Great news for Windows Insiders enrolled to “Fast Ring“!! A new preview build of Windows 10 desktop, Build 10049 is now available and it brings “Project Spartan for the very first time” to Insiders. Apart from Project Spartan there are mostly fixes and small improvements but we will certainly delve deeper and bring the changes that are not easily visible.
With relatively smaller gap between Build 10041 and Build 10049 releases, Microsoft seems trying to stand true on its promise of faster builds. Anyways here is the official changelog including Spartan’s and known issues with Build 10049.
Build 10049 Changelog:
Spartan
- Cortana is built-in and ready to assist: Cortana in Project Spartan is a personal assistant that helps make Web browsing easier for you, with whatever you’re trying to get done. Cortana offers help at just the right moment, based on what she knows about the Web, about you and what you might be trying to do. She remains in the background but provides additional information when you need it, making browsing easier and more efficient. Cortana in Spartan will be available in the US versions of this build, and available more broadly later.
- Inking and sharing so you can capture and communicate your thoughts: Everyone uses the Web routinely to share questions, thoughts, info and comments with friends and colleagues. Now with new inking capabilities, Project Spartan enables you to write or type directly on the page, comment on what’s interesting or clip what you want – then easily share this “Web Note” via mail, or a social network. Researching and collecting information from the Web is just as easy, as you can save your notes directly to OneNote.
- Distraction-free reading with Reading List and Reading View: Keeping up with information overload on the Web is one of the challenges that we all have to manage. Project Spartan helps with a beautiful new Reading List to collect everything you want to read, including the ability to save any webpage or PDF for convenient access later, and an integrated, distraction-free Reading View that keeps you focused on the content.
- A new engine for the modern Web: Project Spartan’s new rendering engine is built around the idea that the Web “just works,” while being fast, more secure and more reliable. As we shared in our recent developer workshop, we made some changes to the rendering engine that you will see in this build.
Fixes
- We’ve fixed the issue from Build 10041 for when the Photos app on your PC crashes when you tap on the circular icon (your camera roll – thanks Rafael) at the top left to view the photo you just took.
- We’ve also fixed the issue from Build 10041 where you might end up in a state where windows open on your desktop are accidentally visible behind the Start Screen, Task View, Snap Assist, and when rearranging windows in Tablet Mode.
- You will no longer get stuck when you manually lock your PC (Windows Key + L) during the initial out-of-box experience.
Known Issues & Workaround:
- After logging in, you may see a blue screen instead of your desktop. To work around this issue, lock your PC (with the hardware button or by pressing the Windows Key + L) and try logging in again. You can also try Ctrl + Shift + Esc to open Task Manager.
- Indexing of new email in Outlook is not working, so search results will be limited to when the last index was built.
- If you have Virtual Machines hosted in Hyper-V on your PC running Windows 10, you will want to move to the Slow ring and wait for the next build as this build breaks the ability to run VMs.
- There are 2 issues using Visual Studio 2015 preview on this build:
- The emulators will not boot and you won’t be able to deploy a Windows Universal app to the Mobile emulator.
- The XAML designer in VS and Blend will crash when opened.
- If you are a developer using these tools today to develop Windows Universal apps and need this functionality to work – we recommend switching to the Slow ring until we release a patch to fix these issues.
