Happy Patch Tuesday! As is routine, Microsoft has just released the monthly round of security updates for all shipping and supported versions of Windows today. On Windows 11 this month, the patch brings some tweaks for notifications, and on Windows 10, security tweaks. Here’s what you need to know.

If you’re running Windows 11, you’ll be seeing KB5012592 (OS Build 22000.613) in Windows update. Microsoft’s official changelog mentions that this build updates security for Windows, integral to OS functionality, as documented here. Yet, there’s also a video on the changelog page that mentions tweaks to notifications in Windows 11.

Per that video, it’s now possible to show up to four different toast notifications simultaneously, three high priority and one normal notification. There’s also a fix for OneDrive, where files might lose focus. The final new feature covers Widgets, where you now can find the proper settings option when searching in the settings for it. All of these features were in Windows 11’s March preview update.

On Windows 10 version 21H2, and version 21H1, meanwhile, you’ll be seeing KB5012599. This bumps the OS to builds 19042.1645, 19043.1645, and 19044.1645. Yet unlike on Windows 11, this just brings security patches. As always you should automatically see these updates in Windows Update as a download. If not, you can manually download it through the Microsoft Update catalog.

Microsoft has seemingly dodged the mainstream antitrust scrutiny that’s hounded similarly rooted tech companies such as Google, Amazon, and Facebook; but that could be coming to an end soon as the volume of customer complaints over a 2019 contract change increase.

According to a report from Bloomberg, current Microsoft customers are raising concerns in the way the company is handling licensing of its products to interoperate with competing platforms.

Back in 2019 Microsoft made a head scratching decision to overhaul the licensing of its famed Windows and Office platforms that raised the price across the board for customers, however it has now become apparent that the move was arguably a smoke screen to inject “discounts” for existing customers who continue to use Azure platform rather than rival ones.

Rather than simply raising the price for customers who choose to use Microsoft platforms alongside competitor services, which would likely be seen as a direct anticompetitive move, the company raised the price of all its products while offering those who unilaterally use its services steeper discounts as financial incentives to boost its cloud market share.

Unfortunately for Microsoft, some customers are beginning to connect the dots and are requesting European regulators investigate the matter.

“The excrement is about to hit the fan,” said Wes Miller, an analyst at Directions on Microsoft, a research firm that advises customers on Microsoft licensing. He said that using the company’s software on a competing cloud service is “significantly more expensive than it used to be, and more expensive than it costs you to do the same thing on Azure.”

Other stories conveyed to Bloomberg include:

A person familiar with the company said it started using AWS when it began rolling out mobile devices to employees. The company used its Amazon and Windows combination successfully for several years, until the changes in late 2019. The conflict came to a head more recently, when the company began renewing its contracts with Microsoft—to keep using Windows on virtual desktops via Amazon’s cloud, the customer is required to buy a license that was formerly included, adding millions of dollars to the total cost.

The company considers this a penalty, the person familiar said, because Azure customers get that additional license for free. The customer isn’t allowed to run Office software through a competing cloud at all without violating the terms of its license with Microsoft, the person said. The company spent months negotiating with Microsoft on the issue, eventually getting a reprieve of several years. After that expires, this customer will again be out of compliance.

Anecdotal cases alone may not be enough to warrant the ire of the dreaded antitrust microscope but given Microsoft’s past along with the totality of the market, the company could be on the hook for a “tying” antitrust violation.

As defined by the Federal Trade Commission:

For competitive purposes, a monopolist may use forced buying, or “tie-in” sales, to gain sales in other markets where it is not dominant and to make it more difficult for rivals in those markets to obtain sales. This may limit consumer choice for buyers wanting to purchase one (“tying”) product by forcing them to also buy a second (“tied”) product as well. Typically, the “tied” product may be a less desirable one that the buyer might not purchase unless required to do so, or may prefer to get from a different seller. If the seller offering the tied products has sufficient market power in the “tying” product, these arrangements can violate the antitrust laws.

According to customers and rivals such as Amazon and Google, Microsoft is not unaware of the request to address the issue as all parties have issued complaints directly.

Microsoft President and vice chair Brad Smith has acknowledged some of the concern and issued the following statement, “there definitely are some valid concerns, it’s very important for us to learn more and then make some changes.”

While Microsoft hasn’t officially made any changes to its 2019 licensing overhaul, the company has also acknowledged that rival platforms can in fact offer their own discounts to win over seemingly disgruntled and unsatisfied customers, an argument sure to be used if the company is hauled into court over the matter.

As customers and rival platforms await movement on their complaints from either Microsoft or regulators, competitors such as Amazon face their own scrutiny as the House Judiciary Committe follows up on their 2020 report targeting AWS titled Investigation of Competition in Digital Markets.

In the end, Microsoft, AWS, Google, IBM and the like will all come under further scrutiny as each jockey for customer acquisition and retention in a shrinking pool. At this point, antitrust violations may be less a matter of “if” and more a matter of “when” depending on how aggressive each platform provider becomes.

