Announcing Windows 10 Insider Preview Build 17123 for Fast & 17623 for Skip Ahead

Hi All,
Last week Microsoft released Windows 10 Insider Preview Build 17123 (RS4) to Windows Insiders in the Fast ring & Build 17623 to the Skip Ahead ring
Make sure you test WDAG this feature rocks!

What’s new in Build 17123

Introducing High Efficiency Image File Format (HEIF) in Windows 10

The High Efficiency Image File Format (HEIF) has arrived for Windows 10 and the Photos app! HEIF is an image container that leverages modern codecs like HEVC to improve quality, compression, and capabilities compared to earlier formats like JPEG, GIF, and PNG. In addition to traditional single images, HEIF supports encoding image sequences, image collections, auxiliary images like alpha or depth maps, live images & video, audio, and HDR for greater contrast. We have heard your feedback that these features and the ability to share photos easily with other platforms is important to you. This release we are delivering essential viewing support (You cannot edit HEIF images in this release).

In order to try this out, you need to join the Windows App Preview Program for the Photos app and make sure you are running the March release of the  Photos app (Version 2018.18022.13740.0 or newer). This version of the Photos app has been updated for RS4 to support viewing the primary image inside a HEIF file and to guide the install of dependencies like the HEIF and HEVC media extensions from the Microsoft Store. Once installed, these media extensions enable HEIF viewing in Photos as well as thumbnails and metadata in File Explorer.

Additionally, any application that uses WIC, WinRT Imaging APIs, or the XAML Image control can now add similar support for viewing single HEIF images.

Click here to open Feedback Hub and send us feedback on the HEIF experience with the Photos app and Windows 10.

Windows Mixed Reality

With this build, the Windows Mixed Reality Team would like to let you know about a few known issues as you try out the new Windows Mixed Reality features:

  • We’re investigating reports of a performance regression for Windows Mixed Reality on hybrid laptops on this build.
  • In some cases, the inbox apps will fail to load inside of Windows Mixed Reality and newly placed Holograms may be empty. Restarting Windows Mixed Reality should resolve both issues.
  • Occasionally there may be a long delay and restart of mixed reality when transitioning to a new place (Skyloft or Cliff House).

Since the last build, the following bugs should now be fixed:

  • The ambient sound in Skyloft should now the correct volume.
  • Launching the Store from Movies & TV should no longer crash either app.
  • 360 videos should render correctly inside of the Edge app, and the 360 Viewer can be launched from directly from the Store app.

To give feedback on Windows Mixed Reality, click here to open Feedback Hub.

General changes, improvements, and fixes for PC

  • We fixed an issue from the last flight on PCs with the Dolby Access app installed and expired Dolby Atmos license, where the Windows Audio service (audiosrv) would crash with a stack overflow exception and the PC won’t have sound.
  • We fixed an issue resulting in a bug check with the error message SECURE_KERNEL_ERROR in recent flights.
  • As of Build 17063, a change was made that may have caused some older drivers to not load properly. This may have caused update failures or bugchecks (GSODs) shortly after the PC was rebooted. This build includes fixes for this that should prevent these update failures and bugchecks from occurring.
  • Thanks everyone who’s shared feedback about our Embedded Handwriting Panel so far – we’re making a change such that if you clean install, reset your PC, or upgrade straight to this build from the Fall Creators Update this experience will be turned off by default. The setting will remain on for Insiders who have upgraded from previous builds where it was enabled, and can be turned on by anyone with a pen capable device via the “Write directly into text field” option under Pen & Windows Ink Settings.

Known issues

  • If you had your phone linked to your PC prior to upgrading, you’ll find it has become unlinked after upgrading. You can relink your phone from Settings > Phone.

 

What’s new in Build 17623

Introducing High Efficiency Image File Format (HEIF) in Windows 10

The High Efficiency Image File Format (HEIF) has arrived for Windows 10 and the Photos app! HEIF is an image container that leverages modern codecs like HEVC to improve quality, compression, and capabilities compared to earlier formats like JPEG, GIF, and PNG. In addition to traditional single images, HEIF supports encoding image sequences, image collections, auxiliary images like alpha or depth maps, live images & video, audio, and HDR for greater contrast. We have heard your feedback that these features and the ability to share photos easily with other platforms is important to you. This release we are delivering essential viewing support (You cannot edit HEIF images in this release).

In order to try this out, you need to join the Windows App Preview Program for the Photos app and make sure you are running the March release of the  Photos app (Version 2018.18022.13740.0 or newer). This version of the Photos app has been updated for RS4 and RS5 to support viewing the primary image inside a HEIF file and to guide the install of dependencies like the HEIF and HEVC media extensions from the Microsoft Store. Once installed, these media extensions enable HEIF viewing in Photos as well as thumbnails and metadata in File Explorer.

Additionally, any application that uses WIC, WinRT Imaging APIs, or the XAML Image control can now add similar support for viewing single HEIF images.

Click here to open Feedback Hub and send us feedback on the HEIF experience with the Photos app and Windows 10.

External GPU Safe Remove Experience

In RS5, we are introducing a safe remove experience for external GPUs connected via Thunderbolt 3. The safe remove experience allows you to know which applications are running on an external GPU so that you can safely remove to prevent data loss during detach.

To safely remove an external graphics card, go to the “Safely Remove Hardware and Eject Media” icon and click to eject your GPU. If there are applications running on your external GPU, then a dialog will appear with the applications that are currently running. Close the applications to safely remove the device. If there are no applications currently running on your external graphics device then no dialog will appear and you can safely detach your external GPU.

A new privacy settings layout in the set up experience

This build includes the same changes to the set up experience for privacy settings mentioned last week in RS4 Build 17115. This new design conveys focused information to help our customers make focused choices about their privacy and offers two new settings for Inking & Typing and Find my device. More details about the change can be found in this blog post here.

Windows Defender Application Guard (WDAG) Improvements

The Windows Defender Application Guard (WDAG) Team has introduced new improvements for users to have a better experience with our upcoming release. We have combed through our user feedback and acted to ensure your needs are met. On top of significant performance improvements, we have added an ability to download documents highlighted below.

Performance improvements: The teams at Microsoft are constantly working to improve performance for our users. Windows Defender Application Guard is no different. In this upcoming feature update, you will notice an improvement in the launch time for Application Guard. We have made the start process lighter and faster, which will provide our users with a better experience when accessing Microsoft Edge in Windows Defender Application Guard.

Download files to the host: One of the items our users voiced was an inability to “download files from within WDAG” to the host. This created an inconsistent experience for Edge overall as downloaded files were stuck inside the container. In this release, users can turn on a feature to download files from their WDAG browsing session onto the host file system. This feature is available in the Windows 10 Enterprise edition and must be turned on. Once the feature is enabled, users will be able to download files into a folder created in their Downloads folder and open all files on the host.

How to enable and configure the Download to host feature:

Requirements:

  • Latest Windows 10 Enterprise RS4 Builds.
  • Windows Defender Application Guard feature is installed.
  • Network isolation policies are configured.

Steps:

  1. Navigate to Local Group Policy Editor > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > Windows Defender Application Guard.

Group Policy Editor

  1. Select Allow files to download and save to the host operating system from Windows Defender Application Guard
  2. Select Enabled and Apply

Select Allow

After this policy is enabled, you can download files from your Windows Defender Edge session to your Downloads folder. The files from Application Guard will be saved in a folder called “Untrusted files” nested inside the Downloads folder. This folder is created automatically when you first download a file from Application Guard after enabling the policy.

Downloads folder.

Notes:

  • This feature is off by default.
  • Users will need to assess the files they downloaded and assume any risks of opening on the host.

We encourage you to try our new download feature and assess our improved launch performance. Your feedback and suggestion are important to us as we continue to improve our products. You can click here to open Feedback Hub to give feedback on WDAG.

We’ve also made updates to Windows Defender System Guard.  With Windows Defender System Guard, we are making a leap forward in platform security with memory integrity by default and bringing a born secure device promise to our user base.  To learn more about these changes and talk with product team, see their post in the Windows Insider Technical Community.
General changes, improvements, and fixes for PC

  • For Windows Insiders in the Skip Ahead ring, we will begin testing a change where links clicked on within the Windows Mail app will open in Microsoft Edge, which provides the best, most secure and consistent experience on Windows 10 and across your devices. With built-in features for reading, note-taking, Cortana integration, and easy access to services such as SharePoint and OneDrive, Microsoft Edge enables you to be more productive, organized and creative without sacrificing your battery life or security. As always, we look forward to feedback from our WIP community.
  • We fixed an issue where the Microsoft Store may be completely broken or disappeared altogether after upgrading to this build.
  • We fixed two issues impacting the usability of Windows Mixed Reality on the previous build (Windows Mixed Reality running at a very low frame rate (8-10fps), and a potential crash at startup that could cause Windows Mixed Reality to not work).
  • We fixed an issue resulting in not being able to interact with title bars using touch when Sets was enabled.
  • We fixed an issue resulting in the touch keyboard crashing when focus was moved to certain password fields.
  • We’ve improved the performance of Bluetooth mice when the system is under load.
  • We fixed an issue from recent flights causing precision touchpads to periodically need a few tries to be able to move the mouse.
  • We fixed an issue resulting in the Amharic keyboard not working in Win32 apps.
  • We fixed an issue where EFI and Recovery partitions were unexpectedly listed in Defragment and Optimize Drives.
  • We fixed an issue optimizing drives in Defragment and Optimize Drives didn’t work in the last few flights.
  • We fixed an issue resulting in a permanently black window if you dragged a tab out of a Microsoft Edge window, pulled it up to the top edge of the screen, and moved it back down and released it.
  • We’ve updated the Cortana section in Settings to now be called “Cortana & Search”.
  • We fixed an issue where you couldn’t use touch to interact with the Timeline scrollbar.
  • We fixed an issue where a failed app update could result in that app becoming unpinned from the taskbar.
  • We fixed an issue where if focus was set inside Action Center pressing Esc wouldn’t close the Action Center window.
  • We fixed an issue that could result in ShellExperienceHost periodically waking the device from hibernate if active live tiles were pinned to Start.

Known issues

  • If you open Settings and clicking on any links to the Microsoft Store or links in tips, Settings will crash. This includes the links to get themes and fonts from the Microsoft Store, as well as the link to Windows Defender.
  • If you try to open a file that is available online-only from OneDrive that hasn’t been previously downloaded to your PC (marked with a green checkmark in File Explorer), your PC could bugcheck (GSOD). You can work around this problem by right-clicking on these files and selecting “Always keep on this device.” Any file-on-demand from OneDrive that is already downloaded to the PC should open fine.
  • The Emoji Panel keyboard shortcuts don’t work – for now you’ll need to use the touch keyboard to enter emoji. If you right-click on the taskbar you’ll find an option to show the touch keyboard button and go from there.

 

Source: Windows Blogs (Fast)

Windows Blogs (Skip Ahead)

Announcing Windows 10 Insider Preview Build 17112 for Fast Ring

Builds are piling up these last weeks, (17107,17110,17112) were getting close to RS4 release for sure!
The time is now more than ever your chance to test & feedback before the release so get your systems up2date and make sure you use the Feedback Hub to report any issues or suggestions to the team. (Windows key + F)
This build has a few issues that might impact your productivity so read below before yo upgrade

Windows Mixed Reality

There are two issues impacting the usability of Windows Mixed Reality on this build. Windows Mixed Reality runs at a very low frame rate (8-10fps) that could result in some physical discomfort. And there are multiple crashes at startup that will cause Windows Mixed Reality to not work. For Insiders who want to keep Windows Mixed Reality working – you might want to consider hitting pause on taking new Insider Preview builds until these issues are fixed. You can pause Insider Preview builds by going to Settings > Update & Security > Windows Insider Program and pressing the “Stop Insider Preview builds” button and choosing “Pause updates for a bit”.

General changes, improvements, and fixes for PC

    • We fixed an issue where selecting a notification after taking a screenshot or game clip opened the Xbox app’s home screen instead of opening the screenshot or game clip.
    • We fixed an issue where EFI and Recovery partitions were unexpectedly listed in Defragment and Optimize Drives.
    • We fixed an issue optimizing drives in Defragment and Optimize Drives didn’t work in the last few flights.
    • We fixed an issue resulting in a permanently black window if you dragged a tab out of a Microsoft Edge window, pulled it up to the top edge of the screen, and moved it back down and released it.
    • We fixed an issue where the warning on Windows 10 S when trying to run non-Microsoft Store apps from File Explorer might end up stuck behind the File Explorer window.
    • We fixed an issue where there was some unexpected extra space in the File Explorer navigation pane before the chevron icons to expand/collapse folders.
    • We fixed an issue where if focus was set inside Action Center pressing Esc wouldn’t close the Action Center window.
    • We fixed an issue that could result in ShellExperienceHost periodically waking the device from hibernate if active live tiles were pinned to Start.
    • We fixed an issue where navigating to Settings > System > Focus Assist > “Customize your priority list” could crash Settings.

