During Build 2016, Microsoft announced the Anniversary Update for Windows 10 along with several new attractive features. Now that the preview update (14316) has been released on the Insider fast track additional tools are making their way out to the public we’re can get a look at some of these new features.
Most important to many of our readers may have been the inclusion of native bash in Windows, which we have now had a few days to get a better look at and help provide some insight.
Most recently was the release of Project Centennial, a project that helps developers easily convert desktop installation packages (usually with a .msi extension) to the Universal Windows Platform. The applications must be able to run on a Windows desktop environment currently (such as Win32, .NET) and will be side-loaded initially, with the hopes that the developer will submit the application to the Windows Store. Obviously Windows continues to try and get developers to embrace its own marketplace over independent installation, but this hasn’t always gone over quite well. There are benefits to this approach, however, as it does tie the installation to a Microsoft account and can then be checked against for potential piracy (as found in the release of Quantum Break this week.) You can find out more about this project here.
Also to many people’s hopes was the ability to download and install Bash support on Windows 10. As noted in the blog and Build 2016 discussion this will allow many of the Ubuntu Bash functions that we have come to use and appreciate. But if you’re thinking of being able to set this up as a true Android build environment, I will save you the trouble and tell you it’s not possible at the moment. Several necessary packages (such as OpenJDK 7) would not properly install and various network features were also not working properly when I tested this on Tuesday. I’m particularly concerned about it starting as root as well, but Windows added a blog entry on MSDN that future builds will use a traditional user and sudo versus the current root user.
Bash is based on Ubuntu 14.04LTS currently but is expected to be updated to 16.04LTS once it has been released. Hopefully they also improve the performance as it’s much less responsive and slower than running this in my dual-boot environment.
Are there any other Build 2016 projects that you’re looking forward to? Have you tried either Bash or Project Centennial and would like to share your findings with our readers? Sound off below in the comments and let’s continue the discussion!
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