This post has been republished via RSS; it originally appeared at: Windows Blog.
Back at Build ‘23 in May, we announced a host of new experiences with a renewed focus on developer productivity and performance. We are now pleased to share with you that features like Dev Home, Dev Drive, WinGet and improvements to Taskbar, File Explorer and many more will start to become generally available with the latest Windows 11 update. We also have exciting news to share about the developer tools you already know and love: Windows Subsystem for Linux and Windows Terminal. At Build in May ’23, we announced a new home for developers on Windows – Dev Home. With the latest Windows 11 update, Dev Home is now available as part of the OS, making developer features a key component of Windows 11. Today we are excited to announce a new PC setup experience for developers.A new PC setup experience for developers on Windows 11
For the first time in Windows, you will be able to identify as a developer during your initial PC setup and Windows will customize your install experience catering to your workloads. To do this, select the "Development" intent on the "Let's customize your experience" page during setup. Once you set up your PC with “Development” intent it is easier to get all the benefits of Dev Home.
Dev Home: Your productivity companion
Dev Home is a new experience for developers in Windows 11 that helps you get back in the zone and streamlines your workflows, boosting your productivity. Dev Home assists you in setting up your dev environment by downloading apps, packages, or repositories, and lets you connect to your developer accounts and tools (such as GitHub). It also helps you create a Dev Drive for performant storage - all in one place. Dev Home also provides a customizable dashboard to help you monitor both your system and dev projects. We are releasing Dev Home v0.5 alongside the latest Windows 11 update to provide even more functionality like managing your extensions. We are adding a new extensions page on Dev Home, available now, that helps you discover and manage your Dev Home extensions, giving you the control to enhance and personalize your experience. With this addition, the Dev Home GitHub Extension will no longer be automatically installed. For more information see Dev Home for Windows Developers | Microsoft Learn.Unattended and reliable dev machine setup: Reducing set up time from days to hours
At Build we introduced WinGet Configuration, a fast and reliable mechanism to help developers get ready to code in just a few clicks. WinGet Configuration is now stable and no longer requires enabling experimental features. To help you get started we have several samples that you can try, and several GitHub repos now include configuration files to help you quickly install the tools to build the source code. For example: vscode/.configurations/configuration.dsc.yaml at main · microsoft/vscode (github.com) PowerToys/.configurations/configuration.dsc.yaml at main · microsoft/PowerToys (github.com)

Dev Drive: A new storage volume tailor-made for developers: supercharged for performance and security
At Build we introduced Dev Drive – a new type of storage volume, tailor-made for developers, with a file system that delivers both performance and security. Starting today, Dev Drive will be available for all developers on Windows with the latest Windows 11 update. Dev Drive is based on the Resilient File System (ReFS), which, combined with a new performance mode capability in Microsoft Defender for Antivirus, offers up to 30% file system improvement in build times for file I/O scenarios. To reap the benefits of Dev Drive, we recommend moving your package caches and repositories to Dev Drive(s). Learn more. In addition, to quickly view the status of your Dev Drive volumes, the ‘For Developers settings page’ now has a new Dev Drive section. The section also provides deep links to Disk & Volume settings to create a Dev Drive and launch the Windows Security app to control antivirus behavior.Performance mode for Microsoft Defender
Microsoft Defender Antivirus has released performance mode that provides asynchronous scanning on Dev Drive volumes. Behavior can be controlled via the new improved UI for Dev Drive in the Microsoft Security app under “Virus & threat protection”. If you have multiple Dev Drives, you can now quickly identify which one is in “Performance mode”.

Reducing toil and unlocking the fun and joy of developing on Windows with new improvements
The team has listened closely to what is top of mind for you, including improvements to the Taskbar that we announced at Build back in May. Starting today, all these improvements will become available in the stable version with the latest Windows 11 update.- You can now quickly identify and access any instance of each app housed in the taskbar with just one click. All instances of the app are ungrouped with labels on the taskbar.
- You can now hide your Time and Date with a setting on the taskbar.
- You can quickly and easily shut down applications with a simple right-click on the app directly from the taskbar without opening the Task Manager. This setting can be enabled within the Developer settings page to then have “End task” appear within the context menu when you right-click on the icon within taskbar.
- For Developers settings page has moved from “Privacy & Security” to System. This provides a quick and easily discoverable entry point to developer settings.
- You can now get improved performance of archive functionality during compression on Windows. We have added native support for additional archive formats, including tar, 7-zip, rar, gz and many others using the libarchive open-source project.
File Explorer is getting even better
We have introduced new functionality and collection control in WinUI3. ItemsView collection control offers LinedFlowLayout and Island functionality provides an easy way to adopt WinUI3 look and feel in any part of your app without having to change your entire application. File Explorer now runs on WinUI3 and has introduced several new features like Gallery powered by ItemsView and Island functionality, making it easy to access your photo collection. You can also now bring these new WinUI3 capabilities to your apps and offer a rich user experience to your customers. In addition, we have also added multi-threading capabilities to File Explorer to greatly improve the performance of copy, move, recycle, and delete actions. Large operations should see significant improvements in the calculating phase as well as the actual file operation. As noted in our May 2023 blog, these changes show over 40% improvements in bulk delete operations, giving time back to developers.Tools you know and love are getting even better and smarter
New and exciting – Suggestions UI, Broadcast Input and Web Search features are coming to Windows Terminal 1.19 Preview
With the Windows Terminal 1.19 Preview we are introducing several new features such as the Suggestions UI, Broadcast Input, and Web Search. The Suggestions UI is a new UI element in Windows Terminal that provides text suggestions to the user. These suggestions can come from recently run commands, saved commands, and more.

