NickPavlov

@pavandavuluri It is high time to come up with some innovative device! And, consider threading into mobile again.

Today we're announcing the new Surface Pro and Surface Laptop for Business, powered by Intel Core Ultra Series 3. The result of deep collaboration between hardware and software teams at every level. Proud of what this team has built 🚀. blogs.windows.com/devices/2026/0…

@levie Let's be honest. Software companies, with their demand for skills in specific frameworks, destroyed a lot of the demand for fundamental skills, bringing up a generation of developers who think knowing React is all they need. This must change.

Right now there’s a temporary mismatch between the jobs that used to be sought after in some fields and the new jobs that are becoming in demand in those fields. For instance, if you studied CS, for years the general direction of travel was often to join a tech company and build customer-facing software in some form. A significant portion of the CS pipeline from college to hire was built for this. When you realize that AI is going to make coding abundant, you realize everyone will need technical talent to implement agentic systems. This means the types of roles engineers should be thinking about radically expands. I was talking to a Fortune 500 pharma CEO a week ago that commented on how much more technical talent they need right now. The job may be different from what it was 5 years ago when thinking about tech, but the demand for the skills are still there. And this is what I’m hearing from every CIO and CEO across nearly every industry right now. We definitely need colleges to wake up to this; but we equally need companies think about how they craft pipelines into these jobs.

@levie We cannot just throw the ball over to colleges. Businesses must cooperate with colleges and restore the importance of theoretical and fundamental knowledge.

@WindowsLatest Well, that was to be expected when you kill your mobile platform and then neglect your customers platform (Windows) for years.

Former Microsoft executive says Microsoft missed the AI wave like the internet and mobile, as Copilot scales back in Windows 11 Microsoft’s AI strategy has a serious adoption problem, and a former Microsoft exec just said the quiet part out loud. Mat Velloso, who spent 12+ years at Microsoft and even served as Satya Nadella’s technical advisor, says Microsoft “missed the AI wave.” The numbers explain why this hits hard. Microsoft has pushed Copilot into Windows 11, Office, GitHub, and the taskbar. However, fewer than 3% of paying users actively use Copilot. Out of roughly 450 million Microsoft 365 users, only about 15 million are paid Copilot seats. The same issue exists with AI PCs. OEMs added NPUs because Microsoft pushed the category, but Windows still does not have enough truly useful NPU-first features for normal people. Microsoft is aware of the backlash, and Windows 11 is suddenly getting the fixes users wanted for years: movable taskbar, better Start controls, native UI work, driver quality improvements, and fewer pointless Copilot pushes.

@Erinthul_ The Witcher 3, I think Johnny.

"Remember it as if it were yesterday. Soon as I woke, I went to empty my bowels - my favorite part of the day. Defecating to the sunrise - downright glorious..." Do you know where this quote is from? 😄

@WindowsLatest Killing Live Tiles was the saddest mistake MS made in regard to Widgets. A native and perfectly working solution was replaced again with some web based misconception.

More details in our story: windowslatest.com/2026/05/14/mic…

Microsoft says it needs your feedback to fix Windows 11 UX, launches new research panel for Windows Insiders. The survey asks about the devices you use, what kind of work you do, your Insider channel, where you discuss Windows issues, and whether you’re open to future UX studies. This comes at an interesting time. Microsoft is already trying to clean up Windows 11 by modernizing old dialogs, moving more Control Panel features to Settings, refreshing Run, improving File Explorer, and reworking parts of the Start menu. Windows 11 still has a messy mix of modern and legacy UI, and users clearly miss the charm and consistency of older versions. It feels like Microsoft is finally admitting that Windows 11’s user experience needs first-hand feedback from real users.

#WinUI source code now includes the unit tests, so it is easier for us to verify our PRs doesn't break anything: #discussioncomment-16882250" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">github.com/microsoft/micr…

WinUI3 perf update: github.com/microsoft/micr…

@WindowsLatest Well, this has been around since ages. It is called priority boost. Windows has been using it in many cases, including when a thread (app) receives user input. I really don't understand the noise.

More details in our story, including hands-on with Low Latency profile mode in Windows 11: windowslatest.com/2026/05/11/mic…

Microsoft VP fires back at Windows 11's new speed trick critics: "Apple does this and you love it." Windows 11’s hidden Low Latency Profile is getting dragged online, but the criticism misses the point. Windows Latest has tested the Low Latency Profile, and it truly works. When you open the Start menu, a menu, or an app, Windows briefly boosts the CPU for 1–3 seconds so the task finishes faster. On budget PCs, that can make the whole OS feel much snappier. Some users called it a “band-aid,” but Microsoft's Scott Hanselman pushed back and explained that macOS and Linux already do similar things. Modern systems boost CPU speed for interactive tasks because responsiveness matters. "Let Windows cook," Microsoft's legendary dev Scott Hanselman argues in defense of Windows 11's upcoming feature. Of course, Windows 11 needs to be optimized at the code level, but the answer is not “don’t boost the CPU.” Microsoft needs to do the best of both worlds. That means it needs to optimize the code, reduce bloat, and use modern scheduling tricks to make Windows feel fast again.