Known issues

    • IMPORTANT: The Microsoft Store may be completely broken or disappeared altogether after upgrading to this build. Please see this forum post for details including a workaround on how to get the Microsoft Store back.
    • If you try to open a file that is available online-only from OneDrive that hasn’t been previously downloaded to your PC (marked with a green checkmark in File Explorer), your PC could bugcheck (GSOD). You can work around this problem by right-clicking on these files and selecting “Always keep on this device.” Any file-on-demand from OneDrive that is already downloaded to the PC should open fine.
    • Post-install at the first user-prompted reboot or shutdown, a small number of devices have experienced a scenario wherein the OS fails to load properly and may enter a reboot loop state. For affected PCs, turning off fast boot may bypass the issue. If not, it is necessary to create a bootable ISO on a USB drive, boot into recovery mode, and this this will allow bypass.
    • When Movies & TV user denies access to its videos library (through the “Let Movies & TV access your videos library?” popup window or through Windows privacy settings), Movies & TV crashes when the user navigates to the “Personal” tab.

Source: Windows  Blogs

Announcing Windows 10 Insider Preview Build 17093 for PC

Last Thursday Microsoft released Windows 10 Insider Preview Build 17093 for PC to Windows Insiders in the Fast ring and for those who opted in to Skip Ahead. Great stuff for gamebar, Video playback & Password less option for Windows S! and much; much more… Enjoy!

What’s new in Build 17093

Cool updates on the Gamebar:

Updated Game bar design in RS4!

  • We’ve given Game bar a makeover so it’s even easier to find what you’re looking for.
  • Go to your captures, toggle your microphone and camera, and edit the title of your Mixer stream—all from new buttons on Game bar.
  • Quickly check the time using the new clock.
  • Choose a theme—Dark, Light, or your current Windows theme.
  • Game bar settings are easier to use.

Game bar in light mode.

Game bar in light mode.

Diagnostic Data Improvements

Last week, we announced some new privacy tools as part of Data Privacy Day which included the Diagnostic Data Viewer that showed up for Windows Insiders in Build 17083. With our commitment to transparency and control, users can now delete the Windows Diagnostic Data that Microsoft has collected from your device. In Settings > Privacy > Diagnostics & feedback, you will find a delete button that deletes the Windows diagnostic data associated with your device.

You can now delete the Windows Diagnostic Data that Microsoft has collected from your device.

Note: The backend cloud system is currently under development and will be available to complete the Delete requests prior to public release of RS4.

Graphics Improvements

HDR Video on more Windows PCs: Many newer devices are capable of HDR video, but needed to be calibrated in the factory to enable HDR. Now, we are expanding HDR video access to more users via new functionality via Settings > Apps > Video playback. If the “Stream HDR video” toggle can be switched to “On”, your device can be calibrated for HDR video.

To try our experimental calibration tool, click the link “Change calibration settings for HDR video on my built-in display”. This allows you to change the way HDR video appears on your device, allowing you to find your preferred balance between details in dark scenes and details in bright scenes. This tool is still early stage, and we’d love any feedback you might have as we are getting this tool ready for release with RS4.

We are expanding HDR video access to more users via new functionality via Settings > Apps > Video playback. If the "Stream HDR video" toggle can be switched to "On", your device can be calibrated for HDR video.

Note: By default, HDR video uses the full brightness of your screen, so it consumes a little more battery. Fear not: if you want the best of both, just check the box “Don’t increase display brightness when watching HDR video on battery” under “Battery Options” in Settings > Apps > Video playback.

New Graphics settings for Multi-GPU Systems: In this build we’re introducing a new Graphics settings page for Multi-GPU systems that allows you to manage the graphics performance preference of your apps. You may be familiar with similar graphics control panels from AMD and Nvidia, and you can continue to use those control panels. When you set an application preference in the Windows Graphics settings, that will take precedence over the other control panel settings. Find the page by going to Settings > System > Display and scrolling down to the “Advanced graphics settings” link. (In future flights, you will see this link as “Graphics settings”.)

The first step is to choose an application to configure. Choosing a “Classic app” will let you browse to an application on your system. Choosing a “Universal app” will let you choose a Store application from a list. By default, the application added to the Graphics settings page is given a “System default” preference. System default means that the system decides the best GPU for your application.

Picture of advanced graphics settings page in Settings. You can choose an app to select graphics performance preference – there’s a dropdown to choose between classic app and universal app.

Once you’ve chosen the application, click on the application in the list and then click the “Options” button. The “Power saving” mode is a request to run the application on the most power saving GPU available. The “High performance” mode is a request to run the application on the most high performance GPU available. Generally, the power saving GPU is the integrated GPU on a system, and the high performance GPU is the discrete GPU or external GPU. If you have both a discrete GPU and an external GPU on a system, the external GPU is considered the high performance GPU.

Remove an application from the list by clicking the application and clicking the “Remove” button. Removing an application is the same as choosing “System default”.

Graphics specifications popup, showing the option to switch graphics preference between system default, power saving, and high performance.

Applications are always allowed to have the ultimate choice of which GPU to use, so you may see additional applications that do not follow the preferences you set. In that case, look for a setting within the application itself to choose a preference.

If you have feedback about the feature, please reach out to us directly on the Feedback Hub.

Go password-less with Windows 10 S!

Do you hate entering your passwords all the time? So do we. Passwords are inconvenient and insecure. With Windows 10 S you don’t have to! Just download the Authenticator App and use it to set up your Windows 10 S PC. You will be able to go through the out-of-box experience, set up Windows Hello and access all your favorite apps and services – all without ever having to enter your password.

Starting with this build, your Windows 10 S PC will automatically make your experience password-free.

With the changes in this build, your Windows 10 S PC will automatically make your experience password-free. You will notice that if you have Windows Hello set up, you won’t see passwords anywhere in the Windows experience – not on the unlock screen nor in Sign-in options.

You will notice that if you have Windows Hello set up, you won’t see passwords anywhere in the Windows experience – not on the unlock screen nor in Sign-in options.

You will notice that if you have Windows Hello set up, you won’t see passwords anywhere in the Windows experience – not on the unlock screen nor in Sign-in options.

Eye Control Improvements

We first released eye control for the Windows 10 Fall Creator’s Update back in October 2017 and we’re excited to share some of the new capabilities we’re adding with today’s flight to enable a richer eye control experience. We’ve received a lot of great feedback requesting improvements to eye control – like easier controls for scrolling and quicker access to common tasks. All up, here are three areas we’re updating based on your feedback:

Navigate more easily: We’re adding the ability to more easily scroll content, like email and websites. We also heard the need for a quicker way to click with the mouse, so in addition to precise mouse control we’ve incorporated direct left click and direct right click capabilities into the launchpad.

Get there quick: Accelerate to common tasks with quick access to Start, Timeline, Settings, and device calibration, now available right from the eye control launchpad.

Pause when you need to: We also received feedback on the importance of pausing or hiding the launchpad when not needed to avoid accidental clicks, so we’ve added a pause button on the launchpad. Eye control users now have the flexibility to hide the launchpad for uninterrupted reading, streaming, or relaxing without accidental clicking. Re-engaging the launchpad is simple too – just glance at the pause button in the top or bottom middle of the screen.

Eye control is still in preview, and we welcome your feedback to help improve the experience!

The eye control launchpad. Shows reposition the launchpad, direct left click, direct right click, scroll, text to speech, precise mouse control, keyboard, calibration, Start, Timeline, Settings, and Pause button.

Windows Security Improvements

Windows Defender is now Windows Security in Settings: We have renamed the settings page under Settings > Update & Security from “Windows Defender” to “Windows Security. This settings page has also been redesigned – putting emphasis on the various protection areas to keep you safe and secure on your PC.

We have renamed the settings page under Settings > Update & Security from “Windows Defender” to “Windows Security. This settings page has also been redesigned – putting emphasis on the various protection areas to keep you safe and secure on your PC.

Account Protection Pillar in Windows Defender: We’ve made it easier for users to protect their identity when signing in to Windows with the new Account Protection pillar in Windows Defender Security Center.  Account Protection will encourage password users to set up Windows Hello Face, Fingerprint or PIN for faster sign in, and will notify Dynamic lock users if Dynamic lock has stopped working because their phone or device Bluetooth is off.

Device Security Pillar in Windows Defender: We’re giving you greater insight into the security features integrated in your Windows device. The Device Security page provides you with status reporting and management of security features built into your devices – including toggling features on to provide enhanced protections.

Bluetooth Improvements

Streamlined Pairing and Connecting to Certain Bluetooth Devices: Starting with this build, Windows enables users to start pairing and connecting supported devices in a single click. When these devices are ready to pair and detected to be in range, Windows shows a notification to the user allowing them to quickly and conveniently start the pairing process. We want to thank the Surface Accessories team for partnering closely with us and having the first device available on the market supporting this great new experience, the Surface Precision Mouse. We are working with many other partners to grow the list of supported devices, and a number of them are on the way. To learn more, check out our blog post here.

Microsoft Edge Improvements

Evolving full screen mode (F11): With the Fall Creators Update we added F11 support to Microsoft Edge, to enable you to take full advantage of your screen real estate. Full screen removes the Edge frame so that only the webpage is visible. You can enter this mode by pressing the F11 key, and exiting using the same key. We’ve heard your feedback, and with this build we’re updating this experience so that without leaving full screen you can now access the address bar and navigate to other sites, add a site as a favorite, and more. To do this, simply hover your mouse at the top of the screen while in full screen mode, or using touch drag a finger down from the top of the screen, and the familiar controls will appear. As always, don’t hesitate to provide feedback so we can continue improving this feature.

Clutter-free printing: Now you can print webpages from Microsoft Edge without ads and unnecessary clutter from the web. Enable the “Clutter-free printing” option in the print dialog and print only the content you want. Note: this option will only be visible for certain type of webpages.

The print dialog opened from Microsoft Edge, with the clutter-free printing option highlighted.

Input Improvements

Multilingual text support in Windows: If you type in more than one Latin script languages on Windows, you’re going to like this new feature. With the Touch Keyboard, you do NOT have to manually switch the language anymore! Simply continue typing in multiple languages and Windows will assist you by showing predictions from multiple languages to make you more productive.

The additional step of manually switching between languages creates a barrier for users that are multi-lingual. We’re hoping that this feature can reduce that barrier and allow you to easily type in multiple languages.

With this build, Windows supports up to 3 Latin script languages for multi-lingual text predictions. It picks the top 3 installed languages from Language Settings while suggesting predictions. You can turn the feature off by going to Settings > Devices > Typing > Multilingual Text Prediction.

Text Prediction support for a bunch more languages! If you’re using the touch keyboard in any of the following languages, you’ll now see words suggested as you type: Assamese, Bashkir, Belarusian, Greenlandic, Hawaiian, Icelandic, Igbo, Irish, Kyrgyz, Luxembourgish, Maltese, Maori, Mongolian, Nepali, Pashto, Sakha, Tajik, Tatar, Tswana, Turkmen, Urdu, Uyghur, Welsh, Xhosa, Yoruba, Zulu.

Windows App Permissions

Updated Privacy Settings navigation pane: To improve visual acuity, we’ve added new categories to the Privacy Settings navigation pane – here’s what it looks like:

Privacy Settings, with the nav pane showing Windows permissions and app permissions grouped.

View user dictionary: We’ve added a new section to Speech, Inking, & Typing settings under Privacy so that you can new view your user dictionary and easily clear it if need be.

Ease of Access Improvements

Narrator has been enabled in safe mode: You can now use Narrator when in safe mode! Note: It’s recommended for Narrator users to enter safe mode via msconfig.exe. On some devices you may need to use USB headphones to hear audio in safe mode.

Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) updates

Note about launch speed: The first launch of each distro will be slow on this build.  Some of our updates require sizeable changes to the Linux file system directories; applying those changes may take a few minutes. This should only happen once for each distribution you have installed from the store.

WSL is more configurable with wsl.conf: We added a method for you to automatically configure certain functionality in WSL that will be applied every time you launch the subsystem. This includes automount options and network configuration. Learn more about it in our blog post.

AF_UNIX allows socket connections between Linux processes on WSL and Windows native processes: WSL and Windows applications can now communicate with each other over Unix sockets. Imagine you want to run a service in Windows and make it available to both Windows and WSL apps. Now, that’s possible with Unix sockets. Read more in our blog post.

Better file handling via folder level case sensitivity: One of the tricky problems sharing data between Linux and Windows comes down to file case handling.  Windows isn’t case sensitive, Linux is.  In the past WSL used exclusively process-based case sensitivity.  Starting in 17089, NTFS has a new flag that can be set on directories to indicate all operations in those directories should be treated as case sensitive, which allows Windows applications to correctly open files that differ only by case.

For an even more detailed list of WSL updates, read the WSL release notes.

