AI is about empowering your workflow, not about taking over your work. Let’s take this blog to look at that statement. “Empowering your workflow” means that AI augments your abilities. It means we can focus on the code that only we can write and let AI deal with the boilerplate code. It’s about using tools to speed up onboarding and setup. Finally, it’s about moving the security needle towards the developer.
It’s that time of year. The most wonderful time of year. The time of year for Microsoft’s Build developer conference. This year was the rising of the computers. That is the emergence of the age of AI is upon us and peeking behind the curtains of copilots that have been dropped on us we find OpenAI’s ChatGPT plastered across everything. I’d say I’ve done a good job of a avoiding it up to now by not reporting on all the copilot type announcements. This cannot be avoided any longer. AI is here and it’s time we have a frank conversation about it.
Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 25330 was released this afternoon. One of the changes in this build is that the Snipping Tool will open when the Print Screen button is pressed. Previously it would take a full screen copy of your monitor(s) and save it to the Screenshots folder in Pictures. I will still use the Win-Shift-S method of taking screen shots as it is flexible and suits my needs, but many people swear by the full functionality of Snipping Tool so this change will be good for them.
On February 28th Microsoft announced the Moment 2 release. Part of that Moment was an announcement that Phone Link would work with iPhone. At the time only a small select group of people had access to it, and that made me sad. But today they widened the net and I (along with all the insiders) got access to it. As soon as that button appeared on the connect page I clicked on it and scanned the QR Code.
Last Thursday Microsoft announced a new version of TypeScript has been released. TypeScript 5.0 brings with it a faster, smaller, and simpler programming language while still managing to bring some new features.
Some of the new features introduced are support for the new decorators standard, simplified configuration, and expanded JSDoc functionality.
TypeScript is a superset of JavaScript aimed at making developer’s life a little easier. It adds strong typing to JavaScript and helps flush out bugs at compile time rather than run time.
Hot on the heals of .NET 8 Preview 1 comes Preview 2! This monthly release cycle will continue until .NET 8 is released probably in November. Preview 2 includes some changes including new System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations extensions for RequiredAttribute.DisallowAllDefaultValues, RangeAttribute exclusive bounds, LengthAttribute, AllowedValuesAttribute, DenyValuesAttribute and Base64StringAttribute. Also there is new introspection support for function pointers in System.Reflection. This is the ability for reflection to obtain function pointer metadata. Be sure to read the announcement blog here.
It’s the most wonderful time of year! It’s time for Build registration and this year Build will be hybrid. Some lucky people get to go in person and everyone else can attend virtually. Microsoft Build is the premier developer conference of the year. It’s sometimes compared to WWDC and whatever Google’s dev conference is called (Google I/O - I had to look it up), but really it’s better than both of those combined.
There must have been some backlash over the Windows Insider Program’s channel updates because there was an E-mail sent out to Canary users offering a USB Memory Stick if they don’t already have one. This would be used to create a bootable drive with which to reinsall Windows.
I got the code, but when I attempted to enter my address for them to send me the USB stick, the form didn’t have any values in the State drop down.
FREE Software # In an amazing announcement on Monday, Microsoft said that Outlook for Mac is now free to use! All you need to do is use it. There’s no need for a Microsoft 365 account, subscription, or license required. It’ll work with just about any E-mail account from Yahoo!, GMail, iCloud to anything with an IMAP endpoint.
Outlook for Mac is built for Apple Silicon. It is a native app designed for macOS.
The Windows Insider Program is excited to announce a change in the channels for Windows Insider Builds. Starting today there’s a new channel and a restating of what’s in another channel. The new channel is called Canary Channel and it will support preview builds of platform changes. The existing Dev Channel will not be the place for enthusiasts to try out new features and experiences that have long-lead times.
Today a new dev build for Windows 11 dropped for Insiders. This build, 25309, contains a few enhancements and a flurry of bug fixes. Let’s get right into it.
Yesterday Moment 2 was released and I wrote a large post about it. This update to Windows 11 was a large feature update and came with numerous changes to our familiar Windows 11. From Phone Link to Studio Effects there was a lot in this release.
But waking up this morning, the Kool-Aid had worn off a bit, and I was searching for deeper meaning in the announcement. The iPhone Phone Link is only for a select few “Cool Kids” right now, and the Studio Effects are really only special if you have an NPU on your computer.
Today my favorite C-suite person at Microsoft announced the release of a new Moment for Windows 11. In a blog post Panos Panay (Chief Product Officer) announced a release for Windows 11 that is coming about 8 months early. Typically feature releases come out in October, but this isn’t a feature release, it’s a “Moment.” What’s the difference and what’s included? Well I’m glad you asked. Read on to learn more.
Hot on the heals of the trade-in deal, Microsoft has a site that will help you pick out your new Surface. You answer a few basic questions about what you are looking for and it spits out a suggested Surface for you to buy. Try as I might though I could only have it come up with Surface devices that are already released. There must be a way to get a result that is an unreleased device.
One of the biggest pains of being a Windows Insider is not that you get a new build usually once a week but it’s that after you install it and reboot there’s a .NET Framework update waiting and you have to reboot on it too. Always, two reboots. It’s been a major source of pain for me. Well that’s all changing with version 22H2 of Windows 11. The .NET Framework updates are integrating into the Unified Update Platform (UUP).
Microsoft has a trade in program for your older equipment. Which is good because I hear through the grapevine that a new Surface Laptop Studio is coming soon. Before I go spend $2000 on a new laptop I thought I’d see what my current laptop is worth. Turns out, not much. Looks like it’s only worth about $170. My old Xbox One X is worth $90. It’s a simple matter of entering in your machine details and then it gives you an estimated value.
The new AI-powered Bing and Microsoft Edge has come a long way in the past month. A lot has been said about this new technology in the press and although I’ve stayed out of it until now, it isn’t because I don’t like the tech. There is just so much to say about this topic that I think it deserves a long post of it’s own (or maybe a YouTube video).
Enterprise Microsoft 365 users (E3 or E5) have a new feature to play with today. If you are an Insider running on either the Beta CHannel or the Current Channel (Preview) you can use Loop directly inside of Outlook for Windows! Scenarios for this include keeping track of a project status and to collect knowledge using a Q&A Loop component. I would use this to gather feedback from other teams to find out if something is either implemented or not.
Are you or someone you know looking to get into coding but not sure where to start? Microsoft has the answer for you. They are looking for beginners to participate in a hackathon this March. The idea is that there is a list of top Microsoft Graph scenarios that you may build or you can build one of your own with inspiration from this list. Whenever you have questions there are experts available to help guide you.
Well, with a release of 17.5 comes the preview of 17.6 of Visual Studio 2022. Yawn right? Well not if you are running VS 2022 on Project Volterra. This release of Visual Studio includes the .NET Multi-platform App UI (MAUI) workload for Arm64. This is great news because now we can build MAUI apps using the Project Volterra.
Other improvements include GitHUb issue searching from within the commit message box in VS.
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.
Hello, World. Welcome to OMG! Microsoft, where we tell you about Microsoft and its wonderful technologies. We also make fun of ourselves a lot, because we are such big nerds. We love Microsoft so much that we sometimes forget to eat or sleep or go outside. We think Microsoft is the best thing that ever happened to humanity, even better than sex or ice cream. But we also know that Microsoft is not perfect, and sometimes it makes mistakes or does stupid things.