@shanselman This overreaction puzzles me, too. Priority boost has been in Windows for many, many, many years. Including boosting the priority of the thread receiving the user input. This is just a fine tuning of the priority boost technique.

Todos los sistemas operativos modernos hacen esto, incluyendo macOS y Linux. No es “hacer trampa”; así es como los sistemas modernos hacen que las apps se sientan rápidas: suben temporalmente la velocidad del CPU y priorizan tareas interactivas para reducir la latencia

@Eirenarch Just looking at DirectWrite Api gives me terrible headaches. I can even phantom the complexity of the implementation.

I believe achieving this is half of the complexity of building a browser

@WindowsLatest Fine-tuning priority boost, nothing else.

More details in our tests: windowslatest.com/2026/05/08/i-t…

Microsoft's hidden Windows 11 trick makes apps launch 70% faster. I tested it on a low-end PC, and early results are promising. Right now, when you click Start, open File Explorer, launch Edge, or right-click for a context menu, and there’s often that tiny micro-stutter before anything happens. Microsoft is now testing a feature called Low Latency Profile. Once turned on, and you do a high-priority action, Windows 11 briefly pushes the CPU to max frequency for 1–3 seconds, finishes the task faster, then drops back down. In my testing on a constrained VM with just 2 cores and 4GB RAM, the difference was obvious. Edge, Outlook, Copilot, and the Start menu opened much faster. CPU usage spiked to around 96–97%, but only for a few seconds. For high-end PCs, the difference may be small. But for budget laptops and low-end Windows 11 machines, this could be a real game-changer.

@davidfowl Hope you are cooking native. ;-)

It took us a bit but we (Microsoft) are beginning to cook. More to come soon 🙏🏾

@lauriewired This is non-sense. Compilers rely on strict rules to generate code, all optimizations include. LLMs rely on "guess the next word from a large db of dubious code", sprinkled with randomness, and doomed to ultimately fail by the inherent hallucination.

There’s a famous Usenet story about a programmer (Mel) who refused higher level abstractions. It was the late 1950s, and even in that era, Mel was…well today we’d call him a boomer. Mel only wrote in raw hexadecimal. He didn’t approve of compilers, and refused to use optimizing assemblers. "You never know where it's going to put things”, he said. Everyone else in the company was moving on to FORTRAN, and they didn’t understand why Mel was so stubborn about using new tools. He *loved* self-modifying code. “If a program can’t rewrite its own code”, he asked, “what good is it?” Mel eventually left the company, and other engineers were tasked with understanding what was left. Mel’s hand-optimized routines always beat the assemblers; but some of it looked absolutely bizarre. One engineer took ~2 weeks to understand why there were loops with no exit condition…yet the program worked fine. I won’t spoil all the details, you should really read it, it’s short. But it’s a fantastic piece on “what defines a real programmer?”…which is becoming increasingly relevant in this vibe-coded era. I strive to understand computers as deeply as Mel! If we aren’t careful, we’re going to lose the “Mels” of this world to time. That’s part of why I go so deep in my youtube videos. I hope that younger viewers are genuinely fascinated by the inner workings of our machines, instead of handing everything off to higher abstractions.

@cherepets @davidfowl Embedding a WebView into a WinUI app doesn't make the app native.

@dotPavlov @davidfowl Notice the white line on the top? It's a bug present in all WinUI 3 apps. If it's using WebView2, it's likely only the photo canvas, while all of the frame is WinUI.

Native apps are BACK!

@JezCorden Well, the moron destroyed a lot with his focus on Azure and AI, neglecting developers and the OS, and the importance of native apps, and vision. Now, he's up to a challenge, because unless MS return to native apps, they will get nowhere.

"We're doing the work required to win back fans across Windows and Xbox": Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella says the company is making foundational changes to fix Windows 11 and Xbox. windowscentral.com/microsoft/were… "Satya Nadella has commented on recent announcements around Windows and Xbox that are working to rebuild trust and positive sentiment around its consumer offerings." They've got a mountain to climb.

@zacbowden Of course I miss it. It was ahead of its time, but working like charm. I had two Continuum docks, and used them for remote work. Mail, Browser, light Office and Remote Desktop... That gave me huge power to work remotely with just plugging my phone to the dock...

Ahead of its time.

@cherepets @davidfowl Its photo editor is not.

@dotPavlov @davidfowl Photos is WinUI

@dotMorten @shanselman I tried myself, but ended up to A> only, no dir command, and just a short C# file of 4K :-D

@dotPavlov @shanselman Just asked copilot to do it for me 🤣

The earliest DOS source code was found on printer paper in Tim Paterson's garage so we've open sourced it on 86-DOS 1.00’s 45th anniversary! This is next-level software archaeology for study, preservation, and plain ol’ curiosity. Go dig in and learn how it was recovered! #DOS #RetroComputing opensource.microsoft.com/blog/2026/04/2…

@dotMorten @shanselman Respect! How did you do this?!

@shanselman LOL I asked copilot to port it to C#. That didn't take it long: