Welcome to the first of several posts that describe some of the inner workings of the Windows Console. This post was written by Craig Loewen (our awesome 2017 summer intern), and Paul Campbell (SDE on Windows Console, Cmd, & Bash on Windows). Settings in the Windows Console Host can be a bit tricky to understand. This is mostly because the ...

As of Windows 10 Insider build >= 16215, you no longer have to enable Developer Mode (Settings -> Update & Security -> For Developers) in order to run Bash on Ubuntu on Windows! Why? This restriction was first put in place to safeguard non-technical users from inadvertently using a feature that was, at the time, very new and not yet widely ...

In case you've not seen it yet, Bash/WSL team members Yosef, Paul & Ben, along with Sean Larkin (WebPack) & Ken Wheeler (FormidableLabs) talk about what Bash/WSL is, what it's for, and why it's an essential tool to them! Be sure to watch, and comment below and/or hit us up on Twitter if you have questions! Yosef (@yosefdurr) Paul (@paul...

Will Linux distros run on Windows 10 S? Many people have asked "You just announced that Linux distro's are coming to the Windows Store - will they run on Windows 10 S?" The answer is No! Just because an "app" comes from the Windows Store does NOT automatically mean that it's safe & suitable for running in Windows 10 S. There are some apps th...

We're REALLY excited about this announcement and think many of you will be too ;) On May 11th 2017, during Microsoft's Build conference keynote, Terry Myerson (EVP for Windows & Devices Group) made several announcements about the Windows Subsystem for Linux: And at OSCON 2017 I delivered a talk on the architecture and history of Bash...

At the end the post announcing what's new in Bash/WSL in Win10 Creators Update, I stated: We continue to forge ahead with many planned improvements and exciting new features. Stay tuned for lots more exciting features coming in future releases of Windows 10: If you want to be among the first to access and experience improvements planned for t...

When Windows 10 Anniversary Update (AU) was shipped, the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) was still far from complete, and was known to have many incompatibilities, especially with popular developer tools like node.js, Java, etc. However, it was important to get this exciting new feature into the hands of real users so that we could learn from th...

I've recently received a couple of questions asking when Haskell support would be added to WSL, and was surprised since I thought Bash/WSL users were aware of the fact that Haskell has been working for the last few weeks, ever since #14986 in fact, but it appears that we'd not explicitly communicated the fact, so ... here we are! :) Haskell now...

I first learned about Visual C++ for Linux, which was released in March 2016, shortly before the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) was first announced. I was immediately blown away by how VERY cool this feature of Visual Studio is! What's insanely cool about this feature is that when the project is built, VS opens an SSH channel to a target Linux ...

[Update 2017-02-07] Note that both of the two issues noted below have been fixed in more recent Insider builds Windows Insider build #15002 started shipping to Windows Insider Fast Ring users today, January 9th 2017. As is often the case in software development, after many teams have been beavering-away on their features for several months, thing...