Passkeys are a safer alternative to passwords where users can authenticate using biometrics, a PIN, or pattern, and have been adopted by a number of other technology companies, like Amazon, GitHub, Google, PayPal, and more. 

With the new API support for third-party passkey providers, users will be able to utilize their preferred external passkey app. To implement this, Microsoft has been partnering with providers like 1Password, Bitwarden, and others.

“At Microsoft, we truly believe that security is a team sport. By partnering with OEMs, app developers and other partners in the ecosystem, and by helping people be better at protecting themselves—we are continuing to make Windows more secure by design and more secure by default,” Katharine Holdsworth, partner group product manager for Windows Security at Microsoft, wrote in a blog post. 

The experience for creating and using passkeys has also been improved. When a user visits a website that supports passkeys, they will be prompted about how they want to save those passkeys, with one of the options being to save to their Microsoft account. Users saving to their Microsoft account will need to go through a one-time setup where they will create a recovery key that will later be used to verify their identity and protect their passkeys. Once this initial setup is complete, they will be able to sign in to the website and save their passkey through Windows Hello. 

Passkeys saved through Windows Hello can be synced to multiple Windows 11 devices, providing users a more seamless sign-on process across all of their computers. 

“Microsoft is committed to making passkeys more readily available wherever you need them, with the experience, flexibility and durability that you expect when using Windows,” Holdsworth wrote. 

According to Microsoft, these three new features will start rolling out to the Windows Insider channels over the next several months. The company will also be sharing more information during sessions at Authenticate 2024 from October 14 to 16. 

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The new preview introduces many new features, one of which is that the Microsoft Store now won’t update Windows Terminal while it’s being used. This enables developers to keep long-running tasks going without worrying about the terminal being shut down for updates.

A visual change in this release is the addition of more types of lines that can be displayed. Users will now be able to display colored, curly, dashed, dotted, or doubled underlines. 

Microsoft has also made updates to how search results in Windows Terminal are displayed. When searching directly in the terminal for text, the search results are now highlighted. 

Windows Terminal also got several usability updates, such as that the AtlasEngine rendering engine is now enabled by default, the “Canary” ZIP distribution defaults to portable mode, readability of settings disclaimers is improved, and more. 

A full list of the updates and bug fixes can be found in this blog post.

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Windows Terminal is on a quarterly release cycle, meaning that an update is published every three months. To get new features faster, you can now install the Windows Terminal Canary channel.

This new channel ships new features nightly and gives you the opportunity to try new features before they make it to the preview version.  

It can be installed in addition to Windows Terminal stable and Windows Terminal Preview. Right now it is available either as an App Installer or Portable ZIP distribution. 

Microsoft does note that this Canary channel is the least stable release channel, which means users may find bugs before Microsoft has a chance to discover and address them. 

“We hope that Windows Terminal Canary can become a place for you to try our new experimental features and provide us feedback as we build them,” Christopher Nguyen, product manager II for Windows Terminal at Microsoft, wrote in a blog post.

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One of the features in Windows Terminal 1.19 is Broadcast Input, which allows developers to broadcast the contents of a terminal pane to all other panes in that tab. 

The team also added the option for developers to highlight a piece of code and then do a web search on it. This can be achieved by highlighting text, right clicking, and selecting “Web Search” from the menu that pops up. It defaults to Bing as the search engine, but this can be changed by editing the settings.json file. 

Windows Terminal 1.19 also adds support for unfocused acrylic, which is a visual setting that can be applied to windows that aren’t in focus. 

The developers at Microsoft also added a new UI element called the Suggestions UI, which provides suggestions to the user, ranging from a variety of topics, such as command history and saved commands. The Suggestions UI can use the sendInput action as a source, enabling developers to save their favorite commands so they don’t have to type them out every time. 

Another addition in Windows Terminal 1.19 is support for emojis in Command Prompts. 

Microsoft has also made a number of smaller usability improvements, such as displaying an indicator in the tab for closed or crashed applications, a new flag for appending to a command, support for Erase Color Mode, and more. 

More information is available in this blog post here. 

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According to the company, this Windows Community Toolkit v8.0 is a complete rework of the toolkit. Previously, there were two separate branches for the toolkit: WinUI 3 and WindowsAppSDK. These branches had different namespaces, package identities, and codebases. The rework brings everything into a single namespace, which enables Microsoft to target multiple platforms from one codebase, making development and maintainance much easier. 

As a result of the rework, there are some older features not migrated over. These include AdaptiveGridView, DataGrid (which is now its own project), DropShadowPanel, Expander (now part of WinUI), InAppNotification, MarkdownTextBlock, and more. A full list of removed features is available here. 

Despite the long list of removals, v8.0 also includes many new features. The Toolkit Gallery that displays samples and documentation has also been updated to feature a more modern design. The company also added new samples and reworked some of the existing ones to make them easier to understand. 

A new package called Sizers includes a control for making other controls resizable. For example, you could use it to create an expanded view of NavigationView or use Expander to make a pop-out drawer. 

There is another new control called Segmented that will allow you to provide users options in your application, such as setting filters or changing a view.

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The user experience has been improved so that it is easier to locate everything in one place. The company stated that these enhancements also work to build the foundation for Microsoft’s AI-powered experiences, such as Copilot for Microsoft Teams.

In an effort to bring users heightened speed, Microsoft has made a ground-up investment to overhaul the platform to provide speed and performance improvements for data, network, chat, and video architecture.

