 Welcome to the Windows Server Engineering Summit, my name is Brent Forman, I'm a product manager on the Windows Server team, I'm your host for this session. And later I'll be handing it off to Yasha Khar, who's also a product manager on the Windows Server team, we work closely on this. And we're excited to talk about modernizing the Windows Server desktop. Okay, so modernizing the Windows Server desktop, we wanted to build a more capable Windows Server desktop, but with a familiar feel. And let me talk about why we wanted to do this. We want to do this for two main reasons. The main reason is really that customers have been asking for this for a long time. There are many features on the client on Windows 11, and Windows 10 before it, that Windows Server customers recognize are not on Windows Server and would like to have them there. They've been asking what's our plan with several of these features. So that's the main reason. But we have a second reason as well. And that reason is something that we've observed over decades with Windows Server, where there's a real career progression with IT pros. Somebody who's tomorrow's IT pro yesterday was somebody, maybe a kid at home with their laptop or on their game machine, connecting with friends and family or playing games or work or school on their Windows device. And what we've recognized is that over time, they actually move on to maybe a career in tech, and then they're familiar with Windows. So they can do things on day one. And sometimes they get into IT support that way. They can do many things. There's many things, but like leading to Windows Server would be more of an IT pro path. Sometimes it's a coding path as well, and sometimes it's a mix. But what we've noticed is that person may start in a tech shop somewhere sort of at the ground floor helping people with what they know about Windows. So some small company is moving forward and their employees are productive. Well, what they can actually do is make a career out of it. They can move on to from a desk side support role or a call center role. They can move on to a tier two or tier three support, and then maybe even a data center support or global operations role or working in the cloud and supporting clouds themselves. And clearly Windows Server is central to that. So what we wanted to do again is make a more capable Windows Server desktop, but with a familiar feel. So with that, I'm going to move on to what demos we have for you today. So I'm going to start with talking about some desktop basics, some things that are a little unique to Windows Server, but really some things you're going to be familiar with on the Windows 11 side as well. But I wanted to point them out. And then we're going to talk about, I'm going to have a demo for a single sign-on for Microsoft apps. So this is something we're very excited about. You can actually in settings now add a Microsoft account or a work or school account, and that will be a single sign-on for Microsoft apps on the operating system. And then feedback hub. You may have heard. We have feedback hub now working on Windows Server builds. We're very excited about this. We understand it's a little self-serving, but it's still very exciting and it should make things easier. We should be able to get feedback categorized natively in Windows Server because the app is the same app that you have on Windows 11, but it's on Windows Server now. So that will actually help us categorize the data. Like when you submit it, it collects all the logs and all the diagnostic data necessary for an issue. When you submit an issue, it comes to us and we can more quickly see those issues, have all the information we need and action on them more quickly and more definitively and provide better software for you. This is sort of a nice segue into flighting. This is flighting for those that don't know. If you're an insider, you can actually opt in for flighting and it will automatically, just like on Windows 11, you can actually get new builds of Windows Server sent to your device. You see it. You recognize that you want that new build and then you can install it and it'll go through the whole installation flow and upgrade your device to the latest preview build of Windows Server. Especially with a UX, that's super easy to use. And then Wi-Fi. This is the point where I'll hand it off to Yash. And Yash will talk about Wi-Fi and then Bluetooth as well. So Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, these are things that have been on Windows Server in the past, but we wanted to double down and make them more readily supported and available and a better experience for both of those areas. And then we have the terminal app on Windows Server as well. This has been on some builds for quite a while and people are very excited about it. This is certainly a modern thing. People have been asking for this for a long time. It's been on Windows 11 for years. And now it's on Windows Server. And then last but not least, Wingit. As you know, Windows Server does not support the store on Server devices. But Wingit, we think, is actually a better experience for Windows Server. It's a Cli that's internal and it's a package manner, Cli-based package manner. And you can search and list MSIX apps and then download them and install them and then you have them locally. And sometimes, in some cases, you can actually get store apps as well. So we're very excited about Wingit. Okay, before we go on to the demos, I want to talk about new setup screens that we have in Windows Server 2025. This is something that's been well overdue to be upgraded. And I wanted to call this out because the team that did it did a lot of work. And I think that these little finishing touches in the Windows Server 2025 are worth calling out. The function is very much the same. So there's not a big deal. You will only see