Today is the first day of Microsoft"s Build 2019 developer conference, which means that there are lots of developer-related news items. The company announced Windows Terminal, a new app for users of the command line.
Terminal will let you use emoji-rich fonts and GPU-accelerated text rendering. It will also offer a tabbed interface, something that PM Rich Turner teased a couple of weeks ago. Microsoft promises that Windows Terminal will elevate the command line experience for users of PowerShell, Cmd, WSL, and everything else.
Microsoft is also announcing Windows Subsystem for Linux 2, its first major update. Promising to bring "technology built for Microsoft Azure" to the desktop on Windows 10, it aims to address the top feedback. This update should provide up to double the speed for operations that are heavy on the file system, and it now supports Linux Docker containers.
Both Windows Terminal and WSL 2 are coming to Insiders in June.
Another thing Microsoft talked about is React Native on Windows. If you"re a developer and you"re interested in that, the project is being developed on GitHub and you can use it now, although it"s still in preview.
There"s a new unified app registrations experience, as part of improvements to the Microsoft identity platform. The company talked about Microsoft Authentication Libraries for .NET, letting developers use new security features.
Windows UI Library 2.2 will be released this summer, and it has a new control for simplifying using 3D models. XAML Islands is coming this month, which is a UWP control composed inside of another UI framework. Finally, Microsoft announced that the developer preview for MSIX Core, which allows you to install MSIX packages on versions of Windows older than Windows 10, is now available.