Build hasn’t focused on Windows for several years now, and so we only have a few interesting tidbits this year, mostly aimed at developers.

Here are only the Windows-related announcements from Build, or at least those that Microsoft disclosed to us ahead of time.

Snapdragon Developer Kit. Starting this summer, developers will be able to purchase “an affordable Windows on ARM-based PC designed for developers” that will be sold from the Microsoft Store. It was created in partnership with Qualcomm and i’s described a small desktop PC based on the Qualcomm Snapdragon 7c compute platform that will be less expensive than consumer notebooks (based on ARM). So I guess it could still be pretty expensive.

Project Reunion 0.8 Preview SDK. Microsoft’s hybrid desktop app platform should be released in 1.0 form by the end of the year, but we can see the progress in this preview version of the SDK, which supports Windows 10 version 1809 and up, .NET 5 apps, Windows UI Library (WinUI) 3, and Microsoft Edge WebView2.

Linux GUI apps support. The Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) will soon allow developers to run their most-needed Linux GUI tools, utilities, and apps without having to setup, configure, and maintain a virtual machine (VM).

Windows Terminal 1.9 Preview. A preview version of Windows Terminal 1.9 is now available, offering two big new features: A real settings interface (before, it was an editable script) and Quake mode, which lets you quickly open a new terminal window from anywhere with a simple keyboard shortcut.

Microsoft Edge 91. Microsoft claims that Microsoft Edge will be “the best-performing browser on Windows 10” starting with version 91. But this claim is based on two features, sleeping tabs and Startup boost, that are already available in this browser.

Windows Search improvements for commercial customers. Soon, Windows 10 users will be able to access results from Microsoft Graph-compatible enterprise tools like Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Salesforce directly from Windows Search.

And … yeah. That’s it on the Windows front.

Tagged with Build 2021