General changes, improvements, and fixes for PC

  • We fixed an issue where the network flyout didn’t have an acrylic background (Yay Fluent Design!).
  • We fixed the issue causing VPN clients installed via the Microsoft Store to not work after upgrading to Build 17083.
  • We fixed an issue where the Home text label was missing from the Settings navigation pane.
  • We fixed an issue where Windows Security in Settings was missing an icon in the navigation pane.
  • We fixed an issue where dropdowns in the new App volume and device preferences page under Sound Settings were truncated when the Settings window wasn’t wide enough.
  • We fixed an issue where the new App volume and device preferences page under Sound Settings might have duplicate apps listed.
  • We fixed issues with the slider controls for sound under Settings > System > Sound and “App volume and device preferences”. Thanks @MSWindowsinside, @CrazyCatsGot2 and @TheScarfix for reporting this!
  • We fixed an issue in Windows Update Settings where if you’d selected restart to kick off an upgrade and then canceled the restart, the restart button in Settings would no longer be functional.
  • We fixed an issue where the data limit dialog on the Data Usage Settings page had no margins.
  • We fixed an issue where permissions for inbox apps were cleared out when upgrading to recent builds, resulting in you being unexpectedly re-prompted to enable or disable these permissions when you launched an impacted app.
  • We fixed an issue where the Advanced display settings link was missing from Display Settings.
  • We fixed an issue where going to Focus Assist Settings might crash Settings.
  • We’ve updated the “Use my sign-in info…” text in Sign-in Options settings to be more clear.
  • We fixed an issue where clicking the search entry from the app command menu of certain apps would crash explorer.exe.
  • We fixed an issue where the night light quick action in the Action Center sometimes didn’t work due to a long running calculation of the schedule to automatically turn on/off night light.
  • We’ve updated the Action Center context menu such that the three focus assist states are now collapsed under one expandable entry.
  • We fixed an issue where sharing to Cortana Reminders wasn’t working in recent flights.
  • We’ve updated the OneDrive Files-on-Demand state icon in File Explorer’s navigation pane so they now display closer to the file icon.
  • We fixed an issue where burning an ISO file to CD threw an unexpected error “Selected Disc image file isn’t valid” in recent builds.
  • We’ve updated the People flyout to now use your accent color when “Show accent color” is selected in Color Settings.
  • We have fixed the issue where Win32 apps pinned to Start would display as blank live tiles that show only a name starting with “W~”.
  • We fixed an issue where the Start layout might get reset if you upgraded straight from the Anniversary Update.
  • We have fixed the issue where using Task View to switch to an app might result in touch not working properly in that app.
  • We fixed an issue where using the new right-click options to delete groups of activities from Timeline might not delete the entire group.
  • As we prepare RS4 for release, we’re removing the feedback button in Task View that was introduced for Insiders to give feedback on Timeline – thanks everyone who’s logged feedback so far! We welcome you to continue giving feedback via the Feedback Hub under the Desktop Environment > Timeline category.
  • We fixed an issue where the text label for creating virtual desktops in Task View was truncated in certain languages.
  • We fixed an issue where the app icons in the Open With dialog might appear pixelated on high DPI screens.
  • We fixed an issue where music wouldn’t re-route back to audio peripheral if you skipped to next track before connecting the USB or Bluetooth audio device.
  • We fixed an issue where the Windows.old folder wasn’t completely emptied and removed after cleanup.
  • We fixed an issue where using Ctrl + Alt + Break in Hyper-V didn’t work to make a VM re-enter full screen mode.
  • We fixed an issue where vmconnect couldn’t insert or eject an ISO/DVD drive.
  • We fixed an issue that could result in lower frame rates in games in certain monitor configurations.
  • We fixed an issue resulting in audio from Microsoft Edge sometimes becoming unexpectedly muted in the last few flights.
  • We fixed an issue where when using Microsoft Edge with dark theme the text in the address bar might become black on dark grey.
  • We fixed a number of issues impacting Microsoft Edge reliability in the last few builds.
  • We fixed an issue resulting in opening a new tab in Microsoft Edge in recent builds potentially taking an unexpectedly long time.
  • We fixed an issue resulting in Microsoft Edge file downloads to secondary drives failing in recent flights.
  • We fixed an issue resulting in SVG images on certain websites not rendering in Microsoft Edge.
  • When dragging a website from the address bar in Microsoft Edge in order to pin it to the favorites bar, you will now see the favicon and website name follow your mouse as you drag.
  • We fixed an issue from recent builds where content copied to the clipboard using Web Notes in Microsoft Edge couldn’t be pasted.
  • We fixed an issue where certain PDF files wouldn’t display their context menu correctly in Microsoft Edge.
  • We fixed an issue resulting in Microsoft Edge potentially crashing on launch when using roaming profiles.
  • We fixed an issue resulting in not being able to scroll components of certain websites when viewed in Microsoft Edge despite a scrollbar being visible.
  • We fixed an issue resulting in not being able to use Flash on certain sites in Microsoft Edge in recent builds.
  • We fixed an issue resulting in Microsoft Edge crashing recently if you clicked on the page when in caret mode.
  • We fixed an issue in Microsoft Edge in recent builds where clicking on link’s in the ‘Ask Cortana’ sidebar might open the page inside the sidebar instead of the main window.
  • We fixed an issue from the last two builds where certain websites didn’t load in Microsoft Edge, although the name of the website was correct in the tab.
  • We fixed an issue from the last two builds where an unexpected grey rectangle was visible in Microsoft Edge settings next to the word Settings.
  • We fixed an issue from the last build where processes in Task Manager only showed at most 100mb of memory used.
  • We fixed an issue where Narrator wouldn’t say anything if you were to use the arrow keys to navigate through text typed into Command Prompt.
  • We fixed an issue an issue where the touch keyboard might be a pixel-width up from the bottom of the screen if the display scaling wasn’t 100%, leading to the keyboard unexpectedly dismissing if you tapped that area.
  • We fixed an issue an issue resulting in the one-handed touch keyboard being unexpectedly large in recent builds.
  • We fixed an issue from recently builds where shapewriting in the touch keyboard would stop showing text candidates if you were using it, dismissed the keyboard, re-invoked the keyboard, and tried to start shapewriting again.
  • We fixed an issue from recent builds impacting Emoji Panel invocation reliability.

Known issues

  • We have observed seeing longer-than-normal delays during install at the 88% mark. Some delays are as long as 90 minutes before moving forward. Please be patient as the install will complete successfully.
  • Some PCs will fail to resume from hibernate requiring a hard reboot to recover.
  • If you install a font product from the Microsoft Store, then later install a new build (feature update), the Store package will remain installed, but the fonts within the package are not installed. Until this is fixed, the temporary workaround is to uninstall the product from the Apps page in Settings, then re-acquire the product from the Store.
  • If an East Asian keyboard is the only input method on your system the touch keyboard will show an English layout with no IME on/off key. Until this is fixed, the workaround is to add a second keyboard language from the Region & Language Settings page, or to use the IME mode button in the taskbar.
  • We’re investigating an issue where the Japanese IME sometimes can’t turn on in UWP apps. If you encounter this issue switch to a Win32 application (e.g. Notepad), turn the IME on there, then switch back to the UWP app.
  • We’re investigating reports that 3 and 4 finger gestures on the touchpad have become unresponsive starting with the previous flight.
  • Windows Hello will fail to work on Surface Laptops with this build.
  • Plugging in an external optical drive (DVD) will cause an Explorer.exe crash.
  • Settings will crash if you open the Themes Settings page.
  • Buttons on Game bar are not centered correctly.
  • In some games—such as Destiny 2 and Fortnite—mouse and keyboard input will still go to the game while Game bar is open.
  • Selecting a notification after taking a screenshot or game clip opens the Xbox app’s home screen instead of opening the screenshot or game clip.
  • After Game bar closes, the mouse cursor resets to the position it was in when Game bar was opened.
  • Keyboard and mouse input may not work correctly in Game bar when playing a first person game (e.g. Minecraft). Alt+Tab out of and into the game should fix this.
  • In the text box for Mixer stream title, using non-character keys (e.g. Tab, Delete, Backspace, etc.) may cause the game to hang for a few seconds.
  • Bringing up Game bar using the Xbox button on an Xbox One controller doesn’t work in some games.
  • [ADDED 2/9] For Insiders who had HomeGroup added as a folder to appear on Start and upgrade to Build 17093, their Start menu will not work due to HomeGroup being removed. We’re working to have a fix in the next build. Unfortunately there is no workaround unless you rollback to the previous build.

source: Windows Blogs

 

2018 Windows Insider Annual Survey

There’s still time to participate in our 2018 Windows Insider Annual Survey! Thanks to everyone who has already completed our Annual Survey. If you haven’t had a chance to respond, there’s still time – and we’d love to hear from you. This survey is one of the most important tools we have for shaping the Windows Insider Program. It’s your chance to tell us what interests you most about the program – and how we can make your Insider experience even better.

Looking for more news on the latest Windows features? Need more resources as a developer or IT Professional? Got an idea for taking the program in an exciting new direction? Or perhaps you’re simply happy with the program as it is now. Let us know!

Click here to take the annual survey now.

klik hier voor de nerderlandse versie.

The survey only takes 10-15 minutes to complete. But the input you provide will help shape the program for the rest of the year – and beyond.

We look forward to hearing from you!

Announcing Windows 10 Insider Preview Build 17074 for PC

Microsoft released Build 17074 to the Insider Fast Ring last week, Edge is getting even more cool stuff 🙂
Auto fill for forms works amazing, InPrivate mode now had add-ins & your saved passwords, favorites are even better to manage..
Quiet Hours got smart, will turn on automatically when required during screen duplication or gaming.
Even more new stuff & a ton of fixes below. enjoy upgrading & testing the new features!

What’s new in Build 17074

Reimagined Windows Internationalization

We have redesigned localization of Windows in this release. Now you can find your desired language (Local Experience Pack – or “Language Pack”) through the Microsoft Store and Region & Language section of the Settings app. The Settings app provides improved discoverability of features supported for each language.

We have also started utilizing Artificial Intelligence (AI) and neural network-based Machine Learning (ML) for Windows localization. Having the Local Experience Packs in the Microsoft Store allows us to take advantage of ML improvements and user feedback via Language Community App to release better translations more frequently. This will consistently improve the experience of our international customers with Windows.

Microsoft Edge Improvements

Hub improvements: We’ve revamped the Hub view in Microsoft Edge to show more content and to be easier and more intuitive to use. You’ll now find the different Hub sections listed with the full name visible in the Navigation view to the left of the content. This view can be collapsed to show icons only if you prefer to save space.

Screen capture showing the new Hub opened in Microsoft Edge, with the Navigation pane expanded to show Favorites, Reading List, Books, History, and Downloads.

Autofill cards on web forms: Microsoft Edge can now save and automatically fill your card information on payment web forms. On submission of a form with card information, Microsoft Edge will prompt you to save card information. In the future, you can simply select the preferred card from a drop-down menu to autofill necessary fields. Microsoft Edge securely saves your card information. CVV information is never saved. All cards linked to your Microsoft Account are also made available for automatically filling card information.

 

New reading experience for EPUB, PDF, and Reading View: We’ve overhauled the look and feel of the reading and Books experiences in Microsoft Edge, bringing a new, consistent, more powerful experience across all your documents, whether they’re EPUB or PDF books, documents, or web pages in Reading View.

Screen recording showing the Reading View in Microsoft Edge toggling between Dark and Light modes.

The new reading experience uses Fluent Design System elements like motion and Acrylic material to provide a fluid, delightful experience that keeps the focus on the page.

In Books, we’ve added a new pop-over menu for “Notes,” making it a snap to navigate between annotations, notes, or highlights. We’ve also updated the Seek bar, so you can scrub through your document more easily, including Go-to-page (Ctrl-G) to find a specific page in the document. Go-to-page supports PDF Page Labels or EPUB Page List, so the page numbers can correspond to a print source that may be numbered differently.

Grammar Tools for EPUB books and Reading View: When viewing reflowable EPUB books or Reading View for websites, you can now use the new Grammar Tools button to enable new comprehension aids. Grammar Tools can break the words on the page into syllables, as well as highlight different parts of speech such as nouns, verbs, and adjectives.

Screen capture showing the an EPUB book in Microsoft Edge. The Grammar Tools pane is open with “Split words into syllables” and “Highlight all Verbs” turned to “On.” In the background a page from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland shows with words split into syllables and verbs highlighted in red.

New Full-screen reading experience: You can now take Books, PDFs, and Reading View pages full-screen, for a distraction-free reading experience.

Improved roaming for progress and notes across devices: For Store books, reading progress, notes, bookmarks, and annotations will roamed much faster across devices on the same account in near-real-time via WNS.

Screen capture showing the Notes and Table of Contents views open over a Book in Microsoft Edge.

The new “Notes” and “Table of contents” let you navigate between chapters or highlights, notes, and annotations with ease.

General Improvements: We’ve made many improvements to fixed layout EPUB books, so content should be arranged more predictably on the page. Users of assistive technology will also find several improvements to viewing PDFs or Books with a screen reader, including more explicit narration when opening, loading, and navigating books.

Improved Library experience: We’ve built on the library improvements in Build 17035 with new changes in response to your feedback. Now, in addition to refreshing your library or pinning books to your Start menu, you can see recommendations for new books (when your library is empty) or filter expired rentals from the current library view. When you’re reading a book, we now show a Books icon and the title, rather than the URI, for a clearer and less cluttered presentation.

Audio Narrated Books: We’ve added support for EPUB Media Overlays, enabling support for a tailored narration experience, including custom audio and highlight styles. On supported books, you can now hear the book read aloud with custom narration, with the publisher’s chosen style applied to the highlight as the book is read. We’ve also made accessibility improvements when using Narrator to browse, search, or load a book.

