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The era of hiring a .NET outsourcing partner has shifted from a checklist of language skills to a high-stakes evaluation of platform maturity, cloud-native architecture, AI-enabled workflows, and sector-specific compliance know‑how — and choosing the wrong vendor in 2026 can cost months of momentum, regulatory risk, and billions in unleveraged product value. Background: why 2026 is a turning point for .NET outsourcing The release cadence and capabilities of the .NET platform since 2023 have...

Microsoft’s Copilot push entered a new, more automated phase this month as the company confirmed a staged rollout of PowerPoint Agent Mode, a feature that can autonomously build presentations by pulling content from SharePoint, OneDrive, email, and Teams conversations—part of a wider wave of Copilot expansions due between February and June 2026 that deepen tenant grounding, add agentic multi-file workflows, and extend Copilot into government and in‑app scenarios...

Anthropic’s Cowork — the company’s agentic desktop tool that turns Claude into an autonomous, folder-scoped coworker — is now available on Windows, moving from a macOS research preview into the broader desktop ecosystem and bringing what Anthropic calls “full feature parity” to roughly 70% of the PC market as of its February 10, 2026 Windows launch. Background / Overview Cowork started life as an experiment in making Anthropic’s Claude Code capabilities accessible to non-developers. Rather...

Windows 11’s sleep problem that left laptops dead and dangerously warm overnight has finally been given a practical guardrail: starting with Windows 11, version 24H2, Modern Standby now detects abnormal battery drain and suppresses most wake sources so a sleeping device will only wake for explicit user actions such as opening the lid or pressing the power button. ([learn.microsoft.coosoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/design/device-experiences/modern-standby-wake-sources) Background / Overview...

Customization is no longer a niche pastime for a handful of power users — it’s a practical way to shape Windows into a faster, clearer, and more productive workspace. The Habr piece you provided sketches a pragmatic toolbox of utilities — Microsoft PowerToys, WinAero Tweaker, ExplorerPatcher, Rainmeter, TranslucentTB, and EarTrumpet — and warns correctly about the trade-offs of modifying system files and registry keys without a reliable backup. That compact guide is a good starting point...

Windows 11 quietly packs productivity and accessibility tools that feel like paid add‑ons — if you know where to look. From a time‑saving clipboard that remembers 25 items to system‑wide live captions and a proximity‑based lock that secures your session when you walk away, many of these features are turned off by default or tucked behind a keyboard shortcut. Enable a handful of them and your daily workflow will feel faster, safer, and less cluttered — without installing anything extra...

Microsoft has quietly given the Microsoft Store a power-user face-lift: a native command-line interface (Store CLI) that lets you browse, install, and update Store apps directly from a terminal without firing up the graphical Store app. Released in February 2026, the Store CLI is aimed at developers, administrators, and command-line enthusiasts who want scriptable, repeatable management of Store-based apps — and it arrives at a moment when Microsoft is pushing to make the Store both more...

Customization is the secret handshake of power users: with a handful of trusted utilities you can reshape Windows into a faster, cleaner, and more productive workspace — but only if you respect the risks. This feature examines six widely used tools — Microsoft PowerToys, WinAero Tweaker, ExplorerPatcher, Rainmeter, TranslucentTB, and EarTrumpet — explains what they do, shows how to use them safely, and evaluates their trade-offs so you can decide which belong in your toolkit. Background...

Microsoft appears to be preparing a much‑requested course correction for Windows 11: internal planning documents and reporting indicate the company is working to return two long‑missing pieces of functionality — the ability to move the taskbar to the top or sides of the screen and the ability to change the taskbar’s size — as part of a broader 2026 push to address the OS’s most persistent “pain points.” Background: why the taskbar fight matters again The Windows taskbar is one of the oldest...

Microsoft's February 10, 2026 Patch Tuesday closed a surprising and high‑severity hole in the modern Windows Notepad app: a command‑injection style flaw in Notepad's Markdown link handling (CVE‑2026‑20841) that could let a deceptively simple Markdown file become an execution trigger when a user clicked a link. The bug, credited to researchers Cristian Papa, Alasdair Gorniak, and Chen, affected Store‑distributed Notepad builds prior to 11.2510 and carried a CVSS v3.1 base score of 8.8 — a...

