Developer Experience on Windows: Microsoft Build 2026

Key Takeaways

Our team has been working hard to make Windows a great place for development. And today I'm going to show you some major improvements and the lighters you can try out today. So what we have here is the default experience on the Surface RTX Spark Dev Box. Right away it feels calm. There's no news feed, no widgets popping up, no notifications, and of course we're in dark mode. I'm immediately ready to start development. Well, there's one thing I'd like to change. I'd like to put my taskbar on the left. So let me jump into my taskbar settings using the new run, which is built leveraging the architecture of PowerToys command palette. No, no, no. I want it all the way on the left. There we go. After popular demand, we're excited to announce that vertical taskbar is now available in Windows Insider builds. The new Surface RTX Spark also has a bunch of key dev tools already installed like Python, Node, and many more of your favorites. All of the developer goodness all in one file. And if you want to get the same experience today on your device, we're making this file available to everyone right now. We have a public repo set up with the configuration file and instructions for how to apply it using winget configure, which will make the adjustments to Windows and install all the tools. Now one cool thing that I have running here is PowerToys' new utility called Grab and Move, which lets you hold Alt and move the window around from anywhere. Another tip is that you can enable end task, which lets you end the process without having to open task manager. So let me jump into my dev drive. Dev drives run on REFS with Defender running in async and are optimized for performance when it comes to development scenarios. Also, File Explorer is Git aware. We got stuff like last change author name, last change message, the status of each file, plus my favorite is that the branch name is on the bottom left. So, now let's get started building and open our terminal. This is an experimental experience called intelligent terminal that makes working with agents even more seamless. When you first install intelligent terminal, you're greeted with the option to pick your favorite agent. I'm going to use GitHub Copilot for today, but you can use whichever agent speaks to you. Now, here in intelligent terminal, I have a regular terminal pane at the top and an agent that's listening on the bottom, and I can work between them while the agent helps along the way. So, for example, here's an error being generated. My agent pane is able to detect it and provide a fix, which is great when I don't remember the syntax, especially for something like regex. So, I'm going to work on Open Claw, and I've already built it using WSL container. WSL container is a native container experience on Windows, plus it can leverage the GPU, which is perfect for the Surface RTX Spark. It can also reference your existing container files, just like the one in the Open Claw project. So, here's one of the files open in Microsoft Edit, which ships in Windows by default and just got syntax highlighting in its latest version. And then, you can also just see your containers running with a simple container images command. And since we're on the topic of WSL, we're providing a WSL profile that's designed to feel comfortable for those of you who use tools like Starship, ZSH, and Homebrew. So, it comes pre-configured with all of your favorite utilities, and it's available in the repo that I showed earlier, and it also includes one of my favorites, Btop. So, the Surface RTX Spark is designed for developer-heavy workloads, including serving large local models for coding. I've already done some development with a 120 billion parameter model that most machines can't even load. So, here's a quick view of my usage, and we can see how many tokens I've used locally. So, we're looking at about 3.4 million tokens leveraged on the device itself. Now, we can kick off multiple sub-agents using Fleet. And just so we don't have to watch me type, I'm going to use Copilot's voice feature, which is also leveraging its own local model. So, I'll just hold spacebar and tell it what I want it to do. Find any console.writeline or debug.writeline calls in the tray and node projects and convert them to the standard logger used elsewhere in the code base. There we go. Now, the main agent will delegate sub-agent tasks of appropriate complexity to the local model, utilizing my GPU and making it more cost-efficient. Now, as developers, while we're debugging, we're often looking through log files to diagnose any issues. Sometimes finding the location of the log files is a challenge. I'd love to be able to just type something like grep log and find them all. Oh, uh sweet. So, on top of already adding curl, tar, and sudo to Windows, now we're adding over 75 command line utilities like env, head, tail, and touch for those of us who love to live in the terminal. So, I found all my log files, but now having to parse them is the second challenge. Well, I've actually had Ion instruct practically performing analyses on my log files this whole time. Now, I can quickly diagnose anything that's gone wrong in my development. Plus, I don't have to worry about token usage because it's all local. We can even take a look at our machine's resources. The models are loaded, and you can see 90 gigs of RAM being utilized by the GPU, truly showcasing the full power of the Surface RTX Spark. We were able to use three local models simultaneously, unmetered, while going up our our regular dev flow without a hitch. That's huge. >> [applause] >> So, I know you're going to love what the team's been working on. We hope it gives you a glimpse of what's possible on Windows today and where we're headed next.