Microsoft has rolled out a maintenance update for its PowerToys suite of tools, bumping it up to version 0.29. This release is entirely focused on performance improvements and bug fixes. As for the improvements made in this release, there are plenty of bug fixes for the PowerToys Run, FancyZones, and Color Picker tools.
why hello 0.29.0 of #powerToys. Happy soon to be new year to you too. ???????? https://t.co/7SoJb9Yavr
— Clint Rutkas (@ClintRutkas) December 29, 2020
Microsoft also notes that version 0.29 lays the foundation for some major additions and changes that are in the pipeline for 2021. Furthermore, the company plans to ship new features, including plug-ins for the PowerToys Run utility in future releases.
“Due to the short dev cycle due to the holidays this month, larger work items will show up next release such as FZ editor improvements and three new plug-ins for PowerToys Run,” said Clint Rutkas, Program manager lead on PowerToys.
Here’s the full list of improvements and fixes in PowerToys version 0.29:
General
- Bug report tool and improved logging.
- Various localization improvements.
- CodeQL added. Triggered via a cron timer twice a day.
- “How to use” docs moved to https://docs.microsoft.com/windows/powertoys/
- This will allow the community to do direct PRs against those documents
ARM64 Progress
- .NET Core upgrade for code bases the PowerToys team controls is complete. We still have two external dependencies that are .NET Framework that need to be updated.
Color Picker
- General bug fixes
- Added ability to provide the name of the color at parity with Office and WinUI Color Picker.
FancyZones
- Allows to use Windows Snap on desktops that don’t have a layout applied and for apps that are in the excluded list.
- Bug fixes
PowerToys Run
- Improved performance
- PT Run now supports accented characters.
Installer
- Option to extract the MSI from the .exe for enterprise scenarios and more options to do unattended installations.
- Removed toast notifications during installation.
For those that were waiting for the Video Conference Mute utility, it’s still available in the experimental release. The team plans to release an updated experimental release early in 2021. In the meantime, you can download the latest version of PowerToys from the GitHub releases page.