Custom platforms were supposed to be a competitive advantage—build exactly what you need, control every detail, own your technology destiny—but for many brands the promise quietly calcified into a tax: security patches, infrastructure bills, brittle integrations, and a backlog that never seems to shrink. The story that once began as "we’ll out-innovate the market" often ends with teams asking, week after week, "Can we keep this running?" rather than "What should we build next?" Background...

The market’s recent pullback has a simple demand: show the receipts. Investors no longer reward mere promise; they reward the companies that can turn AI spending into repeatable revenue and improving margins. The Korea IT Times piece that sparked this conversation neatly captured that shift—arguing the rotation into Microsoft and Google reflects their ability to monetize AI across both infrastructure and applications. rview AI is no longer a product-area bet reserved for research labs. It...

Microsoft has quietly started refreshing the Secure Boot certificate chain that underpins Windows platform security to prevent a looming trust break when Microsoft‑issued Secure Boot certificates first issued around 2011 begin to expire in mid‑2026. Background UEFI Secure Boot is the firmware‑level trust gate that runs before the operating system and verifies the authenticity of early boot code — bootloaders, shim binaries, option ROMs and other EFI applications. Its enforcement relies on a...

Windows can feel deceptively simple until the day you need to do something a little less ordinary — and that’s when a handful of built‑in and first‑party tools turn the OS from a consumer toy into a professional workstation. The five utilities highlighted in the recent How‑To Geek piece — PowerToys, Windows Terminal, Task Scheduler, Event Viewer, and Disk Management — are not flashy, but together they unlock automation, observability, and low‑level control that every serious Windows user...

Win11Debloat is a tidy, auditable PowerShell script that strips the clutter Microsoft layers on top of Windows 10 and Windows 11 — removing trial apps, silencing targeted suggestions, and turning off telemetry — while giving you granular control and built-in rollback options so you’re not left guessing what changed. //github.com/Raphire/Win11Debloat) Background Windows has become a platform not just for applications, but for an ecosystem of promoted content, telemetry, and services that run...

Zero‑click search is no longer an edge case — it’s the operating assumption for discovery in 2026, and that rewrites what “visibility” means for enterprises. Recent industry tracking shows that roughly six in ten U.S. Google queries now end without a click, shifting authority from ranking positions to what AI agents say and whom they cite. The Muddy River News roundup of the “10 Best Tools to Track AI Search & GEO Visibility for Enterprises (2026)” captures this transition and names...

Microsoft's abrupt deprecation of the Polyglot Notebooks extension for Visual Studio Code — announced on February 11, 2026 and set to take effect on March 27, 2026 — has sent a shockwave through the .NET, data‑analysis, and SQL communities. The maintainers declared that the extension will be marked as deprecated, that bug fixes and support will cease immediately, and that new features will no longer be added; users were advised to migrate notebooks or uninstall the extension. (github.com)...

Microsoft’s reported plan to restore a movable Taskbar to Windows 11 is the single most important usability signal we’ve seen from the Windows team in years — but it’s also the kind of change that will test Microsoft’s engineering trade-offs, third‑party ecosystem, and enterprise update practices in equal measure. According to an exclusive report surfaced this week, Microsoft is working to let users reposition the Taskbar to the left, right, or top of the screen and to resize it — work that...

Windows Search doesn't have to be the slow, noisy mess most people complain about; with five targeted, low-risk tweaks you can dramatically improve speed, relevance, and usefulness without swapping in a third‑party launcher or altering your daily workflow. Background Windows Search has evolved into a hybrid system that mixes a local indexer, Advanced Query Syntax (AQS) filters, and online features (Bing suggestions, search highlights, and AI experiments on supported hardware). Out of the...

Microsoft’s Exchange Online team is deprecating the long-standing -Credential parameter in Exchange Online PowerShell — a change that administrators must treat as urgent rather than optional. The company’s guidance (and the wider MFA/ROPC narrative) makes clear that the legacy Resource Owner Password Credentials (ROPC) style of authentication cannot meet modern Multi‑Factor Authentication (MFA) and Conditional Access requirements; as a result, the Exchange Online PowerShell modules released...