Favorites bar improvements: The Favorites Bar will now automatically show on Start and New tab pages, if you have at least one favorite in it. When you navigate, the Favorites Bar will automatically hide to give you the most space for browsing. You may still choose to always show the favorites bar if you wish, via a context menu on the favorites bar “Show bar”, or via settings “Show the favorites bar”. The Favorites bar also now supports hiding names for individual favorite bar items, instead of having to either hide none or all names.

Option to never save passwords for domains: One of the top pieces of Windows Insider feedback was to provide an option to never save password for certain sites. When you choose to never save passwords, you shall never be prompted with a save password notification for that site.

Autofill passwords when InPrivate: Microsoft Edge now supports auto-filling of saved passwords when browsing InPrivate. To view list of available credentials for a site, click on the username field and it would populate all saved credentials for the website. No user credentials will be saved or updated when the windows is InPrivate.

Use Extensions when InPrivate: We’ve heard your feedback and have added the ability to load extensions when Microsoft Edge is in an InPrivate window. You can grant individual extensions permission to run in InPrivate from the options menu for the extension. We’re working with extension developers to enable more features when InPrivate.

Variable Fonts: Microsoft Edge now supports CSS extensions for OpenType Font Variations, which allows single “variable” font files to behave like multiple fonts, with a range of weight, width, or other attributes. You can see examples of variable fonts in practice at the Axis-Praxis Playground in Microsoft Edge.

Screen recording of a web page in Microsoft Edge, displaying an animation of a cartoon horse with a rider galloping.

Demo page from Axis-Praxis showing an animation of a horse using OpenType Variable Fonts.

Vertically dock the Microsoft Edge DevTools: The Microsoft Edge DevTools can now be docked vertically, fulfilling a a top web developer feature request. Click the new “Dock Right” button in the top-right corner of the tools to toggle the location. In a future update, we plan to improve the UI and flow of DevTools content when docked vertically.

Screen Capture showing the Microsoft Edge DevTools docked to the right of a web page.

Windows Shell Improvements

Quiet Hours: Are there certain times when you don’t want to be interrupted or just need to stay focused on what you’re doing? Be more productive with Quiet Hours. With this build you can automatically choose those times when you don’t want to be bothered with Quiet Hours automatic rules.

The new Quiet hours experience coming in RS4.

 

  • Quiet Hours will automatically turn on when you are duplicating your display. Never get interrupted during presentations again!
  • Quiet Hours will turn on automatically when you are playing a full screen exclusive DirectX game.
  • You can set the schedule that works for you so that Quiet Hours are always on when you want them. Go to Settings > Quiet Hours to configure your schedule.
  • Customize your own priority list so that your important people and apps always breakthrough when Quiet Hours are on. People pinned to your task bar with always break through!
  • See a summary of what you missed while you were in Quiet Hours.
  • If you’re using Cortana, you can also have Quiet Hours turn on while you’re at home.

Making your folders more discoverable: In response to your feedback, especially for those upgrading to Windows 10 for the first time, we’re making it easier to navigate to the things you care about by showing links to the Documents and Pictures folders in the Start menu by default. If you’d like to customize the folders that appear here, just right click an item and there’s now a link directly to the customization settings. We love the feedback!  Let us know if this helps and continue to tell us if there are ways we can make it easier for you to quickly get to the stuff you care about in Windows!

Start menu with context menu showing saying “personalize this list” that would appear after right-clicking the Photos folder icon on the left side of Start.

Near Share Improvements: Thanks everyone who’s shared feedback about Near Share – we’ve made some important reliability fixes to the feature with this build, so please give it a try once you upgrade.

For those who haven’t seen Near Share already, here’s a demo:

Note: Please update all of your Insider PCs to the latest flight to nearby share between them. PCs running older Insider Preview builds won’t be discoverable by those running the latest flight.

Windows Settings Improvements

Improved Storage Settings: If you head to Settings you’ll find that Disk Cleanup functionality has been rolled over into Storage Settings as part of our efforts to consolidate our settings experience.

Temporary files section in Settings – scanning for temp files, shows Thumbnails, Temporary files, Recycle Bin and more things that can be cleaned up.

Sound Settings Improvements: Continuing our work to make the new Sound Settings page a one stop shop for your audio needs, we’ve made some more design tweaks and have added some more helpful links. We’ve also added a brand new “App volume and device preferences” page to help you customize your audio experience to best fit your needs and preferences! Please explore these pages and share your feedback as we continuously work on improving them.

Sound settings landing page, showing these two new options under Other sound options.

About Settings Improvements: We’ve updated About Settings so you can now select and copy your device name. We’ve also added a link to System info and updated our search strings so that if you search for “computer name” you’ll now see a link that takes you to About Settings.

Manage app execution aliases from Settings: UWP apps can declare a name used to run the app from a command prompt – we’ve added a new page under Apps & Features Settings where you can turn these execution aliases on or off (particularly in the case where multiple apps use the same alias, and you want to choose which to give preference to).

Input Improvements

Introducing the Embedded Handwriting Panel: In this Insider release, users get to experience a new way to handwrite on Windows. Typically handwriting is done in a panel that’s separate from the text field and requires users to split their attention between the handwriting in the panel and the text in the text field. Our new handwriting experience brings handwriting input into the text control!

To invoke the experience, just tap your pen into a supported text field and it will expand to provide a comfortable area for you to write in. Your handwriting will get recognized and converted into text. If you run out of space, an additional line will be created below so you can continue writing. Once you’re done, simply tap outside the text field.

If something gets misrecognized or you’d like to edit what you’ve written, the same gestures that are available through the handwriting panel are also available, like the new insert gesture we added recently. Overall, we believe moving handwriting into the same location as the text will create a more comfortable, confident, and direct experience. Try it out and let us know what you think!

If you’d like to turn this experience off, there’s an option to do so in Pen & Windows Ink Settings, although if you do, please take a moment to log feedback about why you made this decision.

Note: This experience currently works in all XAML text fields except the Microsoft Edge address bar, Cortana, Mail, and the Calendar app. These teams are working on making the experience more tailored to their applications. This embedded experience will *only* appear if you’re using a pen to tap the text field – if you use touch, the existing handwriting panel will be invoked.  

Handwriting Recognition Updates  

Windows can now recognize Hindi handwriting: We’ve expanding our handwriting capabilities to new languages including Hindi, Welsh, Sesotho, Wolof and Maori!

To install one of these languages, go to Settings > Time & language > Region & Language and click “Add a language”. Select the language name and click Next. Make sure to select the “Handwriting” checkbox and select “Install.”. Reboot the machine for the changes to take effect.

Now switch to the input language of your choice – Hindi for example. Writing in that language will show handwriting recognition results in that language and convert it to text.  If you speak these languages, please give it a try and share feedback in the in the Feedback Hub, under Input and Language > Handwriting Recognition. As a reminder, if you’d like to use the handwriting panel with touch, you’ll need to enable it – it’s an option in Pen & Windows Ink Settings.

Writing Namaste in Hindi using the handwriting panel.

In addition to the handwriting panel, any app that uses the Ink Analysis APIs will now be able to recognize ink in these new languages without any additional changes!

XAML Improvements

We wanted to take a moment to walk through some of the changes you’ll see with apps using the next Insider SDK that is published. You’ll also see this across various elements in the system that use XAML.

Reveal in Light theme: Reveal will now show up by default with dark borders in light theme, but will continue to have a white hover Reveal:

Reveal in light theme now has dark borders.

Improved NavigationView:

  • We’ve stabilized and added animations for item headers, pane opening, and item selection events.
  • We’ve fixed several bugs with the Back Button in NavigationView.

Border Reveal in Lists: Based on feedback we’ve made the decision to removal Border Reveal in lists. It will be removed for ListView and TreeView. It will still be visible in NavigationView.

That means that ListView and TreeView will now only have the borders on hover, but no approach behavior will be applied to them.

Comparing approach and hover for dark and light theme as described in the above changes blurb.

CommandBar Margins: We’ve added a 2px margin between AppBarButtons by default when they are in a CommandBar. This also applies to the AppBarButtonRevealStyle. This can be seen below:

Showing the new wider CommandBar margins.

Important note about the Camera app

Some Insiders may have noticed changes in the Windows Camera app. You will get a more personalized behavior, like remembering the last camera and scene used. Handling two cameras simultaneously and more resolution options are available too. We also made some core architecture changes to the product to remove a lot of complex handling for unsupported devices and functionality that is now duplicated in core Windows operating system functionality. These changes will help us to innovate, fix bugs, and deliver new features. We think that this set of changes will long term yield a much higher quality Camera experience for all users!

General changes, improvements, and fixes for PC

  • We have rolled out Sets to more Insiders – if you see it show up, please try it out and do the Quests in Feedback Hub!
  • This build includes mitigations to protect Insiders from the Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities. For more information on this topic, please see this blog post from Terry Myerson. Additionally, if you are running 3rd party antivirus software on your PC you will need to ensure you are running the latest most up-to-date version of your antivirus software with the latest antivirus definitions to avoid having your PC get into a bad state.
  • Windows now fully supports Adobe-style “.otf” OpenType Variable Fonts, like the Acumin Variable Concept font and others recently released by Adobe.
  • Insiders running Windows 10 S may have noticed that after upgrading to the latest builds, their PC appears to be running “Windows 10 Pro In S Mode”. This change is by design and these PCs will continue to function as Windows 10 S PCs and will continue to be able to take Insider Preview builds as part of testing RS4. We’ll have more to share as we get closer to the next Windows 10 release.
  • For Insiders who reported that Windows needs activation after upgrading to Build 17063, this build includes the fix that caused the issue however you will need to use the Activation Troubleshooter to get your activation back into a good state once you’re on this build.
  • We have added a new PowerShell cmdlet to retrieve decoded logs for Delivery Optimization (Get-DeliveryOptimizationLog).
  • We’ve updated the reveal effect in the Taskbar’s Clock and Calendar flyout such that the day with focus now has a lighter background.
  • Now that it’s had some time to receive your feedback, we’ve updated to be the default keyboard for the Tamil language.
  • We fixed an issue where Settings might crash if the window was too small.
  • We fixed an issue where Windows Update Settings unexpectedly displayed two horizontal lines.
  • We fixed an issue where in certain cases USB devices with unreliable connections might cause bugchecks (GSOD) on PCs.
  • We fixed an issue from the previous flight where touch and pen weren’t working on the non-primary display. This might also have resulted in mouse, touch, and pen input not happening in the right place after an orientation change or when using a non-native aspect ratio.
  • We fixed an issue where if you were using any EUDC fonts Microsoft Edge, Cortana, and other apps that use a webview wouldn’t launch.
  • We fixed an issue resulting in Microsoft Edge crashing when deleting favorites.
  • We fixed an issue where Microsoft Edge might crash when trying to copy text or login on certain websites.
  • We fixed an issue where Microsoft Edge might crash when opening PDFs on the previous flight.
  • We fixed an issue in Microsoft Edge resulting in images on flickr.com going blank after a follow/unfollow user action.
  • We fixed an issue resulting in a white line being visible on the right side of screen when certain videos are watched full screen in Microsoft Edge.
  • We fixed an issue where while navigating through OOBE, some of the buttons in the pages might not display correctly.
  • We fixed an issue resulting in Themes appearing in Start after they’d been downloaded from Store.
  • We’ve updated the reveal effect in the Taskbar’s Clock and Calendar flyout such that the day with focus now has a lighter background.
  • We fixed an issue where the feedback message (like from Windows Hello) could end up overlapping Spotlight text on the lock screen.
  • We fixed an issue where Windows Update Settings unexpectedly displayed two horizontal lines.
  • We fixed an issue where when transparency effects were turned off the Virtual Desktops pane in Task View would overlap Timeline with no background.
  • We fixed an issue resulting in an explorer.exe crash when using WIN + Tab to open Task View on the previous flight.
  • We fixed an issue resulting in an explorer.exe crash when trying to use control.exe to open app defaults.
  • We fixed an issue where the Taskbar might render completely transparent on secondary monitors.
  • We fixed an issue resulting in certain apps, like Firefox, might not have audio after upgrading to the previous flight. This issue also impacted the ability to record audio in Microsoft Edge.
  • We fixed an issue where surround sound gaming headsets would revert to stereo after rebooting.
  • We fixed an issue in the audio service around app impersonation which was breaking audio recording from apps like Firefox which intentionally run with a restricted token.
  • We fixed a couple of issues resulting in crashes in the “audiosrv” and “audioendpointbuilder” audio services which would cause audio not to work, or new audio devices not to be recognized.
  • We fixed an issue resulting in Hearthstone not launching on the previous build.
  • We fixed an issue that could result in fullscreen games getting stuck minimized or exiting fullscreen status unexpectedly.
  • We fixed an issue where the emoji panel search wasn’t working in desktop (Win32) apps.
  • We fixed an issue where the input flyout wouldn’t appear the first time you pressed WIN + Space.
  • We fixed a memory leak in NisSrv.exe from the previous flight.
  • We fixed an issue where MsMpEng.exe might unexpectedly use a high number of disk I/Os per second for a long time.
  • We fixed an issue where WerFault.exe might spike to 50%+ CPU for an unexpectedly long time.
  • We fixed an issue from the previous flight where touch and pen weren’t working on the non-primary display. This might also have resulted in mouse, touch, and pen input not happening in the right place after an orientation change or when using a non-native aspect ratio.
  • We fixed an issue when using the Arabic touch keyboard where pressing Ctrl wouldn’t show the directional markers on the Shift keys.
  • We fixed an issue where the emoji panel search wasn’t working in desktop (Win32) apps.
  • We fixed an issue where the input flyout wouldn’t appear the first time you pressed WIN + Space.
  • We fixed an issue where the OneNote app wasn’t being included in Cortana’s ”Pick up where I left off” notifications.
  • We fixed an issue on certain PCs where using the fingerprint scanner wouldn’t wake the PC up from Connected Standby.
  • We fixed an issue where you might show as connected to the network, but you wouldn’t actually be connected to use the Internet.
  • We fixed an issue where in certain cases USB devices with unreliable connections might cause bugchecks (GSOD) on PCs.
  • We fixed two issues that could result in some PCs bugchecking (GSOD) when entering into Connected Standby. If you had a laptop that encountered this, the experience would have been that you’d open your laptop and unexpectedly be logging into a new session, rather than continuing the one open before closing the lid.
  • We fixed an issue where some Bluetooth devices weren’t working and Device Manager showing error 43 for those drivers.