this from booting off of the ISO. On the left, you can see legacy experience that's been there for release after release after release. But we have a new set of dialogue screens that are now in Windows Server 2025. Okay, let's dive into the first demo. I'm going to show you some basics about the new Windows Server 2025 desktop. The main thing you can see right away is the new beautiful wallpaper we have. This is dark mode, of course. And this is, you know, it should be very familiar to you as it looks very much like Windows 11. So I'm going to go to start. And there's some new default pin dApps. There's the Azure Arc setup. Server Manager, as you know, Server Manager is minimized, but it is there and pops up by default. I minimized it before I started this demo. And then Edge Browser, File Explorer, Terminal, Windows PowerShell, and Feedback Hub. Okay, so that's pretty much the main things I wanted to show you. As our new set of default pin dApps, there's one other thing, which is the new Task Manager that we brought over from Windows 11. So this is, again, if you're familiar with Task Manager on Windows 11, we've brought that over and it's that same experience. So we wanted to, again, this is about us bringing Windows Server desktop to a parity with Windows 11 experiences. So it feels familiar. But of course, it's all Windows Server underneath. Okay, let's jump into the second demo. This is about single sign-on of Microsoft Apps on the Windows Server 2025 desktop. By using single sign-on, you can actually add an MSA to settings. I'm going to show you go to settings and then go to accounts and then go to email and accounts. And you can see you can either add an MSA here or you can add your work or school account. For simplicity, I'm going to add a Microsoft account, an MSA, for its homogenous experience. If you add a work or school, you can get some variation depending on the organization that set this up. So I'm adding a Microsoft account. I'm going to enter my credentials for that Microsoft account. Here I'm going to click Microsoft Apps only. And you can see my Microsoft account has actually been added. So adding it from a central location makes it so that other Microsoft Apps on the desktop can actually use that identity for signing in those apps. So here's going to feedback. I'll show you what that looks like. It's not signed in. I could have gone through that flow here, but I wanted to do it centrally. But now when I click on sign-in on Feedback Hub, you can see that the MSA is added already. And all I need to do is click Continue. I'm going to click OK on the privacy notice. And in a second here, yeah, right there, it recognized me. I don't have a picture with this particular Microsoft account, but if I did, it would show up there. But you can trust me that I am logged on. And I'm going to show you what that looks like on the Edge browser as well. So I've opened the Edge browser. You can see down at the bottom left, the MSA has already been pre-populated on Edge browser. So by signing in centrally in settings, these different Microsoft Apps are aware of my identity and will sign in for me with that MSA that I added centrally in settings. So in Feedback Hub, create an actual Windows server issue. These are all native now. You don't have to scroll down and pick Windows Server like you used to be able to do or used to have to do. Now all these categories are applicable to Windows Server. So I'm going to pick Network and Internet, and then I'm going to pick General Network Issues. Next, I'm going to scroll down, and you can see all of this is just the same experience you have in Windows 11. And now I'm going to select Submit because I have everything that I want. I could add all these things, attach a file or screenshot, but I'm going to click Submit, and it's collected all the diagnostics and log data from this machine locally and submitted. Okay, thank you for the feedback. So that was the second demo. Okay, let's dive into the third demo. It was a good segue from the last one. This is about flighting, a bunch before, flighting Windows Server builds. It's very exciting for insiders that are looking to upgrade to the latest preview build. So to do that, you go to Settings, scroll down to Windows Update, and instead of checking for updates here, I'm going to scroll down to the Windows Insider program. And it shows here that although I have some options, it's clear I need to link an account that's in an insider account. Now you can go online to find out how to do it in an insider account. It's very easy. You'll reach out to us. We'll give you all the links. It's very easy to do. But so the first thing I'm going to do is link an account. I'm just going to link an account that I know is already in an insider. So I'm going to go continue. I've got to picking an MSA, and then I have to add my credentials. So I added my credentials here. Again, click Microsoft Apps only. That's another way to single sign on, add single sign on. And you can see that a new build is available. Immediately I'm notified a newer build is available from the build I'm currently running. So I'm going to open Windows Update. I'm going to go to Check Updates. And there's some updates to download and install. I went ahead and did that. And then I'm going to go ahead, which is totally normal. And now I'm going to go ahead and restart the system. OK, I rebooted the system. And I'm going to go back to the same place, Start, Settings, and Windows Update. And now there it is. You can see the latest build that's available for insiders. It does say Windows 11 there. And then we know that's a known issue, and we're going to fix that. But that is the latest build, 26063.1. That's been released at the time of this recording. And I'm going to go ahead and download and install it. And then from there on, it just goes ahead, downloads the