With today’s 22621.1343 build release to the Release Preview Channel, Microsoft has enabled Windows Studio effects on computers with an neural processing unit (NPU). That means that if you have a Project Volterra device you can finally use the NPU for something other than waiting for access to the Qualcomm beta. Windows Studio effects include: Background effects - like background blur Eye Contact - this is an effect to make it look like you are looking directly into the camera instead of down at the screen.

As if a new .NET preview wasn’t enough, today also found the release of Visual Studio 2022 version 17.5! This is a major release that includes many new features and improvements. These new features include changes to .NET and cloud development, modern C++ and game development, C++ cross platform and embedded development, and enterprise management. Ohhh, enterprise management goodness. Let’s double-click on that one shall we? The enterprise management features of Visual Studio 2022 v17.

In the ever evolving world of .NET, the next major release or Long Term Supported (LTS) release had its first preview release today. LTS means it’ll be supported for 3 years instead of .NET 7’s 18 months. The changes in .NET 8 include producing Release assets by default when you call dotnet publish or dotnet pack. This can of course be reverted by changing the PublishRelease property to false. Various improvements have been made to System.

This week the Windows Insiders were treated with a new build. Build 25300 was released, and you can even install it via ISO if you want a clean install. Among the goodies that are normally in a new build (bug fixes and some minor updates to features) was a host of new language support for Live Captions. Besides US English, which was previously in the build, we now have access to Chinese (Simplified and Traditional), French, German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese (Brazil), Spanish and other English dialects.

Microsoft has had a great tradition of bringing us technologies that help us multitask, remember Windows 8 where you could have a whopping one app running at a time? Well they have just announced a way for customers on the Microsoft 365 Personal or Family subscription to have E-mail open links in a browser. Oh, that’s not innovative enough for ya? Well, it’ll open the E-mail in one pane and the link in another.