Known issues

  • When users try to create a Microsoft Edge InPrivate window from inside a Mixed Reality headset, a regular window will get created instead. Users won’t be able to use InPrivate inside Mixed Reality in this build. InPrivate on desktop is not affected.
  • We’re preparing for the inclusion of OpenSSH Server as a deployment mechanism in Developer Mode. However the UI code got checked in ahead of the components, and so while there is a “Use OpenSSH (Beta) for remote deployment” switch in the UI under Settings, it won’t work, and turning it on will break remote deployment to that device until the switch is turned off.
  • When you open Task View immediately after an upgrade, Timeline may not be visible. If you encounter this, wait 15-30 minutes and try launching Task View again.
  • The Windows Defender icon is missing from the systray, even if it shows as enabled in Settings.
  • Certain devices may hang on the boot screen after upgrading. If this happens to you, go into the BIOS and disable virtualization.
  • Apps that come preinstalled with Windows may fail to update in the Store with error 0x80073CF9.
  • Audio playback from Microsoft Edge is sometimes unexpectedly muted. A workaround is to minimize Edge, count to three, and then unminimize.
  • Upgrading to 17063 or later builds sometimes causes Settings / Privacy / Microphone, Camera, etc. to flip to “disabled”, which breaks camera and microphone access. A workaround is to manually turn them back on.

source: Windows Blogs

Announcing Windows 10 Insider Preview Build 17063 for PC

An early Christmas gift from Microsoft Build 17063 was released last night to the fast & skip ahead ring

Lots of cool new, improved & fixed stuff to test with during the holidays!

What’s new in Build 17063

Introducing Timeline

Timeline is here! We know that it can be difficult to get back to stuff you were working on in the past. If you’re like us, you might sometimes forget which site or app you were using or where you saved a file. Now you can finally close apps without worrying—with Timeline, you can get right back to where you left off.

Timeline introduces a new way to resume past activities you started on this PC, other Windows PCs, and iOS/Android devices. Timeline enhances Task View, allowing you to switch between currently running apps and past activities.

The default view of Timeline shows snapshots of the most relevant activities from earlier in the day or a specific past date. A new annotated scrollbar makes it easy to get back to past activities.

Task view has been enhanced to include a Timeline of past activities.

Figure 1. Task view has been enhanced to include a Timeline of past activities.

There’s also a way to see all the activities that happened in a single day—just select See all next to the date header. Your activities will be organized into groups by hour to help you find tasks you know you worked on that morning, or whenever.

Browse all your activities for a single day.

Figure 2. Browse all your activities for a single day.

And if you can’t find the activity you’re looking for in the default view, search for it.

Search Timeline to find exactly what you are looking for.

Figure 3. Search Timeline to find exactly what you are looking for.

Activities

In Timeline, a user activity is the combination of a specific app and a specific piece of content you were working on at a specific time. Each activity links right back to a webpage, document, article, playlist, or task, saving you time when you want to resume that activity later.

App developers are working hard to enhance their apps by creating high-quality activity cards to appear in Timeline. In this Preview release, you can see and resume web-browsing activities in Microsoft Edge, files you opened in apps like Microsoft Office including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote, and updated UWP versions of Maps, News, Money, Sports, and Weather.

We encourage app developers to update their apps to support timeline.

The new activity history settings page allows you to control which accounts appear in Timeline. This is most relevant for users with multiple accounts, such as a personal Microsoft account, and a work or school account. Settings here also let you disable activity collection and clear your activity history.

The activity history settings page lets you choose which accounts you want to appear in your timeline.

Figure 4. The activity history settings page lets you choose which accounts you want to appear in your timeline.

Cortana

In addition to resuming past activities through Timeline, your personal digital assistant Cortana will suggest activities you might want to resume to help you stay productive as you switch between your phone, laptop, and other Cortana-enabled devices. This experience is powered by the same activities that appear in Timeline.

Cortana helps you resume activities when switching between devices.

Figure 5. Cortana helps you resume activities when switching between devices.

Getting started

Use your PC normally. After a while, select the new Task view icon in the task bar. (You can also open Task view by pressing Windows logo key + Tab.) Below your running apps, you’ll see past activities in Timeline.

The Task view icon has been updated to reflect new timeline capabilities.

Figure 6. The Task view icon has been updated to reflect new timeline capabilities.

If you have more than one PC, try using Timeline on all of them—you’ll see the same activities no matter which PC you’re using. And if an activity from one PC used a modern app that you don’t have installed on another PC, Windows will help you install that app.

We’d love to hear your feedback, so please press the feedback button in the upper-right corner of Timeline if you have any problems or suggestions.

Microsoft Edge Improvements

Fluent updates in Microsoft Edge: Microsoft Edge now supports an updated Dark theme, with darker blacks, and much better contrast with all colors, text, and icons. This addresses many accessibility contrast issues, making the Microsoft Edge UI easy to navigate and more visually pleasing. As well, Microsoft Edge now supports Reveal on our navigation buttons, action buttons, buttons in the tab bar, as well as on lists throughout Microsoft Edge (such as in the HUB: Favorites, Reading, History, Downloads), making navigating Edge UI even easier. We’ve heard your feedback and have also updated the Acrylic in the tab bar and in-active tabs, allowing more color to show through.

Bookmark button and flyout become one: With this build, Microsoft Edge has also simplified adding and managing bookmarks for EPUB and PDF books. Based on your feedback we now allow you to add bookmarks and manage your list of bookmarks from the same location. This provides a very consistent experience across the different book formats and makes it really easy for users to manage their bookmarks from one location.

Offline web sites and push notifications: Microsoft Edge now supports Service Workers and the Push and Cache APIs. These new web standards allow web pages to send push notifications to your Action Center or refresh data in the background, even when the browser is closed. In addition, certain web pages can now work offline or improve performance, by using locally cached data when the cache is up to date, or when your device has a poor connection. You can learn more about these features in our post Service Workers: Going beyond the page. These features lay the technical foundation for Progressive Web Apps on Windows 10 – we’ll have lots more to share about this topic soon on the Microsoft Edge Dev Blog!

Web Media Extensions Package: This build installs the Web Media Extensions package for Microsoft Edge, which extends Microsoft Edge and Windows 10 to support open-source formats (OGG Vorbis and Theora) commonly found on the web. Try out your favorite OGG content (such as Wikipedia videos or audio)! We will be monitoring feedback from this feature in Insider flights to eventually expand to broader availability to Microsoft Edge customers in the Current Branch.

Gesture Improvements for Precision Touch Pads: This build introduces a new gesture experience for Precision Touch Pads (found on Surface and other modern Windows 10 devices). You can now use gestures like pinch and zoom, or two-finger panning, to achieve the same interactions on web sites that you can do with a touch screen today. For example, you can now pinch-to-zoom on a map in Bing Maps to zoom in the map without zooming the entire page. Developers can learn more about how this change is implemented and how to make sure your sites are ready for modern input experiences over at our blog post, Building a great touchpad experience for the web with Pointer Events.

Sets

A few weeks ago, we announced a new Windows 10 feature called “Sets” (we may end up calling it something else by the time it ships) which would be coming to Windows Insiders as a controlled study. The concept behind Sets is to make sure that everything related to your task: relevant webpages, research documents, necessary files and applications, is connected and available to you in one click. Office (starting with Mail & Calendar and OneNote), Windows, and Edge become more integrated to create a seamless experience, so you can get back to what’s important and be productive, recapturing that moment, saving time – we believe that’s the true value of Sets. Starting with today’s build, Sets will be available to Insiders however because it is being introduced as a controlled study, not all Insiders will see Sets. For more on this – see my blog post here.

Cortana Improvements

Cortana’s Notebook has a new look: Notebook has undergone a UX transformation to be more responsive to Cortana’s evolving capabilities and allow users to easily complete their tasks.

  • Your content has a new home called Organizer that lets you access your lists and reminders with ease. And all Skills are together, so you can easily configure Cortana to suit your needs. Configuration experience has also been significantly simplified.
  • Tabbed view to cleanly segregate your content and configuration and single page to manage Cortana’s Skills and easy way to discover more.
  • Simplified configuration experience page with easy interest management.
  • This is a server side change currently rolling out for those using English (United States) and will be rolled out to other markets with time.

Account entry point in the navigation menu: To improve discoverability and consistency, we’re moving the account entry point out of Cortana’s Notebook and into the navigation menu (that’s the side bar that contains elements like Home, Notebook, and Collections).

Lists and Collections – better together! Cortana Collections have been merged with Lists, so you get personalized suggestions and help with List creation – all in a rich, attractive interface. Cortana helps you track your To-Do’s and manage Grocery lists. She also suggests items of interest –  restaurants to try out, recipes to make, books to read, movies & shows to watch, things to shop for – and makes it easy to add them to your lists.  See and use your Lists and suggestions in the List home:

You can access it from Notebook:

For now, this feature is only available for Insiders using English (United States), who are logged into both Windows and Cortana with their Microsoft Account.

A note about Collections: We’ve made an underlying breaking change to how Cortana’s Collection works – if you’ve been using this feature in previous builds we need to migrate your data to our new collection APIs. Because of this, once you upgrade to this build you’ll notice all of your existing saved list items have moved under suggestions. If you want to keep these suggestions, please drag and drop them back into the list. Thank you everyone who’s given us feedback so far about the Collections experience – please continue doing so!

Cortana loves music: You can now use Cortana to control music playback on more of your favorite music apps (EN-US only). Starting with this build, we are enabling natural language compatibility for Spotify just like the Harman Kardon Invoke! This will work on both, above the lock screen (PC is locked) as well as below! You can try queries like…

  • Play Christmas music on Spotify
  • Play my discover weekly playlist on Spotify
  • Play <Artist/Track/Title/Genre/Mood> on <AppName>
  • Play some Drake
  • Play focus music
  • Play rock music
  • Play my tracks

Once music is playing you can ask Cortana what’s playing like this:

  • Hey Cortana, what’s playing?

Cortana will keep you posted on your tracks.

To start rocking to your favorite tracks just get the latest app update and sign into Spotify in the notebook under the music section.

NOTE: For the above to work, you need to have a Spotify account (free or premium).

Windows Shell Improvements

Bring on the Fluent! Today, Start and Action Center support acrylic to align with Fluent design principles. And now we’re bringing the next wave of Shell UI to the party by applying acrylic to the taskbar, Share UI, Clock & Calendar flyout, Network flyout, Volume flyout, and Input flyout. Try it out and let us know what you think!

Note: The acrylic background is disabled if you enter battery saver mode. We’re also investigating an issue where if you have scaling > 100% the blurred background may appear distorted.

Save notification drafts: Notifications are inherently transient – one thing we’ve heard from you is how it can be frustrating to have started writing a response into a notification (such as one from Skype), only to have the response disappear if you didn’t submit it before the notification went away. Well, no more! If a toast gets dismissed with unsubmitted text, we will now save the draft; open the action center and your text will now be saved with the notification.

Simplified letter grouping in Start for East Asian languages: One of the top feedback items from our users is that it’s too hard and takes too long to find apps in the all apps list because of the way the apps are grouped when using East Asian languages. We hear you, and we’re happy to announce that with this build we’ve simplified the grouping of apps in the all apps list for Chinese (Simplified), Japanese, and Korean. This change is most noticeable for Chinese (Simplified) and Japanese, where we’ve reduced the number of groups by 29 and 36, respectively. If you use Windows in these languages, please take a moment to check it out once you get the build and let us know how it feels.

Chinese (Simplified) previous and new all apps list sections

Japanese previous and new all apps list sections

Cloud states for the Navigation Pane: In an effort to further keep you informed about the state of your OneDrive files and folders on demand, we’re looking at adding a state icon to use in File Explorer’s Navigation Pane. If you’d like to turn this off, there’s an option in the File Explorer ribbon View tab – click the Options button, then in the dialog that appears go to the Navigation Pane section of the View tab and uncheck “Always show availability status”.