build, installs it just like it does Windows 11, and after the reboots, you're up on the new build. OK, that was Windows Server Flighting on Server 2025. So now I'm going to transition this and hand this off to Yash Shakar, who's going to go through Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Terminal, and Wingit to complete and round out our session here on modernizing the server desktop. Yash. Thanks, Brent. Today I'm going to be demonstrating some basic Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity work on the new Windows Server 2025. Starting with Wi-Fi, historically, the wireless LAN service has been an optional feature that had to be installed separately. In Windows Server 2025, it comes pre-installed. And if the right drivers are present, you should see Wi-Fi experiences work just the way they do on Windows 11, with the slight exception that the settings toggle will be off by default. I'm going to switch that on here. Now we'll scroll through the list of networks and look for SecureNet, which I'll be using as the network for this demo. We enter in the password, and we're good to go. It says connected and secured. Just to verify, I'll open up the Edge browser and we're able to hit the Microsoft Learn page for Windows Server documentation just fine. So as you can see, setting up Wi-Fi for Windows servers at Edge locations is really easy with Windows Server 2025. Now on to Bluetooth. We've heard from many customers that Bluetooth audio support in particular had been a gap on Windows Server 2022. We've listened to that feedback and closed that gap. If I open up Bluetooth in Settings and click Add Device, I'll then select Bluetooth from the menu, because I'll be connecting headphones. We see my Bose headphones show up in the list, so I'll select them. And in just a second, we're connected and good to go. As a reminder, other Bluetooth peripherals like mice and keyboards, even if they use dongles, should work great with Windows Server already and will continue to be the case for Windows Server 2025. Great, so next I'll be demonstrating two exciting new additions in Windows Server 2025, the Windows Terminal app and the Windows Package Manager, which many of you know simply as Winged. We think both of these additions will really improve both the admin and developer experiences on Windows Server, making day-to-day tasks much easier. I'll first start by showing the console experience that's included in Windows Server 2022 and prior. So if I launch PowerShell, this is the console experience that I'd see on previous versions of Windows Server. It's missing quite a few neat features that Windows Terminal supports natively, such as a multi-tab experience. Now let's check out Windows Terminal. The modern console app that you've likely already seen on Windows 11, the great news here is that it's the exact same app and it's actually pinned to the start menu as well for easy access. Let's briefly scan through some of the settings that can be configured. You can set the default profile to either PowerShell, Command Prompt, or Azure Cloud Shell. And you can also set the default Terminal application, which I'll go ahead and choose Windows Terminal for. The next thing we're gonna take a look at is the Winged command line utility. Again, the great news is that Winged should work exactly like it does on Windows 11, making app installation feel super easy and familiar. It lets you discover, install, upgrade, remove, and configure applications. I'll start with the Winged list command so that we can quickly scan through and see which apps we already have on this machine. You'll notice App Installer, which is actually the app that Winged itself is a part of. So it's kind of funny, but the App Installer is actually capable of updating itself. And then you see other modern apps, Feedback Hub, Windows Terminal, which we just looked at and are still using right now, and many others. One aspect I wanna highlight is that Winged allows you to download apps from two main sources, the Microsoft Store and the Winged Source GitHub repository. And you can actually specify the source you want to use while initiating the install. The Winged Search command lets me find the app I want. So maybe I want the new Windows Notepad from the store and we can install and look at that once it's ready. But here we are. We have the brand new Windows Notepad. And to show you how easy upgrades are, I'll grab say the first version of PowerShell 7. Great. So now again with Winged List, we can quickly see that it has been installed. And the great thing with Winged is that it actually also shows you the latest available version, which is 7.4.1 in PowerShell's case. And I'll run the Winged Upgrade All command, just for simplicity, awesome. And we can verify that the update was indeed successful with a quick Winged List yet again. And now to wrap things up, we can uninstall the two apps that we just installed. So I'll uninstall both Windows Notepad and PowerShell. There we go, back just as we started. And so to recap, Windows Server 2025 comes with both the Windows Terminal app and Winged, just like you're familiar with on Windows 11. Thanks, Yash. And thanks everyone for listening today. You can see our contact information directly if you want to reach out to us. And yeah, I hope you enjoyed these demos and appreciate our effort to move the Windows Server desktop to a more modern contemporary, yet familiar set of experiences. And don't forget, there's always still Server Core. If you really want a headless, lean Windows Server that's quite capable and it's used all over the world for all kinds of things, but this is how we want to move the Server desktop and make it very much like your Windows 11 and your familiar experiences. So again, thank you very much. Have a great day. Have enjoy the Windows Server Engineering Summit. Thank you.