Windows Archive

The official way to create user interfaces for the Windows operating system changed quite a lot of times during the last years. Microsoft created and (partially or fully) abadoned a lot of APIs which where intended to replace the respective previous ones. They changed names and ways how it’s supposed to be done a few times, and left a lof of developers confused. Here is a small historical overview. Nikolaus Gebhardt If you’re ever wondering how we ended up at a situation where, on the desktop and in Explorer, context menus have their own context menus, well, this is why.

After earlier sightings, Microsoft has now formally announced sudo for Windows. We’re excited to announce the release of Sudo for Windows in Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 26052! Sudo for Windows is a new way for users to run elevated commands directly from an unelevated console session. It is an ergonomic and familiar solution for users who want to elevate a command without having to first open a new elevated console. We are also excited to announce that we are open-sourcing this project here on GitHub! We’re working hard to add more information about the project in the GitHub repo and will be sharing more details about our plans in the coming months! If you’re looking for additional functionality that Sudo for Windows does not provide, check out Gerardo Grignoli’s gsudo which has a number of additional features and configuration options. Jordi Adoumie on the official Windows blog In response to sudo coming to Windows, Theo de Raadt announced that Word is coming to OpenBSD.

The migration from the classic Mail and Calendar app to the new Outlook app is in full swing already. Microsoft announced the deprecation of the classic apps in favor of a new Outlook app in June 2023. It introduced the new Outlook app to Insider builds a month later and announced that it would enforce the migration in early 2024. Not all users are migrated at this point. Those who have been migrated already or installed the Outlook app directly, may notice several differences between the new Outlook app and the classic Mail app. One of the main differences turns an ad-free email experience into one with ads. You may see ads in the inbox in the new Outlook. Martin Brinkmann Ads disguised as emails in your inbox. Microsoft will not rest until Windows resembles Times Square. What a trash fire of an operating system.

That was back in August and since then, there has not been anything too noteworthy in terms of Windows bootability support on ReFS. Meanwhile, Microsoft has also not updated the officially supported ReFS version up from 3.10 yet, and as such, trying to run Windows on any newer ReFS version leads to an immediate crash on the newest Canary build 26040. Apparently, the crash is worse than it was on previous builds as it now throws up no recovery messages either. Sayan Sen at NeoWin It seems like NTFS will be with us for quite a while longer.

If you know your Windows history, you’ll know that the operating system got that name when it moved away from using pure MS-DOS and started using a graphical user interface to show things. As it turns out, you can force Windows 11 back to its legacy roots and reduce it back to a command-line interface. This is what the developer of Tiny11 has achieved, calling their new creation “Minwin.” The developer of Win11, NTDev, posted a video on YouTube about their project. There’s absolutely nothing flashy here; no Copilot, no Start menu, and definitely no UI. It’s as graphically complex as the Command Prompt, which meant that NTDev had to resort to fancy 00s-era ASCII logos to announce that Minwin was working. Simon Batt at XDA Definitely a neat proof-of-concept, and it shows just how modular Windows could be if only Microsoft allowed its users to take out the parts they don’t need. I wonder how close this is to Nano Server, an installation option for Windows Server you’ve probably never heard of. I also like the nod to MinWin, the informal codename Microsoft used internally to refer to an effort by a small number of expert Windows kernel engineers to untangle the spaghetti ball of dependencies that had sprouted between the various architectural layers of Windows. This project started around Vista, and eventually made it possible to make broader, sweeping changes to Windows without breaking things all over the place because the spaghetti ball of internal, low-level dependencies wasn’t mapped out.

Running into a blue screen of death, but don’t want your journey to end? Well, how about dropping into a Linux shell when you hit a BSOD in Windows? We simply register a BugCheck callback. The callback function runs a tiny RISC V emulator running linux. For the video output we use bootvid.dll and for input we have a horrible simple polling based PS/2 keyboard driver. BugCheck2Linux GitHub page The gist here is that during a BSOD, drivers can reset a device to a known working state and gather diagnostic data, so what the BugCheck2Linux “driver” does is load up an incredibly small RISC-V emulator, boot a Linux kernel, and drop you in a shell. An incredibly limited shell that can barely do anything, but a shell nonetheless. And when I say “limited”, I really do mean “limited”: it only works on BIOS systems, runs at 640×480 in 16 colours, the shift key doesn’t work (you’ll need to use caps lock for that), and you can’t use backspace either. Still, this is an incredibly cool proof of concept, and I wonder if more is possible here. Who knows – this could become a valuable troubleshooting tool.

