The team and I are pumped to be back at Construct with the developer community this yr.
During the last yr, Windows has continued to see incredible growth fueled by Windows 11 adoption. In truth, some of the exciting areas driving that growth for Windows has been developers themselves, with a 24% YoY increase in monthly devices used for development.
AI is the defining technology of our time and developers are on the forefront of this transformation. With the appropriate tools we will empower developers and our shared customers to shape the long run and leave their mark on the world. We are only beginning to see the incredible impact AI is having across industries and in our own each day lives. Today, the team and I are excited to share the subsequent steps we’re taking over our journey with Windows 11, to satisfy this recent age of AI.
- We’re introducing Windows Copilot, making Windows 11 the primary PC platform to announce centralized AI assistance to assist people easily take motion and get things done.
- We’re extending Bing Chat plugins to Windows, enabling developers to integrate their apps inside Windows Copilot to higher serve their customers and increase engagement on native Windows applications.
- We’re introducing recent Hybrid AI loop to support AI development across platform, and across Azure to client with recent silicon support from AMD, Intel, Nvidia and Qualcomm.
- We’re introducing Dev Home designed to assist every developer turn out to be more productive on Windows.
- We’re introducing recent AI features and experiences within the Microsoft Store on Windows.
We will’t wait to share more with you tomorrow during our Windows keynote, you’ll want to register for Construct and tune in!
Introducing Windows Copilot for Windows 11
We’re thrilled to introduce Windows Copilot. Windows is the primary PC platform to supply centralized AI assistance for patrons. Together, with Bing Chat and first- and third-party plugins, you may deal with bringing your ideas to life, completing complex projects and collaborating as a substitute of spending energy finding, launching and dealing across multiple applications.
Invoking Windows Copilot is familiar and simple – the button is front and center in your taskbar – easy to seek out and use. Once open, the Windows Copilot side bar stays consistent across your apps, programs and windows, all the time available to act as your personal assistant. It makes every user an influence user, helping you are taking motion, customize your settings and seamlessly connect across your favorite apps. The belongings you love about Windows – copy/paste, Snap Assist, Snipping Tool, personalization – they’re all right there for you, together with every other feature on the platform, and so they only improve with Windows Copilot. For instance, you may not only copy and paste, but additionally ask Windows Copilot to rewrite, summarize or explain your content.
Similar to you’d with Bing Chat, you may ask Windows Copilot a variety of questions from easy to complex. If I need to call my family in Cyprus, I can quickly check the local time to ensure I’m not waking them up in the midst of the night. If I need to plan a visit to go to them in Cyprus, I can ask Windows Copilot to seek out my family flights and accommodations for mid-winter break.
With Bing and ChatGPT plugins in Windows Copilot, people won’t only have access to augmented AI capabilities and experiences, but you as developers can even have recent ways to achieve and innovate for our shared customers. We welcome you to be a part of the Windows Copilot journey by continuing to take a position in Bing and ChatGPT plugins so your investments will carry forward to Windows Copilot.
Windows Copilot will begin to turn out to be available in preview for Windows 11 in June, stay tuned and enroll here to get updates from the team.
Empowering every Windows 11 developer to be an AI developer
That is an incredible time to be a developer on Windows. The chances across industries – healthcare, finance, education, tech, and others – are limitless. We proceed to take a position in essential tools to democratize how apps shall be built for the brand new era of AI; whether you’re developing on x86/x64 or Arm64 we need to make it easy so that you can bring AI powered experiences in Windows apps across cloud and edge.
Should you are only getting began with AI or when you are wondering where to start out, Microsoft and Windows are here to provide help to on that journey. Today, we’re announcing the Windows AI Library, which is able to house a curated collection of able to use machine learning models and APIs that may help jumpstart your AI development. We’ll share more details on the supply and preview dates in the approaching weeks.
Last yr at Construct, we announced Hybrid Loop, a brand new development pattern that allows hybrid AI scenarios across Azure and client devices. Today, we’re excited to share that our vision has turn out to be a reality using ONNX Runtime because the gateway to Windows AI and Olive, a toolchain we created to ease the burden on you when optimizing models for diverse Windows and other devices. With ONNX Runtime, third-party developers have access to the identical tools we use internally to run AI models on Windows or other devices across CPU, GPU, NPU, or hybrid with Azure.
