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The current Xbox One is huge. It makes the rival PS4 look tiny by comparison. But imagine if Microsoft shrunk it down to become the smallest Xbox ever. According to sources who spoke to Kotaku, Polygon and The Verge, that's exactly what's happening: the Xbox One Slim will be 40% smaller than the current model. It will allegedly be cheaper, too, and yet offer 2TB of storage space -- double the capacity of the highest-end Xbox One available now. At a media event attended by CNET, Xbox boss Phil Spencer hints that Microsoft might not wait for a new generation of game consoles to introduce new hardware, and that the hardware might be upgradable.CNET: Don't hold your breath for an Xbox VR headset Xbox boss Phil Spencer explains why Microsoft believes it doesn't need to build a VR headset to go with its Xbox One game console.CNET: You won't need an Xbox to play Microsoft's next generation of games Microsoft developers reveal to CNET that the company's future in-house games will arrive on Xbox and Windows on the very same day.

I am, at times, an unabashed Apple fanboy. But I am also a fan of giving credit where it's due, even if that does involve Microsoft. Whereas a mountain of evidence would suggest that Apple is going to build a car and maybe even a sharing service, Microsoft is probably taking the smarter route by avoiding cars altogether and focusing on its strengths.Peggy Johnson, head of business development for the software giant, told the Wall Street Journal that Microsoft is taking its own route in the auto industry. "We won't be building our own autonomous vehicle but we would like to enable autonomous vehicles and assisted driving as well," Johnson said. Saving itself from a potential billion-dollar boondoggle is but one part of its wise strategy. Microsoft is currently in talks with automakers to see how the company's software can be of help when it comes to building the next generation of connected, semi- or fully-autonomous cars. Whether that involves Microsoft's operating system, cloud services or anything else remains to be seen, but it appears that the company is open to all sorts of possibilities."You're sitting in the car for many, many minutes a day. Can that be part of your new office, can it be your new desk, a place where you actually get work done? We believe it can," Johnson said. "Each of them had a little something different that they wanted." And therein lies the beauty in Microsoft's strategy. Instead of spending a ton of money to put one product out -- a whole car -- Microsoft is taking the scattershot angle, putting as many of its established or already-in-development products into as many cars as possible.

Microsoft may have been engaged in a game of will-they/won't-they when it comes to the possibility of hiring OpenAI's Sam Altman, but it has not stopped the company from making good on its recent promise to give Windows 10 users access to Copilot.

Rumors of the AI assistant migrating from Windows 11 to Windows 10 were circulating for a little while before Microsoft confirmed that it would indeed be happening. The big day has now arrived, and Windows 10 users can now access Copilot... providing certain conditions are met.

Microsoft is redoing its 25-year-old Outlook for Windows product, with plans to replace the current product in about two years.

Those plans were outlined by Microsoft luminaries Margie Clinton, group product manager on the Outlook team, and Robert Novitskey, partner engineering manager for Outlook for Windows, in an online presentation published last week. It's accessible via in this Sept. 12 Microsoft announcement.

The new Outlook for Windows is getting lots of feature improvements, but much of this talk focused on timing issues, as well as IT department concerns about the transition away from the current Outlook for Windows product.

Entity Framework Core is an open source ORM (object-relational mapping) framework that bridges the gap between the object model of your application and the data model of your database. EF Core makes life simpler by allowing you to work with the database using .NET objects, instead of having to write arcane data access code. In an earlier post here, we discussed five best practices to improve data access performance in EF Core. In this article, we’ll examine six more ways to improve EF Core performance. To work with the code examples provided below, you should have Visual Studio 2022 installed in your system. If you don’t already have a copy, you can download Visual Studio 2022 here.

C# 12, a planned upgrade to Microsoft’s signature object-oriented language for .NET development, introduces code rerouting to improve compilation, in the latest preview. The update also features access to inline arrays.Available in Visual Studio 17.7 Preview 3 and .NET 8 Preview 6, both published July 11, the latest C# 12 preview includes features intended to enable future performance enhancements. Among these is an experimental feature dubbed interceptors that allows generators to reroute code, to provide context-specific optimization. C# 12 is set to ship as a final, production release with .NET 8 in the November time frame.

Is nothing working on your Windows 10 or Windows 11 computer? Is an application hanging, or is your PC unresponsive? Most people will reach for the hallowed Ctrl + Alt + Del keyboard shortcut, which has been used since the earliest days of DOS to revive a stuck computer.

You can also use the shortcut to call up the task manager (although Ctrl + Shift + Esc is faster at that). What many people probably aren’t aware of, however, is the emergency restart function Microsoft hid inside the Ctrl + Alt + Del screen. I personally didn’t know about it either until I read this article from BetaNews.

On Tuesday, Michael Schechter, Vice President of Growth and Distribution at Microsoft, shared via Twitter that Microsoft is rolling out unauthenticated chat access on Bing.

Through this update, anyone can experience the Bing Chat hype, even if you are a loyal Google user who refuses to create a Microsoft account. Also: These 4 popular Microsoft apps are getting a big AI boostHowever, there is a catch: non-authenticated user conversations are limited to five chat turns per session.

Multiple Microsoft products reached "general availability", or commercial release, at the Microsoft Build event for developers ongoing this week.

There were no standouts, but the highlights might include the new Burst Capacity for Azure Cosmos DB users, the Azure Monitor support for Prometheus container monitoring as a managed service, plus the ability of the Azure Kubernetes Service to use Azure Linux as a container host OS. Also, avatars for Teams users are expected next month.

The following GA list was extracted from Microsoft's "Book of News" publication for Microsoft Build.

More expensive software isn’t always better software. But sometimes, the features that you get by paying more can be extremely helpful—provided you make use of them.

That’s the case for Windows 11 Pro. Most people will get by just fine with Windows 11 Home, but if you’re a power user (or think you’ll need assistance from one), the additional features that Pro unlocks can be well-worth the cost. The upgrade puts deeper control of the operating system into your hands.