Enhancements have also been made to the core experience of Teams that are geared at simplifying the way customers stay on top of notifications, search for information, manage messages, and organize channels. 

Furthermore, Microsoft has improved the Teams authentication model, synchronization, and notification system to offer users a more consistent experience. 

According to the company, it will also use AI to improve collaboration by providing users with the information needed so they can be up to speed on everything that happened prior to joining a meeting or chat. Additionally, the next-gen AI experiences provide users with answers to questions in the flow of discussion.

To learn more about the new Teams, read the blog post. 

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The Windows Terminal preview is now at version 1.17 and Windows Terminal has been updated to version 1.16. 

As a reminder, new features in 1.16 included the introduction of themes to customize the look of the terminal, new default colors, and a new text rendering engine.

One of the new features being introduced in version 1.17 is the ability to customize the dropdown menu. Folders, separators, and profiles can now be added, and they can be arranged in any way. 

There is now a keyboard shortcut to restart a process or close its window after termination. To close the window, use Ctrl+D, and to relaunch it, use Enter. 

Users can also now utilize Mica as a background material for Windows 11 users. Mica incorporates your desktop wallpaper and theme to add another level of personalization to your terminal. 

The team also updated the Color Schemes page so that when you click on a color scheme it brings you to the edit scheme page. 

A number of updates have also been made to Virtual Terminal as well as usability and accessibility improvements. 

More information about this release can be found in Microsoft’s blog post about the release.

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With this, Flutter has been tailored specifically for Windows applications, combining a Dart framework and C++ engine. Additionally, the Flutter engine is hosted on an embedded layer that allows for communication between Windows and Flutter. 

Flutter coordinates with Windows to deal with things such as window resizing and DPI changes, as well as working with inputs such as keyboard and mouse, in addition to touch screen capabilities already built in.

For more details, read more.

Python in VS Code February 2022 release 

Microsoft revealed that the Python Extension for Visual Studio Code includes several new features, including: 

• Smart selection
• Folding support
• Improvements to the Python interpreters list
• Improvements when using Anaconda

With Smart selection via Pylance, selecting Python Code using the keyboard requires fewer key presses. This comes as a highly requested update, defining the users’ selection range by considering their own code structure and heuristics. 

Developers are also enabled to expand their code selection with Shift+Alt+Right Arrow and shrink it with Shift+Alt+Left Arrow. See here for more information. 

Apache weekly update

For the week ending on February 4, 2022, 303 Apache Committers altered 9,625,849 lines of code over 3,255 commits. The top five contributors of the week are Jean-Baptiste Onofré, Claus Ibsen, Sebastian Bazley, Guillaume Nodet, and Eric Milles.

There have also been several project updates, including the retirement of Apache Ambari and Apache Usergrid. This decision came from Apache committers and was due to general inactivity. 

In addition, users of Apache Superset up to and including 1.3.2 should upgrade to version 1.4.0 or higher as a password leak has been detected for authenticated users. This leak was found and reported by Cesar Santos. 

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With this release, the minimum supported version of Windows 10 for Windows Terminal 1.13+ is now 19041 (20H1). The new features coming to Windows Terminal Preview 1.13 are:

• Updated settings UI design 
• Auto-elevate profiles
• New rendering engine
• Customizable bell sound

The release also brings several other miscellaneous improvements and bug fixes. To learn more, visit here. 

Google Workspace Essentials now available as a no-cost solution

The team at Google recently rolled out a new version of Google Workspace that is aimed at helping users bring the apps commonly used in their personal lives, into their work lives. Google Workspace Essentials Starter Edition provides a no-cost solution for organizations looking to bring more collaboration and enhance teamwork into their business.

In order to use Google Workspace Essential Starter, sign up using your work email and invite teammates to collaborate using Google Docs, Slides, Sheets, Chat, Drive, and Meet. Users then gain access to new ways of working collaboratively.

For more information, see here. 

Skuid acquires InFlight

The team at Skuid, a toolkit creating human-centered digital experiences, announced that it will be acquiring InFlight Corporation. This combination aims to offer users a complete solution for enterprises seeking to optimize their people operations such as talent acquisition and talent management.

“This is a game-changer for the future of people operations applications. The combined capabilities of Skuid and InFlight present a much-needed solution for enterprises that want to design, create, and deliver impactful apps,” says Ryan Niemann, CEO of Skuid.

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That project has since been rebranded as Windows App SDK, but the core vision remains the same. 

Developers can use Windows App SDK to create apps that have a modern UI, access modern platform features like localization and power status, and are backwards compatible down to the Windows 10 October 2018 update (version 1809). All of this can be achieved without the need to rewrite your application from scratch.

To make use of the SDK, developers can use their current installer and add only what is needed on top while leaving the rest of the app as-is. It works with Win32, WinForms, and other Microsoft apps. 

Although it was initially intended to unify applications across different Windows 10 versions, the open source project has expanded with the introduction of Windows 11. Developers can use Windows App SDK to build apps for Windows 11 that are backwards compatible with the Windows 10 October 2018 update. 

“Developers who want to create desktop Windows apps must choose between several app platforms and frameworks. Although each platform provides many features and APIs that can be used by apps that are built using other platforms, some features and APIs can only be used by specific platforms. The Windows App SDK unifies access to Windows APIs for desktop Windows 11 and Windows 10 apps. No matter which app model you choose, you will have access to the same set of Windows APIs that are available in the Windows App SDK,” according to the project’s documentation page. 

More information can be found on the project’s GitHub page. 

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