ONNX Runtime now supports the identical API for running models on the device or within the cloud, enabling hybrid inferencing scenarios where your app can use local resources when possible and switch to the cloud when needed. With the brand new Azure EP preview, you may connect with models deployed in AzureML and even to the Azure OpenAI service. With just a couple of lines of code you may specify the cloud endpoint and define your criteria for when to make use of the cloud. This provides you more control over costs and user experience, as Azure EP gives you the flexibleness to choose from using the larger model within the cloud or the smaller local model at runtime.
You too can optimize your models for various hardware targets with Olive, an extensible toolchain that mixes leading edge techniques for model compression, optimization and compilation. And you need to use ONNX Runtime across platforms like Windows, iOS, Android and Linux, so your Windows AI investment can extend to all of your app platforms.
Each ONNX Runtime and Olive contribute to the speed of getting your AI models deployed into apps. ONNX Runtime makes it easier so that you can create amazing AI experiences on Windows and other platforms, with less engineering effort and higher performance.
Extending our vision for an AI powered future in collaboration with our partners
Windows 11 has the biggest and strongest ecosystem of GPUs on the planet with greater than 200M+ AI capable discrete GPUs. Windows PCs like Surface Studio 2+, and PCs built by partners resembling Acer, ASUS, Dell, HP, Lenovo and Samsung are powered by NVIDIA GPUs. Developers can leverage these GPUs today to run cutting-edge transformer models like Dolly 2.0, Stable Diffusion and NVIDIA’s NeMo which might be pre-optimized for Windows.
NPUs (Neural Processing Units) are purpose-built accelerators to run AI models efficiently. Our partners are continuing to innovate and deliver – like Qualcomm with the Snapdragon 8cx Gen3 Compute Platform which today enables Windows devices including the Surface Pro 9 5G and the Windows Dev Kit 2023. With Olive & ONNX Runtime you may goal Qualcomm AI Engine Direct SDK to run AI models on the 8cx Gen 3 compute platform NPU.
We’re excited to see all our silicon partners bring more Windows devices with NPUs to the market later this yr. AMD recently made early access of Ryzen™ AI software available to developers to run AI models on AMD Ryzen™ 7040 Series processors with Ryzen™ AI. Intel previewed their recent Meteor Lake product, an all-new chiplet SoC architecture that may feature Intel’s first integrated AI engine which is able to scale across the Windows ecosystem starting later this yr and can even make available developer tools, including ONNX Runtime support enabled through OpenVino-EP and DirectML-EP.
Partners resembling WhatsApp, Luminar Neo and Camo are achieving incredible leaps in performance and unlocking recent end-user experiences by leveraging NPUs to run their AI models. Bring your apps to the Windows platform and leverage ONNX Runtime to deliver AI experiences like Camo. We will’t wait to see what the Windows developer community will create with these recent AI toolchains and NPU hardware advancements.
Recent experiences designed to assist every developer turn out to be more productive on Windows 11
Life as a developer involves consistently juggling manual dev machine arrange with too many clicks, multiple tool sign-ins, navigating sub-optimal filesystem performance and context switching, and we all know that these disruptions can significantly impact your productivity. Today, we’re excited to announce recent features and enhancements across all stages of the event cycle on Windows.