Earlier this week, we highlighted Microsoft’s new addition to Edge Canary, the option for PWAs to better handle and open external links. And now, its latest version comes with enhancements for managing extensions, as spotted by Neowin, and Redditor u/Leopeva64-2.

Once this feature reaches general availability, users will be able to turn on and turn off extensions easily. This will enhance security where users can easily turn off the extensions and prevent third-party applications from accessing their credentials.

To disable extensions from your browser, open the extension flyout then click on the ellipses in the upper-right corner and select Pause extensions on this site. Microsoft Edge will then notify you that the extensions have been disabled. However, if you wish to restore this setting then click on the Resume extensions button.

Moreover, Microsoft has also incorporated a new setting that will detect websites with sensitive information and automatically turn off the extensions. This setting is set to work when using banking and payment sites.

Currently, this setting is available to some Edge Insiders in the Canary channel as part of A/B testing. However, most users will have to wait till it is past the testing phase and see if it will make it to general availability.

Preview 3 of version 8 of the .NET Community Toolkit just dropped and it comes packed with a ton of goodies. For those unfamiliar with what this is, it a set of APIs and helpers to assist .NET developers with a large number common tasks regardless of the UI platform they chose to build with. Today we are going to dig into a couple of new features headed our way, let’s get to it.

Microsoft MVVM Toolkit

This new MVVM Toolkit version expands on the source generator functionality released in previous releases. These APIs are intended to significantly simplify the necessary boilerplate when dealing with MVVM, with help ranging from observable properties to commands and more. Here are some of the features.

Cancellation support for commands

The [ICommand] attribute now contains a new property that can be used to direct the source generator to generate a cancel command in addition to the original command. This cancel command can be used to stop an asynchronous command from running. Check out the example implementation below.

[ICommand(IncludeCancelCommand = true)]
private async Task DoWorkAsync(CancellationToken token)
{
    // Do some long running work with cancellation support
}

Revamped observable grouped collections

These APIs are especially handy for working with grouped items, and they now feature improvements to substantially simplify basic tasks such as adding an item in the correct location within a group. Starting with this release all the observable grouped collection types from the CommunityToolkit.Common moved to to CommunityToolkit.Mvvm. Sergio Pedri Software Engineer II at Microsoft shows us a sample of this in the GIF below.

This was just a glimpse at the changes coming our way with the latest Preview release of the Community Toolkit. As always be sure to watch out for breaking changes, as some are in fact included.

For more details on what we just discussed here plus more information on other improvements, please visit the original blog post here or check out the official Community Toolkit’s Github repository for a more comprehensive view of all new features and changes.

While it is highly unlikely that we will be seeing a “slim edition” of the Xbox Series X any time soon, it is being reported that Microsoft may be developing a smaller, more power-efficient chip for its ninth generation powerhouse console.

It should be noted that Microsoft is constantly developing revisions of such components, and information on this supposed chip revision for the Series X remains scant at this point. The source of the speculation comes from a new video from gaming journalist and insider Brad Sams, who is also Vice President and General Manager of Stardock Software. In the video Sams states (in around the 25 minute mark) that he is “very confident” that the Series X will see a revised chip in the not-too-distant future.

Such hardware revisions are commonplace, and indeed par for the course for most consoles. A smaller, more efficient chip would reduce production costs for Microsoft, as well as help in Microsoft’s Cloud Gaming data centers, so it really seems like a foregone conclusion that Microsoft would eventually do such a revision.

We just finished our review of the Lenovo Legion 5i Gaming Tower and walked away decently whelmed.  There was something left on the cutting room floor that could have made it top tier rig, but for $999.99 it offers a solid base for inexpensive upgrades in the future. As for a free rig, given away by us, it’s definitely worth the money and a great grab for those hard-to-find NVIDIA GPUs these days.

We’ve teamed up with Lenovo to give away the Best Buy configuration of the Legion 5i Tower, equipped with Desktop – Intel Core i5-11400 – 8GB Memory – NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 Super – 256GB SSD + 1TB HDD – Raven Black – limited to US and Canada residents only.

Winner

Rafflecopter will be used to track entries, and a winner will be randomly selected on April 22, 2022. Giveaway is limited to residents of US and Canada only!

To enter, please comment in the Rafflecopter widget which will direct you to the giveaway comment section. Tell us about your current gaming setup and what games you’re playing or looking forward to soon!

Contestants can enter a maximum of one comment that equals one entry. Rules are outlined in the Rafflecopter widget.

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• Comment on the giveaway post 1x entry
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The winner will be selected at random shortly after the contest has closed. We’ll publish details of the winner once we’ve made contact – so be on the lookout to find out if you’ve won! We will be contacting you via Twitter or the email you use to comment, make sure you’re paying attention on April 22nd!

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