Developers and IT Pros get new tools in Windows 10 Insider build 17063

The freshly-released Windows 10 Insider build 17063 introduced many cool features for consumers today. Microsoft also brought some goodies for developers and IT Pros such as the Windows Command line Toolchain now including command line tools bsdtar and curl. Moreover, after listening to feedback from IT Pros, Microsoft is introducing new features in Delivery Optimization to reduce the bandwidth consumption on enterprise networks. You can read all the details from the blog post below:

New tools available to developers on Windows

Windows Command line Toolchain includes bsdtar (tar) and curl.

bsdtar and curl two popular command line tools from the Unix shell, are now available in Windows and Windows Server.  bsdtar provides handy extraction/creation of compressed files and curl offers data transfer capabilities so you can download files from a remote location.  Read this blog to learn more about the addition of these two new tools and see how they’re shaping the developer experience on Windows.

Unix style sockets (AF_UNIX) are available on Windows

AF_UNIX is an address family which has enabled inter-process communication on Unix for countless years. The windows equivalent is named pipes, which offers similar facilities. Based on user feedback, we heard that you’d like an easier path when porting tools relying on AF_UNIX to Windows. As a result, two Win32 processes can now use the AF_UNIX address family over Winsock API to communicate with each other.  Read this blog for more details.

New features for IT Pros in Delivery Optimization

We’ve added multiple policies in this release (both Group Policies and MDM Policies) that provide Admins with means to throttle bandwidth at certain times of day (for both foreground and background traffic), restrict peer selection to the same subnet, automatically join devices into peer groups by using a DHCP server’s User option or the connection’s DNS suffix as well as the ability to increase the usage of peers by delaying the use of the HTTP source.

To view the list of new configs, open the GP Editor and checkout the new policies under Administrative Templates > Windows Components > Delivery Optimization:

These features were added based on feedback from IT Pros who rely on Delivery Optimization to reduce the bandwidth consumption on their network. The throttling policies can be useful to you if you are looking to throttle Internet bandwidth during critical business hours while allowing update traffic to flow faster at other times. The new peer selection policies address feedback we’ve received from customers who are using AAD and Modern Management (Intune, WUfB) and needed more options to automatically group peers in each site they manage.

In other developer-related news, Microsoft has also released today the Windows 10 SDK Preview build 17061, which developers can now use in conjunction with the Windows 10 Insider build 17063. That’s a lot of Insider news to digest today, but it’s been nearly a month since we last saw a new Insider build. Microsoft certainly took its time to deliver but it didn’t disappoint with a massive list of changes.