When the AXP64 build tools for Windows 2000 were discovered back in May 2023, there was a crucial problem. Not only was it difficult to test the compiled applications since you needed an exotic and rare DEC Alpha machine running a leaked version of Windows, it was also difficult to even compile the programs, since you needed the same DEC Alpha machine to run the compiler; there was no cross-compiler. As a result, I began writing a program conceptually similar to WOW64 on Itanium (or WX86, or FX-32), only in reverse, to allow RISC Win32 programs to run on x86. CaptainWillStarblazer People with this much skill just exist.

Windows is changing the way apps can access your Microsoft account. Currently, when you sign in to Windows 11 or 10 with your Microsoft account, most apps automatically use that Microsoft account for in-app sign-in. The tech giant plans to change this behaviour by allowing you to decline access to Microsoft accounts in installed apps. Mayank Parmar at Windows Latest This change, like so many others that are making Windows ever so slightly less of a trashfire, is EU-only.

Microsoft’s plan to end support for Windows 10 operating system could result in about 240 million personal computers being disposed, potentially adding to landfill waste, Canalys Research said. The electronic waste from these PCs could weigh an estimated 480 million kilograms, equivalent to 320,000 cars. While many PCs could remain functional for years post the end of OS support, Canalys warned demand for devices without security updates could be low. Akash Sriram for Reuters A lot of these machines are perfectly capable of running Windows 11 if not for Microsoft’s artificial restrictions, and while less relevant – most people can’t just switch to Linux or BSD – there are alternative operating systems to keep these machines going. The only good thing that might come of this is a flurry of cheap, usable hardware on the second hand market, which can be used by us enthusiasts for all kinds of things.

And the culling of Windows features continues. Windows Mixed Reality is deprecated and will be removed in a future release of Windows. This deprecation includes the Mixed Reality Portal app, and Windows Mixed Reality for SteamVR and Steam VR Beta. Microsoft’s “Deprecated features for Windows client” page All this mixed reality stuff was a big push in Windows, up to the point Microsoft added applications and dedicated folders for it to Windows. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone use any of it. The Verge notes Microsoft has been downsizing its VR efforts for a while now, and it seems the company is bailing on the VR hypetrain.

Windows AI Studio simplifies generative AI app development by bringing together cutting-edge AI development tools and models from Azure AI Studio Catalog and other catalogs like Hugging Face. You will be able browse the AI models catalog powered by Azure ML and Hugging Face, download them locally, fine-tune, test and use them in your Windows application. As all of the computation happens locally, please make sure your device can handle the load. Windows AI Studio Preview on GitHub Nothing particularly exciting here, until you get to the installation process, as noted by Venn Stone on Mastodon: you need to install Linux, in the form of Ubuntu 18.04 or higher on WSL, before you can use this Microsoft offering. I don’t know, but that’s just funny.

It’s 1995 and I’ve been nearly two years in the professional workspace. OS/2 is the dominant workstation product, Netware servers rule the world, and the year of the Linux desktop is going to happen any moment now. If you weren’t running OS/2, you were probably running Windows 3.1, only very few people were using that Linux thing. What would have been the prefect OS at the time would have been NT with a competent POSIX subsystem, but since we were denied that, enter Hiroshi Oota with BSD on Windows. neozeed at Virtually Fun This is absolutely wild.

Windows 10’s end-of-support date is October 14, 2025. That’s the day that most Windows 10 PCs will receive their last security update and the date when most people should find a way to move to Windows 11 to ensure that they stay secure. As it has done for other stubbornly popular versions of Windows, though, Microsoft is offering a reprieve for those who want or need to stay on Windows 10: three additional years of security updates, provided to those who can pay for the Extended Security Updates (ESU) program. Andrew Cunningham for Ars Technica Getting users to upgrade from Windows 10 to 11 at that point isn’t going to be easy, because at this point Windows 10 users who can technically upgrade are clearly not doing so for a reason. I also wonder what this will mean for the large number of Windows 10 users who simply cannot upgrade because they have a processor that’s artificially restricted from running Windows 11.

According to our tests and reports seen by us, HP Smart is auto-installing on all versions of Windows that use Microsoft Store, including Windows 11 23H2 or 22H2. HP Smart is an app that allows you to manage HP printers, and it’s typically pre-installed on HP PCs. It’s not supposed to be installed when you’re not using an HP device like a PC or printer. However, the Microsoft Store is auto-installing the “HP Smart” app on Windows installations. Mayank Parmar for Windows Latest Microsoft is giving away free applications to Windows users the world over, and even installing it for them! What a nice, altruistic gesture. I feel all warm and fuzzy inside.