output

### Other Changes

- Move VSIX walkthrough images to images/vsix folder. by @g2vinay in [[#1475](link)]

#### Dependency Updates

- Updated Azure.Identity dependencies. by @scottaddie in [[#1465](link)]

### New Contributors

- @g2vinay made their first contribution in [[#1475](link)]
- @scottaddie made their first contribution in [[#1465](link)]

Matches format from AWS MCP server releases. No workflow changes required—contributor tracking happens automatically during Compile-Changelog.ps1 execution.

Warning

Firewall rules blocked me from connecting to one or more addresses (expand for details)

I tried to connect to the following addresses, but was blocked by firewall rules:

• i1qvsblobprodcus353.vsblob.vsassets.io
  • Triggering command: /usr/bin/pwsh pwsh -Command ./eng/scripts/Compile-Changelog.ps1 -ChangelogPath 'servers/Azure.Mcp.Server/CHANGELOG.md' -DryRun (dns block)
  • Triggering command: /usr/bin/pwsh pwsh -Command Register-PSRepository -Default -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue; Install-Module -Name powershell-yaml -Force -Scope CurrentUser -SkipPublisherCheck (dns block)
  • Triggering command: `/usr/bin/pwsh pwsh -Command

Try to manually install powershell-yaml from a local copy or skip the install

try {
Import-Module powershell-yaml -ErrorAction Stop
Write-Host 'Module already available'
} catch {
Write-Host 'Module not available, will fail later'
}

Sour` (dns block)

• www.powershellgallery.com
  • Triggering command: /usr/bin/pwsh pwsh -Command ./eng/scripts/Compile-Changelog.ps1 -ChangelogPath 'servers/Azure.Mcp.Server/CHANGELOG.md' -DryRun (dns block)
  • Triggering command: /usr/bin/pwsh pwsh -Command Register-PSRepository -Default -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue; Install-Module -Name powershell-yaml -Force -Scope CurrentUser -SkipPublisherCheck (dns block)
  • Triggering command: `/usr/bin/pwsh pwsh -Command

Try to manually install powershell-yaml from a local copy or skip the install

try {
Import-Module powershell-yaml -ErrorAction Stop
Write-Host 'Module already available'
} catch {
Write-Host 'Module not available, will fail later'
}

Sour` (dns block)

If you need me to access, download, or install something from one of these locations, you can either:

• Configure Actions setup steps to set up my environment, which run before the firewall is enabled
• Add the appropriate URLs or hosts to the custom allowlist in this repository's Copilot coding agent settings (admins only)

Original prompt

---

This section details on the original issue you should resolve

<issue_title>[COMMUNITY] Auto generate CHANGELOG, including adding contributors for each release</issue_title>
<issue_description>It would be nice to automatically thank community contributors by referencing them in the CHANGELOG.md for the release.

There's a number of engsys projects to allow this to happen such as https://github.com/marketplace/actions/auto-add-contributors.

Here is a screen shot of AWS MCP server which does this, and I quite like having the shout out for the community members who are helping the product for free.

https://github.com/awslabs/mcp/releases/tag/2025.6.2025052005

</issue_description>

<agent_instructions>See if we can pull contributor information from commits when we're forming the changelog in Compile-Changelog.ps1</agent_instructions>

Comments on the Issue (you are @copilot in this section)

@alzimmermsft Copied from https://github.com/Azure/azure-mcp/issues/323 @weshaggard On top of the this we should also look to automatically generate the changelog file for a release so that we can avoid constant conflicts from people editing the changelog manually.

We should consider some convention for commit messages so that we can auto-generate using a tool like https://github.com/orhun/git-cliff</comment_new>
<comment_new>@feiskyer
+1. It is painful to get new PRs merged due to this. Since CHANGELOG is a common file required currently, new PRs would need rebase everytime another PR is merged. </comment_new>

• Fixes [COMMUNITY] Auto generate CHANGELOG, including adding contributors for each release #156

---

💡 You can make Copilot smarter by setting up custom instructions, customizing its development environment and configuring Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers. Learn more Copilot coding agent tips in the docs.