A consistent Network flyout on the login screen: Continuing our work to modernize all the elements of Windows 10, we’ve now updated the network flyout on the login screen to use the same familiar network flyout you’ve grown to love in the taskbar.

Improving your update experience: In an effort to keep you informed about the state of your PC, if Windows Update Settings shows a warning or alert, we will now echo that via a new Windows Update system tray icon. If you right click the icon, you will see options relevant to the current state, such as restart, schedule the restart, or go to Windows Update settings. If visible, this icon can be turned off from within Taskbar Settings.

An improved My People experience

Based on your feedback we’ve been working on evolving the My People experience and taking it to the next level. This build brings with it a number of requested features, improvements and changes including:

  • Drag and drop rearrange: Checking off one of our top feedback requests – you can now drag and drop contacts to rearrange them in the taskbar! You can also drop contacts into and out of the People flyout. Note: as part of this feature change, when you upgrade, if you have multiple contacts pinned to taskbar you will notice that their order will reverse direction on the taskbar

  • You decide how many contacts to show in the taskbar: With the Fall Creators Update you could have a maximum of 3 people pinned to the taskbar, with any additional pins appearing in the People flyout. We’ve heard your feedback and today’s build brings a new setting so you can decide how many you’d like to show – from one to ten, or you can choose to show them all in the overflow. You can find the setting with the other People settings under Settings > Personalization > Taskbar.
  • Animations for people in overflow: To improve discoverability you’ll now see an animation across the People icon to let you know when someone is pinned to the overflow list in the flyout. In addition, previously you could only receive emotive notifications from contacts that were directly on your taskbar – with today’s flight this experience is now available for people pinned within the People flyout as well! Here’s a glimpse of how it looks (showcased using our favorite “windows10” Skype emoji). Want to try it? Get one of your pinned contacts to send you a “(poke)”, or add, pin, and ping our emoji bot.

  • Fluent in the flyout: As part of our larger ongoing effort to reach our Fluent Design goals, you’ll notice that the People flyout now makes use of acrylic, reveal, and light effects.
  • Improving app discoverability: As developers work to integrate My People support into their apps, we’ll now suggest apps that you might be interested in. There’s an option to turn this on or off in the People settings under Settings > Personalization > Taskbar.

Add a new dimension to what you capture in Snipping tool

This build brings a new “edit in Paint 3D” button to the Snipping Tool so you can take your snip to the next level via Paint 3D.  Move (or remove) objects with Magic select, augment and annotate with a variety of options, bring in 3D objects from Remix 3D, and more!

Windows Settings Improvements

Settings gets a new look: You’ve already seen we say “bring on the Fluent!” in other areas of Shell, and Settings is no different. With today’s build you’ll find not only have we refreshed the Settings UI leveraging Fluent Design principles, but we’ve also taken a look at the Settings homepage and redesigned it with an eye for visual acuity. As you explore the plethora of new and improved settings below, take a moment to get a feel for the updated design as a whole and let us know what you think.

Security questions for local accounts: With the Fall Creators Update, we started working on self help solutions for password recovery from the Lock screen. Today, we’re adding this functionality to local accounts as well, through the newly available use of security questions for local accounts. If you already have a local account, you can add security questions by going to Settings > Accounts > Sign-in Options > “Update your security questions”. If you’re installing a new PC using a local account, setup will walk you through adding these questions and answers right there in the workflow. Once your security questions are set up, if you find yourself unable to remember your password on the lock screen, you will see a link to reset your password, whereupon clicking you’ll be prompted to enter the answers to your security questions.

View your display info in one convenient location: Beginning with Build 17060, you can now view detailed information about your display by visiting the new “Advanced display settings” page linked at the bottom of Settings > System > Display.

Most of the information should be self-explanatory, but here are a couple of pieces that you might want more detail on:

  • Desktop resolution vs active signal resolution. Typically, your desktop resolution and your active signal resolution will be identical. To provide a smoother experience, Windows prefers to keep your display running at its native signal resolution. If you change your display resolution under Settings > System > Display > Scale and layout > Resolution, you may see a difference between your desktop resolution and your active signal resolution.
  • The mysterious 59 Hz refresh rate. Display enthusiasts may remember this conversation from the Windows 7 days. You may see 59 Hz listed as your refresh rate even though you have set it to 60 Hz, but rest assured that this is by design for monitors and TVs that report only 59.94 Hz but not 60 Hz. Learn more about it here.

Stay tuned for more improvements to display settings! Your feedback is important to us – if there are new features you would like to see in display settings in the coming releases, please let us know through the Feedback Hub. Search for and upvote your favorite features, or file your suggestion under the Desktop Environment > Settings.

Improving your scaling experience: In this flight we’ve made it easier for you to fix apps that become blurry if you dock/undock, RDP, or change display settings. Some desktop apps can become blurry in these scenarios. When this happens, you have to log out and back in to Windows to have these apps render properly. In this flight, you can turn on a feature that will enable these apps to be fixed simply by re-launching them. There are three components to this feature:

  • A new setting in the Display Settings page: Under Settings > System > Display > Advanced scaling, you’ll find a new section called “Fix scaling for apps” where you can enable a setting to let Windows try and fix apps so they’re not blurry.

  • A toast that pops up when we detect that you might have blurry apps on your main display.

  • A per-app override of the global setting. By right clicking on the exe for a desktop apps and choosing properties, you can select “Change High DPI Settings”, then “Override System DPI”, then configure the behavior.

NOTE: This won’t work for all desktop apps and it only improves blurry desktop apps while they’re on the main display. If you’re using multiple displays with different scale factors and running in “Extend” display mode, these apps might still be blurry on secondary displays.

A new Keyboard Settings page: We’re introducing a new Keyboard Settings experience on PC! Now found under the Time & Language Settings, you’ll be able to easily add new keyboard layouts, switch between Japanese 106/109 and English 101/102 keyboard layouts, turn on and off settings like key sounds and autocorrect, and other advanced keyboard-related settings. Additionally you can now change the default keyboard independently of the display language, for example using the French display language and having English as the default keyboard (this option was previously available in Control Panel, but has now been moved to Settings). Duplicate settings from Control Panel have been removed.

A new and improved Region & Language Settings page: As part of our ongoing effort to converge Settings and Control Panel, as well as improve Settings usability, you’ll find with today’s build that we have reimagined the Region & Language Settings. We’ve added icons to each language entry to indicate when language support is installed for display language, text-to-speech, speech recognition, and/or handwriting. We’ve also added an entirely new language selection experience – enabling you to quickly identify available language features per language. This also marks the initial integration of Local Experience Packs, native AppX packages, that with Microsoft Store to enable us to regularly update language resources with translation improvements collected from Windows Insiders and other feedback channels. We’re still fine-tuning the UI, so expect some small changes over the next few flights.

Set data settings to prefer cellular usage: In Cellular Settings you can now choose to use cellular instead of Wi-Fi always or when Wi-Fi is poor. This updated Windows feature allows people with fast LTE connections and large/unlimited data plans to favor cellular whenever available and avoid being stuck on poor Wi-Fi connections.

NOTE: The Cellular Settings page will only be visible for people using PCs with cellular connections.

Improved Data Usage Management: You can now configure data limits and/or place background data restrictions to Wi-Fi and Ethernet connections, in addition to cellular connections, in the Data usage page. The updated settings page aims to support a diverse set of devices and users. Whether you have a PC with cellular connectivity or a metered ethernet network connection, tailor your data usage to your budget and needs. Want to see your data usage at a glance? Right click on the Data usage tab in Settings and pin it to the Start menu to see a data usage live tile.

Reset your Game Mode Settings: Under Settings > Gaming > Game Mode there is a new option called ”Reset Game Mode Settings” that allows you to restore Game Mode settings for their PC back to the default values for the feature.

Improved Per-app Settings: When we added a new context menu option to go straight from the app in Start to the per-app settings in Settings, we mentioned turning this page into a one stop shop for settings related to each app. In today’s build you’ll notice that we now bubble up any permissions the app has asked for, along with an easy option for you to toggle them. We’ve also added links to check background usage, lock screen notifications, and defaults, and options to terminate and/or uninstall the app.

Windows Defender Improvements

Windows Defender Application Guard (WDAG) update: You spoke, and we listened. Microsoft is bringing Windows Defender Application Guard to Windows 10 Professional in the next feature update of Windows 10. Now, like Windows 10 Enterprise users, Windows 10 Pro Users can navigate the Internet in Application Guard knowing their systems are protected from even the most sophisticated browser attacks.

Windows Defender Application Guard provides unprecedented protection against targeted threats using Microsoft’s industry leading Hyper-V virtualization technology. Check out this recent RSA talk on Window Defender Application Guard if you’d like to understand this feature in some more detail.

It is available now to our awesome Windows Insider community to give it a try and we would like to hear your feedback.

For more details please see our tech community page.

Quick access from the context menu: You can now right-click on the Windows Defender icon in the notification area and get an updated context menu that lets you quickly do a quick scan, update your Defender definitions, change the notifications and open Windows Defender Security Center.

Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL)

WSL can run background tasks: Processes that set themselves up to run in the background such as sshd, tmux/screen, etc. will now continue running after the last console window has been closed. Read this blog for more information and a demo.

Elevated and non-elevated WSL instances can run simultaneously:  Previously WSL instances all had to all run as elevated or all unelevated.  Now you can run some elevated and some non-elevated instances.  You can also use Scheduled Tasks to run WSL.

WSL runs in remote connections: WSL is now supported when connected via OpenSSH, VPN, Enter-PSSession, and/or other similar Windows remoting tools. Previously this would only work in cases where the user logged in interactively and started a WSL instance before connecting remotely. to the remote host and then launch WSL. With background processes you can background sshd in WSL so it persists in the background without having any open windows.

Tool to convert Linux paths to Windows-friendly paths: Wslpath is a tool that allows you to convert Linux paths to their Windows equivalent. Here is a quick reference for how you can use the wslpath tool:

-a    force result to absolute path format
-u    translate from a Windows path to a WSL path (default)
-w    translate from a WSL path to a Windows path
-m    translate from a WSL path to a Windows path, with ‘/’ instead of ‘\\’

New tools available to developers on Windows

Windows Command line Toolchain includes bsdtar (tar) and curl.
bsdtar and curl, two popular command line tools from the Unix shell, are now available in Windows and Windows Server.  bsdtar provides handy extraction/creation of compressed files and curl offers data transfer capabilities so you can download files from a remote location.  Read this blog to learn more about the addition of these two new tools and see how they’re shaping the developer experience on Windows.

Unix style sockets (AF_UNIX) are available on Windows
AF_UNIX is an address family which has enabled inter-process communication on Unix for countless years. The windows equivalent is named pipes, which offers similar facilities. Based on user feedback, we heard that you’d like an easier path when porting tools relying on AF_UNIX to Windows. As a result, two Win32 processes can now use the AF_UNIX address family over Winsock API to communicate with each other.  Read this blog for more details.

Control Windows legacy apps access to your camera

Camera privacy settings under Settings > Privacy > Camera give you fine control over the apps that have access to your camera. Prior to this update, the toggle marked ‘Let apps use my camera hardware’ only applied to apps installed from the Windows Store (think Skype from Store). This meant that you could have the toggle set to off, but still have legacy apps use the camera (think Skype for Desktop). With this update, we are changing the toggle’s behavior to include all legacy apps. Note that each legacy app will not appear individually in the list today like Store apps do, but they will respect the toggle.

Another related change that is also part of this update will include the Windows Camera app in the list of apps that can use your camera; it was previously exempt from this list.

If your legacy camera application stops working after taking this update, please check your camera privacy settings and ensure that the toggle is enabled. Please try the new camera privacy features & remember to file all feedback via the Feedback Hub.

Input Improvements

Personalize the handwriting panel: In this release you can now change the font that your handwriting converts to in the handwriting panel! Go to Settings > Devices > Pen & Windows Ink > “Change the font of the handwriting experience”, select your preferred font from the dropdown, then write in the handwriting panel to see your chosen font.

You can now use the Emoji Panel in more languages! Based on your feedback, we’ve been working diligently on more added support for more languages and as of today’s build you can now use the emoji over 190 locals – 152 of which have tooltip support when you hover over each emoji. This includes English (Great Britain), French (France), German (Germany), Spanish (Spain), and more! You can open the Emoji Panel by pressing Windows logo key + period(.). Currently you can only browse and use mouse/touch/keyboard to pick an emoji in these languages, however we’re working on adding search. Stay tuned!

Single or multiple emoji at a time – you choose: With the previous flight we added support for inputting multiple emoji at a time. Today we’re adding a setting so that you can decide which behavior is best for you. Simply check or uncheck the new “Don’t close panel automatically after an emoji has been entered” setting under Settings > Time & Language > Keyboard > Advanced Keyboard Settings.

Emoji data update: Last flight we shared our initial emoji data update across multiple languages for this release – as promised with today’s flight we have the second bulk of the payload. We’ve added a number of additional words you can use to find the emoji you’re looking for in your language – use the touch keyboard and search for things like hedgehog, vampire, and pretzel.

