Microsoft BUILD Event

[GoodBytes]

Microsoft has kickstarted it's yearly BUILD event. While focused on developers primarily, Microsoft traditionally shares upcoming features of its Windows OS and features/services that affected most or all here on the first and/or second day of the event. This post will focus on presenting this aspect of it.

 

Day 1

 

Bing coming to ChatGPT

ChatGPT is powered by OpenAI, and OpenAI was heavily supported by Microsoft over many years. ChatGPT while powerful, is limited to select set of data online.

Bing AI Chat is also powered by the same engine, OpenAI, but has access to the full internet.

Microsoft announces that Bing Search engine is coming to ChatGPT to augment it to the same level as Bing Chat AI. This means it is no longer limited to a small set of outdated data from the internet.

 

Copilot - Arrives to Windows

Microsoft announces that Chat AI assistance Copilot is coming to Windows 11.

What it permits is to use AI chat to search features or get suggestions to do things better with your system. It can also summarize text, word, and PDF documents you send to it, and it also has app integration. Like, demoed in the bellow video, you can request a suggestion of music, and its open Spotify and play the music. It also has plugin support to allow apps on your system to augment it.

 

Microsoft says to expect the following plugins to come:

• Zillow
• OpenTable
• Wolfram | Alpha
• Instacart
• Atlassian (Jira and Bitbucket)
• Adobe
  and lots more
  

 

All plugins are cross compatible with OpenAI. So, develop once, and it will work on ChatGPT, Windows Copilot, Microsoft 365 Copilot (Word/Excel/PowerPoint), Bing Chat AI, and any other OpenAI based platform.

 

 

Windows - Dynamic Lighting

If you remembered, there was a leak a while back which suggested that Microsoft is working in having Windows handle all your RGB control needs, instead of relying on a or multiple heavy, resource hungry applications which also can affect system stability. While nothing showcases as of yet, in a blog post, Microsoft shares more information on it. It's name is Dynamic Lighting and will be part of the Settings panel.

Panos Panay, CPO of Windows and Devices at Microsoft says:

Quote

With Dynamic Lighting, Windows users will be able to effortlessly set up and customize their devices with RGB lights directly from Windows Settings. It has never been easier to help all your RGB accessories seamlessly work together for Windows apps. This month, we are making the Dynamic Lighting preview available to Windows Insiders so that developers and hardware partners alike can experiment with new integrations for RGB accessories and components.

 

 

Windows - Ungrouped Taskbar / Show Labels is back!

Shortly after Windows 11 was released with its new taskbar recoded from the ground up, Microsoft was hard at work in bringing to feature parity with past Windows versions. Drag & Drop was shortly added, notification tray and tooltip were modernized to Win11 styling, and features various other improvements. And if you wonder, today, Insiders get the seconds to show on the clock, so if you were waiting for this, expect it soon. As for ungrouping apps and showing the app name, for a while leaks suggested progress on that feature, but Microsoft keep silent.

While not presented as of yet, it is now featured in "Dev Home" feature video:

Screenshot of video:

 

Also, the ability of hide date/time is also coming.

 

 

Windows - 7-zip, RAR, Gz Format support 

Windows will have included Windows, after countless years, support for 7Zip, RAR, and GZ compression files.

To ensure proper support, Microsoft says that it will use libarchive open-source project.

 

 

Windows - Updated File Explorer

Similar to Taskbar ungrouping and label support, this one comes from Microsoft videos, and has yet to announced (maybe it will be later today or tomorrow).

This one is an updated File Explorer. Currently Windows 11 File Explorer has been updated partially. The toolbar has been updated, and tab support was added. But the rest of the Windows hasn't. It is the same old Windows 8 styling.

 

Insider knows that Microsoft ported File Explorer to a new framework (if you will), Windows App SDK, whoever, nothing visuals is different. In a video from Microsoft, for a split seconds we can see the updated file explorer.

 

We can notice:

• Updated highlight in the navigation pane
• Rounded corner address bar and search bar and placed on top of tool bar instead of the bottom.
• Updated "Home" view with file preview
• A new "Gallery" item on the left.

Past leaks also suggest an updated Detail pane view is in the works, replacing Vista one.

 

 

Sources:
https://blogs.windows.com/windowsdeveloper/2023/05/23/bringing-the-power-of-ai-to-windows-11-unlocking-a-new-era-of-productivity-for-customers-and-developers-with-windows-copilot-and-dev-home/
https://www.theverge.com/2023/5/23/23734501/windows-11-rgb-dynamic-lighting-settings-menu-build
https://build.microsoft.com/en-US/home
 

 

 

[Update - Day 2 and 3]

 

New Features

Note: Some of the following new features aren't actual stage announcement but is part of the same Windows Insider build showcasing of the some of the announced features, like the taskbar improvements.

