The holy triumverate of Windows, Mac, and Linux is well established in my industry. Mac and Linux have legions of fans on the interwebs, but keeping an eye on the Windows ecosystem is part of my reality.

PowerToys 0.18 includes a Spotlight-esque launcher. Win+R always felt like a consolation prize with fancier options like Alfred on other platforms. The Verge has a write-up with pics.

Rust/WinRT Public Preview. I’m not a Windows guru, but I’ve long been under the impression that WinRT/UWP was still over-shadowed by many developers’ preference for Win32. In any case, I just think this is neat because I like Rust.

WinForms Designer for Net Core. Drag-y and drop-y tools are neat.

Windows Package Manager. Given the ubiquity of package managers in the *NIX world I always found the absence on Windows… perplexing. I’ve got mixed feelings about this one. Chocolatey (and a few others) have existed for a while, but can’t be relied on for everything. Maybe with official MS support and dog-fooding by PowerShell, VS Code, .NET Core/5, etc. teams this will be the “package manager we deserve”.

.NET 5 Preview 4. The impending “one .NET to rule them all”.

PowerShell 7.1 Preview 3 based on .NET 5. Also includes PowerShellGet 3.0 preview 3 which will hopefully get integrated with their new package manager along with nuget.

WSL2 will include GPU and GUI support, including DirectX support for Linux.

Finally, Windows Terminal 1.0.