Introducing Dev Home: Your recent productivity companion
With a renewed deal with your productivity, we’re announcing a brand new home for developers on Windows – Dev Home. Dev House is a brand new experience in Windows 11, now available in preview, that gets you back within the zone and streamlines your workflow with features resembling WinGet configuration for easier and faster setup, Dev Drive for enhanced filesystem performance and a brand new customizable dashboard to trace all of your workflows and tasks in a single place. Dev Home makes it easy to hook up with GitHub and arrange your machine to code for the repos you care about, easily installing the tools and packages you wish. Dev Home can even configure your coding environments within the cloud using Microsoft Dev Box and GitHub Codespaces. With Dev Home, designed by and for developers, you now have your ultimate productivity companion so you may deal with what you do best – writing code. Download the preview of the Dev Home within the Microsoft Store today. Learn more about Dev Home
Unattended and reliable dev machine setup: Reducing arrange time from days to hours
Prepare-to-code in only a couple of clicks with the brand new WinGet configuration. This unattended, reliable and repeatable mechanism means that you can skip the manual effort of organising a brand new machine or onboarding a brand new project and removes the fear of looking for the appropriate version of software, packages, tools and frameworks to download or settings to use. WinGet configuration reduces this manual and error-prone process all the way down to a single command with a WinGet configuration file. Just run `winget configure ` within the command prompt and when it’s done, you might be able to code! Learn more about WinGet configuration
Introducing Dev Drive: A brand new storage volume tailor-made for developers: supercharged for performance and security
We all know you frequently take care of repositories containing many hundreds of files and directories, and historically this has presented a challenge for heavy I/O operations resembling builds.
Today, we’re announcing Dev Drive – a brand new style of storage volume, tailor-made for developers, with a file system that delivers each performance and security.
Dev Drive is predicated on the Resilient File System, which, combined with a brand new performance mode capability in Microsoft Defender for Antivirus, offers as much as 30% file system improvement in construct times for file I/O scenarios. The brand new performance mode is safer on your workloads than folder or process exclusions, providing an ultimate solution to balance security with performance.
Dev Home makes it effortless to establish Dev Drive as a part of the environment setup process. It’s supercharged to host project source code, working folders and package caches. Dev Drive is out there in preview later this week. Create a Dev Drive now.
Efficiently track your workflows on a brand new customizable dashboard in Dev Home
Dev Home also helps you manage any style of project you’re working on – Windows, cloud, web, mobile or AI – providing all the data you wish, right at your fingertips, in a single customizable dashboard. You’ll be able to enhance the Dev Home experience by adding GitHub widgets to efficiently track all coding tasks or pull requests and projects from one central location, and system widgets to trace CPU and GPU performance. We’re collaborating with Team Xbox to bring the GDK to Dev Home to make it easy to start with game creation. Seeking to add your personal custom-built extensions? You’ll be able to do that on Dev Home.
Dev house is open source. We value community input on the experience, and we would like to construct this with you. Contribute and interact with us on the GitHub repository
Dev House is in preview starting today, you may install Dev Home from the Microsoft Store today.
Your favorite tool, Windows Terminal is getting smarter with GitHub Copilot X
Users of GitHub Copilot will have the opportunity to reap the benefits of natural language AI each inline and in an experimental chat experience to recommend commands, explain errors and take actions throughout the Terminal application. We’re also experimenting with GitHub Copilot powered AI in other developer tools like WinDBG to provide help to complete your tasks with less toil.
Join the GitHub Copilot Chat waitlist to realize access to those features as they turn out to be available.
Reducing toil and unlocking the fun and joy of development on Windows with recent features and enhancements
The team has listened closely to what improvements are top of mind for you, including improvements to the Taskbar:
- You’ll be able to now quickly discover and access any instance of every app housed within the taskbar with only one click. All instances of the app are ungrouped with labels on the taskbar.
- You’ll be able to now hide your Time and Date with a setting on the taskbar. With this setting, users will have the opportunity to cover the time to stay focused, capture screen recordings without having to edit to cover time and date. The feature is situated within the time and date settings page in Windows Settings.
- Quickly and simply shut down applications with a straightforward right click on the app directly from the taskbar without opening the Task Manager.
As well as…
- We have now added native support for added archive formats, including tar, 7-zip, rar, gz and lots of others using the libarchive open-source project. You now can get improved performance of archive functionality during compression on Windows.
- We’re adding tab tear-out to Windows Terminal so which you could easily organize your different shells into windows in accordance with your needs.
Continuing to innovate and speed up development for Windows on Arm
Previously yr, we launched the Windows Dev Kit 2023, and Arm native versions of Visual Studio and .NET to assist speed up development on Arm. Windows is constant this momentum and welcoming more third-party Windows apps, middleware partners and Open-Source Software natively to Arm. Learn the best way to add Arm support on your apps.
