This past week brought a slew of news from Microsoft, ranging from cloud gaming via Game Pass Ultimate to new Insider builds and even a new acquisition. Be sure to catch up via our overview.
From cloud gaming to TikTok acquisitions and even Surface renders, it’s been a rather eventful week as it relates to the Redmond giant. You can find info about that, as well as much more below, in your Microsoft digest for the week of August 1 – 7. To nobody’s surprise, some Windows-related news surfaced in the past seven days, starting with the pair of Insider builds for both the consumer and Server sides. For consumers, Windows 10 build 20185 of the ever-nebulous vNext branch appeared, carrying improved DNS configuration in Settings, as well as new ADMX files (administrative templates). The latter, totalling 56, contain 647 new policies which can be configured via an Intune custom profile, with Intune UX planned to be available later in 2020. Fixes were of course present, listed among which is the moving of the 3D Viewer app into the Windows Accessories folder. Known issues like certain Store games failing to launch if they use Easy Anti-Cheat, or opening of a WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux) 1 distribution resulting in an error (among others) are still being worked on. The identically numbered Server build made its way to testers as well, lacking a changelog, as usual. The SDK, ADK, and WDK carrying build number 20180 (so slightly behind) were released at the same time. In case you don’t really want to bother with all of the activity surrounding Insider testing, but the new Start menu design (coming in 20H2) has caught your eye, there’s a solution. You need to modify the registry, as detailed here, but upon restarting you will get the new theme-aware design for Start. It must be said that while we have not noticed any issues, modifying the Registry is something you should do at your own risk. Speaking of modifications, Microsoft decided to modify the structure of the Azure team a tad. In simple terms, former Surface head Panos Panay was promoted earlier this year to lead both hardware and the Windows Experience group, creating the Windows and Devices division. As part of this latest reorg re-org, employees from the Core OS and Intelligent Edge (COSINE) team will be moved to the Windows team (also under Panay), helping to “create more of an end-to-end servicing and shipping experience”. The parts of the COSINE team relating to engineering (Server, Linux) and Windows Core will however remain under Azure EVP Jason Zander. There’s now also a Windows, Developers, and Experiences (WDX) Engineering team led by CVP Jeff Johnson, while CVP Michael Fortin will be joining Windows and Devices (Panay’s group) to lead a new team managing COSINE services and fundamentals.