Hardware keyboard suggestions update: Since our first flight with this new feature, we have two updates to share with you:

  • Firstly: We now support dark theme! Use Color Settings to switch between light and dark and see how your text suggestions will now follow suit.
  • Secondly: We’ve moved the settings for how to enable this feature, you can now find it under Keyboard Settings > English (United States) > Options > Hardware keyboard > “Show text suggestions as I type”.

Split layout comes to the touch keyboard: As many of you know we redesigned the touch keyboard to be XAML-based for the Fall Creators Update. We’ve been hard at work addressing your feedback, and are happy to announce that with this build the touch keyboard now supports the split layout – an ergonomic layout designed to be used with both hands, one on each side of your tablet.

Note: Korean, Japanese and Simplified Chinese languages aren’t yet supported for this layout, but we’re working on it.

The standard touch keyboard layout for Japanese, Korean, Quick and ChangJie for Traditional Chinese: Now the standard keyboard layout for East Asian languages are available except Simplified Chinese and Bopomofo for Traditional Chinese (which we’re still working on). Japanese Kana layout is also supported. If you want to switch between wide, one-handed, and the standard touch keyboard layouts, just tap the button in the top left of the keyboard.

New features for IT Pros in Delivery Optimization

We’ve added multiple policies in this release (both Group Policies and MDM Policies) that provide Admins with means to throttle bandwidth at certain times of day (for both foreground and background traffic), restrict peer selection to the same subnet, automatically join devices into peer groups by using a DHCP server’s User option or the connection’s DNS suffix as well as the ability to increase the usage of peers by delaying the use of the HTTP source.

To view the list of new configs, open the GP Editor and checkout the new policies under Administrative Templates > Windows Components > Delivery Optimization:

These features were added based on feedback from IT Pros who rely on Delivery Optimization to reduce the bandwidth consumption on their network. The throttling policies can be useful to you if you are looking to throttle Internet bandwidth during critical business hours while allowing update traffic to flow faster at other times. The new peer selection policies address feedback we’ve received from customers who are using AAD and Modern Management (Intune, WUfB) and needed more options to automatically group peers in each site they manage.

Registry Process

In recent Insider Preview builds, you may have noticed a new process labelled “Registry” in Task Manager. The purpose of this process is similar to that of the memory compression store process in that it is a minimal process whose address space is used to hold data on behalf of the kernel. However, while the memory compression process is used to hold compressed pages, the registry process is used to hold registry hive data (e.g. HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE, HKEY_CURRENT_USER).

Storing registry hive data in the registry process gives the registry access to more powerful memory management capabilities which will allow us to reduce the registry’s memory usage in the future.

Today’s Insider Preview build is the first to store hive data in the registry process and this is visible in Task Manager as increased memory usage by that process. Since this data was previously in kernel paged pool there is also a corresponding decrease in paged pool usage so overall there is no net change in hive data memory usage.

 
Figure 1: Example increase in Registry process memory usage (before/after).

 
Figure 2: Example decrease in Paged Pool (before/after).

Other notable changes

A note about HomeGroup: Easily connecting to and sharing the important pieces of your digital life with those who matter most has never been easier with today’s Modern PCs and the cloud. Whether it’s connecting PCs and printers on your home network via the Share functionality in Windows or using OneDrive to share a photo album of your last vacation, Windows 10 makes connecting multiple devices and sharing content streamlined and simple. And it’s because of that evolution that with today’s build you’ll start to see us retire the HomeGroup service. HomeGroup was terrific for the pre-cloud and pre-mobile era, but today this functionality is built right into Windows 10 and apps. Starting with this build, the HomeGroup service is no longer operational in Windows 10. The user profile used for sharing and the file/folder/printer shares will continue to work.

Here are recommended alternatives to HomeGroup for you to get the best file-sharing experience in Windows 10 going forward:

  • File Storage:
    • OneDrive is a cloud-first, cross-device storage and collaboration platform for all of the pieces of data that matter most in your life – like your files, your photos, your videos, and more.
    • OneDrive Files On-Demand takes cloud file storage a step further, allowing you to access all your files in the cloud without having to download them and use storage space on your device.
  • Share Functionality: For those who prefer not to use the Cloud to connect their devices, the Share functionality for folders and printers allows you to see the available devices and connect them to and from other PCs on your home network.
  • Easier Connection: No more remembering cryptic HomeGroup passwords in order to connect to another PC. You can now simply connect through your Microsoft Account email address across devices.

General changes, improvements, and fixes for PC

  • We fixed an issue where all types of dynamic volumes listed here wouldn’t mount properly or be accessible from Windows (the data remained intact but inaccessible on the volume on impacted builds).
  • We fixed an issue where after opening and closing the People flyout notification toasts might stop appearing until the computer had been rebooted.
  • We fixed an issue where Cortana’s notification settings were unexpectedly missing in Settings after upgrading to recent builds.
  • We fixed an issue where when there was a problem with Cortana’s speech resources not being available, she could end up blocking Start.
  • We fixed an issue resulting in potentially not receiving all of your notifications from Cortana in the last first flights. We fixed an issue where when using Windows in Hebrew no search results were shown in Search until a space was entered.
  • We fixed an issue such that Recycle Bin will now show up in the search results when typing in Cortana. This was a server-side change so you will see it outside the bounds of this flight.
  • We fixed an issue where opening the Action Center while there was a notification toast visible could result in the Action Center unexpectedly animating in from the bottom corner rather than the side.
  • We fixed an issue where if you reinstalled or reset your PC without internet in the last few flights the default tiles in Start could get stuck as downward arrows.
  • We fixed an issue where if the system was low on memory context menus might display in a narrow width missing all text.
  • We fixed an issue with the File Picker dialog from recent builds where saving file names that included an additional period in the name (like A.ver2.exe) would result in the file extension not being included with the saved file (A.ver2).
  • We fixed an issue where certain videos when watching in Microsoft Edge would stop playing and become unresponsive upon altering play speed to 4x or 8x.
  • We fixed an issue resulting the expected tooltip not appearing when hovering the mouse over images on certain sites in Microsoft Edge.
  • We fixed an issue where no search suggestions were displayed while typing in the Microsoft Edge address bar if the PC was set to a region not currently supported by Cortana.
  • We fixed an issue that could result in an error message saying “device does not respond” when attempting to use Near Share.
  • We fixed an issue where nearby devices that had near share enabled might not be listed in Share.
  • We fixed an issue resulting in cursor lags on some devices when night light was transitioning.
  • When you use the split gesture to add more space between two words in the handwriting panel (a caret, as showcased here) that space will now close back up after a pause.
  • We’ve added a top level link to Storage Settings to “free up space” now, so you can get at it faster if you need it, rather than having to open Storage Sense first.
  • We’ve made some small tweaks to the design of the Windows Update Settings page and subpages.
  • To improve discoverability, when you have an update pending reboot in Windows Update Settings, beside the restart now button you will now also see a button for selecting other restart options.
  • We fixed an issue resulting in some Insiders finding that Outlook 2016 crashed frequently on the previous flight.
  • We fixed an issue where the group policy to set a custom lock screen image wouldn’t work if you had also set a policy that disabled the image on the login screen.
  • We fixed an issue resulting in docker not working in the last few flights.
  • We fixed an issue from recently flights where the Emoji Panel’s most frequently used page wasn’t updating.
  • We fixed an issue where the touch keyboard showed a very small size on large monitors.
  • We’ve updated the touch keyboard to now have an animation when invoking and dismissing.
  • We fixed an issue where keys on the full touch keyboard might become stuck in a visually pressed state.
  • We’ve updated the wide touch keyboard such that if you double tap the Shift key to turn on caps lock the key will now stay in a visual pressed state so you can see that caps lock is engaged.
  • We’ve updated the full touch keyboard so that you can now use keyboard shortcuts that contain 3 keys (for example, WIN + Alt + D).
  • We’ve made some small design changes to the dictation UI that appears when you press WIN+H.
  • We fixed an issue where the Chinese (Simplified) Pinyin IME might hang when typing quickly into Cortana.
  • We fixed the issue where VPNs that used custom pop-up windows during connection were failing with error 720 when attempting to connect.
  • We fixed the issue causing users that have enabled the legacy console to be unable to launch any command line application.

Known issues

  • Popular Tencent games like League of Legends and NBA2k Online may cause 64-bit PCs to bugcheck (GSOD).
  • [DEVELOPERS] Deploying an x86 app to a x64 PC remotely result in “FileNotFound” deployment failures if the target PC is running Build 17040. Deploying an x64 app to a x64 PC remotely or a x86 app to a x86 PC will work fine.
  • Microsoft Edge may not receive Push Notifications from websites in this flight, due to an issue saving permissions on a per-site basis. We expect this issue to be resolved in the next preview build.
  • Launching an immersive 360 degree video from the Movies and TV app within Windows Mixed Reality will result in the video facing the wrong way. Subsequent launches of 360 degree videos will work correctly.
  • When users try to create a Microsoft Edge InPrivate window from inside a Mixed Reality headset, a regular window will get created instead. Users won’t be able to use InPrivate inside Mixed Reality in this build. InPrivate on desktop is not affected.
  • We’re preparing for the inclusion of OpenSSH Server as a deployment mechanism in Developer Mode. However the UI code got checked in ahead of the components, and so while there is a “Use OpenSSH (Beta) for remote deployment” switch in the UI under Settings, it won’t work, and turning it on will break remote deployment to that device until the switch is turned off.
  • If you’re using any EUDC fonts Microsoft Edge, Cortana, and other apps that use a webview won’t launch. You can resolve this issue by deleting the HKCU\EUDC key in Registry Editor. Note, if you do this, you won’t be able to see EUDC characters. We recommend you export this regkey before deleting it, so it’s easy to reapply the key in a future flight once the issue has been fixed.
  • After upgrading to this build you may find touch and pen to not work on the non-primary display. Related to this, mouse, touch, and pen input might not happen in the right place after an orientation change or if you’re using a non-native aspect ratio. We’re working on a fix.

Update about symbols for debugging

With the cadence that we make Windows Insider Preview builds available, the Windows debugging symbol we publish via an installer on the Microsoft Download Center for Slow flights is quickly made out of date. We have made significant improvements to the online Microsoft Symbols Server by moving this to be an Azure-based symbol store and now include symbols for ALL Windows Insider flights to the Fast and Slow rings. You can find more about this in this MSDN blog entry. Going forward we will no longer publish the offline symbol installer for Insider Slow flights and would love to hear your feedback on how we can make developer debugging experience even better!

source: Windows Blogs

Technine Event : Update on new Microsoft Cloud Technology

Location:

SAVACO NV Professionele IT-Oplossingen
Beneluxpark 19
8500 Kortrijk
België

http://www.savaco.be

Timing:

Donderdag 14 December 2017 18:00 to 22:00 (CET)

Program:

18h00  Welkom

18h30  GDPR / Compliance Manager / Secure Score

19h00  Azure MFA

19h30  Break

19h45  O365 – ATP /defender ATP Demo

20h15  IRM – O365

20h45  Networking / Vragen

21h30  Einde

The Presentations:

TechNine – Advanced Threat Protection

TechNine – Azure Information Protection

TechNine – Compliancy Manager, Secure Score

Technine – MFA 20171214 – savaco

Office Insider Program

Are you an Office Insider? If not – you should be! We’re going to be partnering with the Office Insider Team in the coming weeks to promote some fun and interesting scenarios that will be lighting up with new features in Insider Preview builds. So you’ll definitely want to be an Office Insider too! Going forward, you can expect more promotion of Office with our Insider Preview build releases. So sign-up to be an Office Insider today!

Announcing Windows 10 Insider Preview Build 17046 for PC

 

Microsoft has released Windows 10 Insider Preview Build 17046 for PC to Windows Insiders in the Fast ring. nice new stuff for Edge & input enjoy upgrading & testing!

What’s new in Build 17046

Microsoft Edge Improvements

Form Fill for Address fields: Microsoft Edge can now save and automatically fill your preferred information in addresses and related forms. When filling in fields on a form, such as an address or other contact information, Microsoft Edge will prompt to save your form information. In the future, you can simply select the preferred information from a drop-down menu to complete all the related fields.

Addresses you save will be roamed between your Windows 10 devices, and you can manually add or remove form entries in Advanced Settings.

Text Spacing comes to Reading View: Much like when reading an EPUB book, you can now adjust the text spacing when you’re in Reading View. To enter Reading View, open an article or blog post you’re interested in, then tap the book icon next to the address bar. Adjusting the page to use wider spacing can improve reading fluency.

Windows Shell Improvements

Access advanced UWP app options right from Start: We’ve added a new quick way to get to advanced options! Rather than click through Settings > Apps > Apps & Features > (finding your app) > Advanced Options, if you right-click a UWP app or UWP app tile in Start with this build you’ll find a new Settings option under More which will take you straight there, where you can repair, manage app add-ons, and see startup tasks (if available). We have a goal to make this page the one stop shop for all of the app-related settings you can find across Settings – the Startup tasks work was the first part, but there’s more to come, stay tuned!

If you right-click a UWP app or UWP app tile in Start with this build you’ll find a new Settings option under More which will take you straight there, where you can repair, manage app add-ons, and see startup tasks (if available).