 

Taskbar

Taskbar You can now Force Quit an application/game from the taskbar. No need to open the Task Manager.

 

 

DevDrive

A drive partition (can be a virtual one) for developers formatted in Microsoft new ReFS file format, design to maximized performance relating to dev tasks, and Windows Defender will detect this drive and be tweaked to reflect a dev environment/setup for the files in that drive partition all, again, to maximize performance. Sadly, no information on how it does it all has been presented at this moment. That said, to learn a bit more on ReFS, Microsoft has this document: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/storage/refs/refs-overview

 

 

Settings

You can now view Wireless passwords saved on the system with ease.

Go to Settings > Network & Internet > Wi-Fi > Managed Known networks > pick your network name (in the above MS picture, "The Framework" was selected), and you'll have a button to View the saved password.

 

In the past, you needed to dig through settings to figure it out, and that got progressively harder from Vista to 11 (right before this coming up improvements)

 

Widget bar

• Microsoft is working on the ability to remove the news items, and keep it clean with your widgets only.
• New Widget management panel is being introduced. More widgets are being worked on and are coming.
   

Backup & Restore

A new feature to allow you to backup your programs and restore them on a new install, or transfer of new PC. It backups not only Store apps, but also WinGet installed apps. The app itself isn't being backed up, but rather these apps will be re-installed automatically for you, if you pick to restore your data at the OOBE.

I didn't have yet a chance to play with it.

 

 

 

[Levent]

Oh wow, lots of improvements this time around.

4 minutes ago, GoodBytes said:

Windows - Dynamic Lighting

This is kind of funny, even microsoft took notice to how shit the most RGB software is and decided that they couldnt make it any worse than it already is.

[manikyath]

1 minute ago, Levent said:

This is kind of funny, even microsoft took notice to how shit the most RGB software is and decided that they couldnt make it any worse than it already is.

microsoft: hold my surface.

[Lanrick]

Quote

If you remembered, there was a leak a while back which suggested that Microsoft is working in having Windows handle all your RGB control needs, instead of relying on a or multiple heavy, resource hungry applications which also can affect system stability. While nothing showcases as of yet, in a blog post, Microsoft shares more information on it. It's name is Dynamic Lighting and will be part of the Settings panel.

I can finally unite all my RGB (hopefully). No more MSI Mystic Light, Logitech G hub, and (the worst one) Corsair iCue

[Quackers101]

5 hours ago, Levent said:

Oh wow, lots of improvements this time around.

This is kind of funny, even microsoft took notice to how shit the most RGB software is and decided that they couldnt make it any worse than it already is.

also to say "tease win10 with win11", upgrade now!

 

and I guess the teased about dev console is now coming

 

The Native support for WinRAR to zip, nice

Edited May 23, 2023 by Quackers101

[GoodBytes]

Personally, I am happy that 7zip support is coming. While a great format, the app interface UI/UX design seems to have been stuck in the late 90's or early 2000. Every time I use it, I get annoyed, and so every time I get a 7zip compressed file, I have a bad taste in my mouth.

 

And of course, one less app to install.

[GhostRoadieBL]

This may be unpopular but I prefer a few walls between 7zip, rar and windows, nothing really needed to change when the programs are effectively free. By making native support the creators of the normally used software get nothing for all the effort making the file types standard and easy.

Also, who thought it is a good idea adding bing to openai but only with pathetic subscription based programs (looking at you adobe) which only have long histories pushing for sales instead of quality features or keeping anything useful paywalled?

It's going to be the same issue as ads have become in bing-chat, people I know are starting to leave the platform since they can't trust suggestions as being unfiltered. Adding ads only eroded the usefulness of the platform making some prompts as useless at online product lists.

[Quackers101]

I dont trust the AI agent they want to add or have added with future updates, do not trust.

 

also Nvidia saying they will have a driver ready soon for the windows build.

https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2023/05/23/microsoft-build-nvidia-ai-windows-rtx/

Quote

On May 24, we’ll release our latest optimizations in Release 532.03 drivers that combine with Olive-optimized models to deliver big boosts in AI performance.

Coming soon, NVIDIA will introduce new Max-Q low-power inferencing for AI-only workloads on RTX GPUs

Not sure about AMD's drivers,

[williamcll]

But can I get small taskbar again?

[Doobeedoo]

Well good, some extra support and UI stuff.

[LAwLz]

On 5/23/2023 at 7:57 PM, GoodBytes said:

Bing coming to ChatGPT

This is interesting, but I wonder how it will work.

