Mike

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.

Mike

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.

Mike

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.

Mike

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.

Mike

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.

Mike

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.

Mike

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.

Mike

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.

Mike

TypeScript 5.1, available in a beta release as of April 18, features a variety of coding enhancements including easier implicit returns for undefined-returning functions and allowing unrelated types for getters and setters. Snippet completions for @param JSDoc tags also are featured.With easier implicit returns for undefined-returning functions, TypeScript 5.1 now allows undefined-returning functions to have no return statement, fixing a situation in which only functions that could have absolutely no return statements were void-returning and any-returning functions. This meant that even if a developer explicity indicated that a function returned undefined, at least one return statement was required.This was a problem if an API expected a function to return undefined, in which case at least one explicit return of undefined or a return statement and an explicit annotation was needed. This behavior was confusing and frustrating, Microsoft said. Also with TypeScript 5.1, if a function has no return expression and is being passed to something that expects a function to return undefined, TypeScript infers undefined for that function’s return type.

Mike

Microsoft, with the latest preview of its planned .NET 8 software development platform, is highlighting three new C# 12 language features: primary constructors for non-record classes and structs, the use of aliases for any type, and default values for lambda expression parameters.These capabilities are included in .NET 8 Preview 3, which was released April 11. General availability of both C# 12 and .NET 8 is expected in November. Developers also can access the C# 12 features in the latest Visual Studio 17.6 preview.With primary constructors, developers can add parameters to the class declaration itself and use these values in the class body. For example, developers could use the parameters to initialize properties or use the parameters in the code of methods and property accessors. Primary constructors were introduced for records in C# 9 as part of the positional syntax for records. C# 12 extends these to all structs and classes.