Input Improvements

Emoji data overhaul for the touch keyboard: We’ve taken a look at the emoji data across all of the languages we support and have updated it so that more of the emoji you love will appear as you’re typing related words with the touch keyboard. We’ve also added support for a number of languages that didn’t previously support emoji candidates. Please give it a try and let us know how it goes! Try typing words like unicorn, kiwi, artist, or turtle (in your language, of course ????) – primary candidate will be listed in the candidate list, any secondary candidates will be listed in the candidate list once you tap the emoji button. We still have a bit more work to do on the data that will come with a later flight, but you should see a noticeable improvement with this build.

This flight includes new and updated emoji data for over 150 languages including: Arabic (Saudi Arabia), Danish (Denmark), German (Germany), Greek (Greece), English (Great Britain), Spanish (Spain), Spanish (Mexico), Finnish (Finland), French (France), Hebrew (Israel), Hindi (India), Italian (Italy), Dutch (Netherlands), Norwegian (Norway), Polish (Poland), Portuguese (Brazilian), Portuguese (Portugal), Russian (Russia), Swedish (Sweden), and Turkish (Turkey).

NOTE: To see the emoji predictions as you type in a particular language, as well as typing predictions, you will need to have the optional typing feature applied for that language. It should download on its own as long as you have internet connection when you add the language to your language list, or once you connect to the internet thereafter. If you’re not seeing predictions and have internet connectivity, try removing the language and then adding it back again.

Now you can use Emoji Panel to insert a bunch of emoji at once! Based on your feedback, we’re adjusting the design of the Emoji Panel so that after opening up the panel by pressing hotkey Windows logo key + “.” or “;”, you could browse, search and then select more than one emoji. The panel won’t go away until you click close button or press “Esc” key.

Based on your feedback, we’re adjusting the design of the Emoji Panel so that after opening up the panel by pressing hotkey Windows logo key + “.” or “;”, you could browse, search and then select more than one emoji.

Note: The Emoji Panel is currently only available when the en-us keyboard is active.

Keyboard Improvements: We’re introducing a new keyboard for Tamil language called Tamil 99, as well as updated Sinhala, Myanmar, and Amharic keyboards

  • Tamil 99 keyboard (hardware keyboard, touch keyboard) is now available on Windows PC! We’ve added a new Tamil keyboard – if you speak this language and would like to try it out, make sure Tamil (India) is in your language list. Click that language entry in Region & Language Settings, then select Options > Add a keyboard > Tamil 99. Here’s an example of how it looks on the touch keyboard:
    Tamil 99 keyboard (hardware keyboard, touch keyboard) is now available on Windows PC!
  • The Sinhala and Myanmar keyboards have been updated to support more comprehensive ways of inputting sequences, for example these now work: Sinhala: ෙ + ක -> කෙ, Myanmar: ေ + မ = eမ
  • In order to improve the Amharic typing experience, we’ve fully updated the Amharic keyboard so that you can now input compositions more comfortably. Instead of seeing English letters and a dropdown list of candidates while you type, you’ll now see the Amharic script directly inserted into the text field.

We would love to hear your feedback as you try out these changes!

General changes, improvements, and fixes for PC

  • We’ve added settings that let you view and manage your activity history, which Cortana uses to let you pick up where you left off. Find these settings in Settings > Privacy > Activity history.
  • We fixed an issue where the Properties dialog for This PC in File Explorer wasn’t working in the last two builds.
  • We fixed an issue resulting in Insiders with certain third party antiviruses and OneDrive Files on Demand enabled seeing an error in recent builds citing “OneDrive cannot connect to Windows”.
  • We fixed an issue that could result in delays during logoff and shutdown when a UWP app was open and in suspended state.
  • We fixed a community reported issue where display colors became distorted after upgrading on some TV’s and monitors that incorrectly advertised support for 10/12 bit wire formats.
  • We fixed an issue from the previous flight that could cause heavily-threaded DirectX 12 apps to crash on launch after the first launch.
  • We’ve adjusted the application of acrylic in the touch keyboard to better align with the fluent design standards.
  • We fixed an issue where keys might remain highlighted when typing on the wide touch keyboard layout.
  • We fixed an issue where keys might be dropped when typing with the Chinese (Simplified) touch keyboard.
  • We fixed an issue where when writing a long sentence in the handwriting panel it might scroll while your pen was writing, resulting in an ink stroke across the panel.
  • We fixed an issue resulting in the hardware keyboard text suggestions potentially not working until the touch keyboard had been launched once.
  • We fixed an issue resulting in the mouse noticeably flickering between + and the mouse pointer icon when moving across cells in Excel 2016.
  • We fixed an issue resulting in some Insiders seeing their Start menu layout being reset after upgrading to the previous flight.
  • We fixed an issue resulting in miniview windows (for example in Movies & TV or Skype) flying offscreen when attempting to be resized in the last few flights.
  • We fixed an issue where clicking search results for settings in Settings in the last few flights would always take you to the top level category in the last few flights, rather than the actual category you searched for (for example, Display Settings instead of Storage Settings).

Known issues

  • If you are experiencing broken functionality in Mail, Cortana, Narrator or missing some features like Windows Media Player, please see this Feedback Hub post: https://aka.ms/Rsrjqn. While this issue has been addressed, if you ever upgraded from 16299.xx to 16299.15 (and then to newer builds) you may still need to take the steps to get your PC back into a good state.
  • Popular Tencent games like League of Legends and NBA2k Online may cause 64-bit PCs to bugcheck (GSOD).
  • VPNs which use custom pop-up windows during connection attempts may fail to connect with error 720.
  • Due to a bug that was introduced on this build, you may not receive all of your notifications from Cortana. Reminders are unaffected by this bug, but you may not receive other Cortana notifications that you are expecting. The fix for this should be in the next flight.
  • [DEVELOPERS] Deploying an x86 app to a x64 PC remotely result in “FileNotFound” deployment failures if the target PC is running Build 17040. Deploying an x64 app to a x64 PC remotely or a x86 app to a x86 PC will work fine.
  • All types of dynamic volumes listed here will not mount properly or be accessible from Windows. The data remains intact on the volume, it is just not accessible from this OS build. If you need access to the data you can roll back to an earlier build.  A fix for this issue will be released in the next build.
  • After upgrading to build 17035 or later you may lose certain dictionary files, resulting in not being able to input Japanese or Traditional Chinese via IME, Touch Keyboard, or Handwriting if you are using a non-Japanese or non-Traditional Chinese language-based OS (like an English-based OS). We are working to fix it. In the meantime, this should help to get you unblocked:

1. Go to Start > Settings > Time & Language > Region & language.

2. Under Language, select your language (e.g. “Japanese”).

3. Click [Option] and if the [Download] button is available for “Basic typing” under the Language options, please click it to start download.

4. Once the dictionary files have been downloaded, you can check the status of the necessary optional feature in Settings > Apps > “Apps & features” > “Manage optional features”. The name will be something like “Japanese

source: Windows Blogs

Announcing Windows 10 Insider Preview Build 17040 for PC

 

Microsoft released Windows 10 Insider Preview Build 17040 for PC to Windows Insiders in the Fast ring, lost of fixes & the AMD block has block lifted in this build. Enjoy upgrading!

What’s new in Build 17040

Settings Improvements

Adjust the brightness of SDR content on your HDR display: Starting with Build 17040, Windows now lets you adjust how bright SDR content appears when running in HDR mode on the desktop. On an HDR capable system, you will see a slider in the “HDR and advanced color settings” page under Settings > System > Display. This is one of the improvements to HDR image quality that we have planned based on feedback from Insiders.

Windows now lets you adjust how bright SDR content appears when running in HDR mode on the desktop. On an HDR capable system, you will see a slider in the “HDR and advanced color settings” page under Settings > System > Display.

New Cursor, pointer, and touch feedback section in Ease of Access Settings: Continuing our recent efforts to reorganize this section in Settings, you’ll notice that “change cursor thickness”, “Change pointer size and color”, and “Change touch feedback” have been moved to this new place.

Touch keyboard Improvements

Shape-writing with wide touch keyboard: With the Fall Creators Update we introduced shape-writing input for one-handed keyboard. We’ve heard your feedback, and with today’s build we’re happy to announce that it’s now also available when using the wide keyboard!

With the Fall Creators Update we introduced shape-writing input for one-handed keyboard. We’ve heard your feedback, and with today’s build we’re happy to announce that it’s now also available when using the wide keyboard!

As a reminder, shape-writing is currently available for the following languages: Catalan (Catalan), Croatian (Croatia), Czech (Czech), Danish (Denmark), Dutch (Netherlands), English (India), English (United States), English (United Kingdom), Finnish (Finland), French (Canada), French (France), French (Switzerland), German (Germany), Greek (Greece), Hebrew (Israel), Hungarian (Hungary), Indonesian (Indonesia), Italian (Italy), Norwegian, Persian (Iran), Polish (Poland), Portuguese (Brazil), Portuguese (Portugal), Romanian (Romania), Russian (Russia), Spanish (Mexico), Spanish (Spain), Swedish (Sweden), Turkish (Turkey), and Vietnamese (Vietnam).

Handwriting panel Improvements

Improved Insertion Gesture: Based on your feedback about gesture recognition, we’ve updated the insertion gesture (to add space between words or letters) to now be a small caret (see below gif for a demo of what it looks like, along with a cameo of our joining gesture).

A New Commit Gesture: We’ve added a new gesture so you can automatically commit your text and clear out the text in the handwriting panel. This gesture looks like a 90 degree angle bracketing the end of your text – see gif below for an example of how it works.

Improved button layout for Chinese (Simplified) Handwriting: If you use Chinese (Simplified), you’ll now see a layout similar to the one announced for other languages with Build 17035. The buttons in the handwriting panel are collapsed by default – tap the button with the ellipsis to expand them.

General changes, improvements, and fixes for PC

  • We’ve added settings that let you view and manage your activity history, which Cortana uses to let you pick up where you left off. Find these settings in Settings > Privacy > Activity history.
  • We fixed an issue where network profiles might change from Private to Public after upgrading to the previous build.
  • We fixed an issue resulting in checkboxes being missing from certain win32 apps.
  • We fixed a typo in the Windows Defender Security Center’s Controlled Folder Settings.
  • We fixed an issue resulting not being able to fully remove Windows.old in the last two flights.
  • We fixed an issue resulting in Narrator not saying anything when the candidate bar for hardware keyboard prediction opened. We also fixed an issue where Narrator wasn’t reading the word candidate when the focus moved into candidate bar.
  • We fixed an issue where the “Working on updates” screen was black with a small theme colored box instead of entirely theme colored.
  • We fixed an issue resulting in some Insiders experiencing a green screen on the previous flight with the error BAD_POOL_CALLER.
  • We fixed an issue resulting in UWP app sometimes leaving drop shadow leftovers after closing the window.
  • We fixed an issue where inactive window scrolling wouldn’t work if Excel 2016 was in focus.
  • We fixed an issue resulting in a noticeable flicker when using hotkeys or a precision touchpad to switch between virtual desktops.
  • We fixed an issue where the XAML Reveal light wouldn’t follow your mouse until the first mouse click – instead showing the entire element lit. This issue was visible in Settings and other XAML based UI in the last few builds.
  • We fixed an issue resulting in changes to Feedback Frequency in Feedback & Diagnostics Settings not persisting after leaving the page and returning.
  • We fixed an issue where Start wouldn’t open if you pressed the Windows key when the system menu from elevated Command Prompt or Task Manager window was open.
  • We fixed a rare issue where if you had certain streaming-capable apps on your PC before upgrading you might end up seeing a black screen with only a cursor for some time after logging in.
  • We fixed an issue from recent flights where the “Add” button in the PIN section of Sign-in Option Settings didn’t work for local accounts.
  • We’ve updated the icon for Collections in Cortana.
  • We’ve updated the touch keyboard so that the margin between each key is visual only. This change will be noticeable if you accidentally overshoot the key press by just a tiny bit – before it might seem as if key presses were being dropped in this scenario.
  • Based on your feedback, the feature to restore applications that have registered for application restart after you reboot or shutdown (through power options available on the Start Menu and various other locations) has been set to only occur for users that have enabled “Use my sign-in info to automatically finish setting my device after an update or restart” in the Privacy section under Sign-in Options Settings.

Known issues

  • If you are experiencing broken functionality in Mail, Cortana, Narrator or missing some features like Windows Media Player, please see this Feedback Hub post: https://aka.ms/Rsrjqn.
  • Popular Tencent games like League of Legends and NBA2k Online may cause 64-bit PCs to bugcheck (GSOD).
  • VPNs which use custom pop-up windows during connection attempts may fail to connect with error 720.
  • Due to a bug that was introduced on this build, you may not receive all of your notifications from Cortana. Reminders are unaffected by this bug, but you may not receive other Cortana notifications that you are expecting. We are working to resolve this issue and will release the fix in an upcoming flight.
  • The Properties dialog for This PC in File Explorer isn’t working and can’t be invoked from the context menu.
  • Insiders with certain third party antiviruses and OneDrive Files on Demand enabled may see an error citing “OneDrive cannot connect to Windows”.
  • ADDED: [DEVELOPERS] Deploying an x86 app to a x64 PC remotely result in “FileNotFound” deployment failures if the target PC is running Build 17040. Deploying an x64 app to a x64 PC remotely or a x86 app to a x86 PC will work fine.