Personally, I find that Bing chat doesn't usually perform as well as ChatGPT-4 for my tasks. I hope it's just "giving ChatGPT-4 access to the Internet" and not just replacing ChatGPT-4 with Bing Chat, because it seems like they do perform quite differently (even though Bing Chat is based on ChatGPT-4).

 

 

On 5/23/2023 at 7:57 PM, GoodBytes said:

Copilot - Arrives to Windows

That looks pretty cool, but I did chuckle at the "tell an AI to send this document in a Teams chat", when typing that sentence into the AI probably took more time than just dragging the file into the Teams window yourself. I wonder if they will start charging for this. ChatGPT-4 is not exactly cheap to run, and this will probably make usage go through the roof (even more so than it already is).

 

 

On 5/23/2023 at 7:57 PM, GoodBytes said:

Windows - Dynamic Lighting

This is very good. I don't use any RGB stuff myself, but I do like the idea of standardizing it instead of needing multiple drivers and programs to control things. I just hope that it gets adopted and actually works the way I imagine it will.

 

 

On 5/23/2023 at 7:57 PM, GoodBytes said:

Windows - 7-zip, RAR, Gz Format support 

Fucking finally. I am glad to see them using libarchive as well. If they implement support for all the libarchive features and not just a subset of them, then I will probably uninstall 7-Zip/NanaZip.

Edit: Interesting thing I found: Why is Windows Compressed Folders (Zip folders) support stuck at the turn of the century?

Apparently, the code in Windows 11 for zipping/unzipping files was written around the year 1998 and has not really been touched since then (except adding unicode support).

Apparently, the library Windows uses (called DynaZip), is really, really bad as well. Not just because it's old, but because it is poorly written, and people at Microsoft don't know how to update it. So completely replacing it seems like a good idea.

 

 

 

On 5/23/2023 at 7:57 PM, GoodBytes said:

Windows - Updated File Explorer

I saw someone on Twitter that showed (unfinished) code that enabled you to drag tabs between Explorer windows, and do things like drag a tab to an empty space to create a new window. Just like browser tabs behave. Honestly, that was how I expected tabs in Explorer to work to begin with, instead of the really shitty implementation we have today. I was so excited for tabs in Explorer, and when I realized it was awful to use (because of these missing features) I got so disappointed. I am hoping that this new build will finally implement proper tab support.

 

 

Very good announcements so far.

[LAwLz]

Yes! 

"never combine" taskbar icons has been added to the dev channel. 

 

This is the only reason why I use "explorer patcher". 

 

Sadly it seems like they managed to fuck it up by making the width adapt to the size of the text instead of having all of them the same size though. But it's better than nothing, and might be enough for me to uninstall Explorer Patcher. 

 

Picture:

Spoiler

 

[Mnky313]

On 5/23/2023 at 1:57 PM, GoodBytes said:

Windows - Updated File Explorer

Oh boy, another version of file explorer.
Add it to the pile with the rest of them:

[GoodBytes]

Main post updated with some final reveals.

[Quackers101]

would be cool if ms added an simple option to see when one are in "admin mode" or it being temp.
like an yellow outline around stuff that was enabled admin privileges

[VinLAURiA]

All I want is for them to reintroduce the Ribbon and proper right-click menu into File Explorer and give me my Win10-styled Start Menu back. I am so close to upgrading to Win11 full-time, but I just can't get past those UI regressions. So until then, Win11 will just remain in a test VM while Win10 remains my host OS.

 

In particular, it's the Start Menu that really bugs me.

 

Win10 had the perfect Start Menu. Thanks to Metro Tiles, you had both classic-styled icons and full-functionality widgets in a single clean interface, laid out at exactly at the positions and sizes you want with no extra cruft aside from the full app list right next to it, which is useful in its own right. On the other hand, Win11 turns the Start Menu into an iPhone-styled app drawer where you have far less choice in how exactly you want things laid out, being unable to chose sizes or exact positions (since you can't have any gaps) for icons, while widgets are split off into their own separate panel for no reason.

 

 

And with the full app list now tucked away behind a button, the other half of the Start Menu instead has these unremovable "recommendations", and those are just the same thing as Win10's Timeline or the Content View on Edge's new tab page: two features where everyone I know just turns them off. No one has any use for an ever-changing list of what their machine thinks they might want; they just want their stuff laid out exactly how they laid it out. I can find all my recent files in File Explorer's Quick Access pane already (or by right-clicking the appropriate app's icon), and new apps already appeared at the top of my full app list in a temporary "Recently added" segment. I know what's really gonna fill up that Recommended area in time is just gonna be ads.