- Visual Studio 17.6 now ships with MAUI support for Arm.
- Visual Studio 17.71 Preview 1 now ships with support for Linux development with C++.
- LLVM v12.0 and onwards for cross compile and native compile options for Arm.
- Node 20.0.0 is out there from April with native Arm support.
- WiX installer v4.0 is out there to create native installers for Arm.
- Recent middleware projects which have released within the last 12 months: Qt 6.2, CMake 3.24, Bazel, 5.1, OpenSSL 3.0, OpenBLAS, 0.3.21, Python 3.11.
- Unity Player: Unity Player is now generally available for Windows on Arm natively. Developers using the sport engine will have the opportunity to simply goal Windows on Arm devices to get native performance on current and future titles.
- Additional solutions are coming soon to Arm64 For instance GNU GCC, Flutter & Dart, PyTorch, GIMP.
Beyond Microsoft’s investment within the Arm platform there are numerous developers that see the worth of Arm native support and have released Arm64 native versions of their experiences to provide their customers the very best experience.
Listed below are just a couple of of the recent products launched:
And lots of more with plans to release within the near future:
Recent features to maintain your users engaged
Lighted accessories have been on the rise and might add energy and emotion to your PC experience. Today, lots of these accessories depend on third-party apps and integrations which might be highly fragmented. With Dynamic Lighting, Windows users will have the opportunity to effortlessly arrange and customize their devices with RGB lights directly from Windows Settings. It has never been easier to assist all of your RGB accessories seamlessly work together for Windows apps. This month, we’re making the Dynamic Lighting preview available to Windows Insiders in order that developers and hardware partners alike can experiment with recent integrations for RGB accessories and components.
Recent features and experiences within the Microsoft Store on Windows
We’re committed to not only providing you with the very best tools to construct great apps, but we’re also enhancing the Microsoft Store, an open platform on Windows that gives the reach and growth that you just seek.
Today, we’re pleased to announce recent AI-powered features, expanded Microsoft Store Ads and recent tools to provide help to reach your customers:
- Microsoft Store AI Hub: Coming soon, we’re introducing a dedicated section within the Microsoft Store on Windows that may curate the very best AI experiences built by the developer community and Microsoft.
- Microsoft Store AI-Generated keywords: To assist optimize app discovery, we’re introducing a brand new tool in Partner Center that leverages AI to generate and suggest search tags for apps to enhance discoverability.
- AI-Generated review summary: We’re making it faster and easier for patrons to scan reviews for apps through the use of the facility of AI to compile hundreds of reviews into a straightforward summary, enabling customers to find recent content with ease.
- Microsoft Store Ads: Starting in June, Microsoft Store Ads will expand its footprint beyond the U.S., to greater than 150 regions worldwide. You can even have more options to achieve customers with a brand new premium, high-traffic highlight placement within the Store and Bing.com search results.
- Backup and Restore Apps: To provide help to retain your customers after they switch devices, we’re enhancing the backup and restore experience for apps. This update is in preview and is out there to Windows Insiders today.
To learn more about what we announced within the Microsoft Store on Windows today, including recent AI-powered experiences and developer tools, visit this blog post.
Constructing on and for the long run of Windows, together
It’s an exciting time to be a developer, much more so on Windows, and we’re thrilled to be on this journey with our you. From the moment you open your device, you’ll have the last word productivity tools at your fingertips, empowering you to do your best work. With the incredible momentum that’s constructing around this recent era of AI, we will’t wait to see what you’ll create next.
We wish to empower you to focus your time on creating and constructing – writing code that only you may write. With our renewed deal with supercharging developer productivity, we consider Windows now provides the very best platform so that you can create leading edge experiences on your customers and can also be the very best platform for you to achieve those customers, all with minimal cost and energy. We’re humbled to be on this journey with you.
To learn more about these incredible recent features, explore our recent Windows Developer Center bringing our news and resources all into one location for you. For our Windows Insiders, you’ll have the opportunity to start out accessing a set of those recent features later this week in an Insider Preview Construct. And you’ll want to try our various sessions throughout Microsoft Construct to learn more about all the things we announced.