Tuesday, October 07, 2014

The one Windows 10 TP Console Post to rule them all?

Building Apps for Windows - Console Improvements in the Windows 10 Technical Preview

This post was written by Rich Eizenhoefer, a Program Manager in the Microsoft Developer Tools and Runtimes team.

I have some good news about the Windows command line console, conhost.exe. In this blog post, I’m joined by our two console developers, Michael Niksa and Paul Campbell. We’d like to give you an overview of what’s been changed since the console was last updated.  You can check out the improved console today in the Windows 10 Technical Preview.

The changes discussed here are just the start of the console updates we are working on for Windows 10, but we hope you’ll like them. Let’s start with a quick look at the architectural mods and then get into the new features.

Architecture update

Many people consider CMD, PowerShell, or their favorite alternate command line as the console, but it is more subtle than that. Each of these are character-mode applications that run within conhost.exe, the console host, otherwise known simply as the console. The console is responsible for accepting keyboard and mouse input, drawing text to the screen, providing memory buffers and presenting an API for apps to use.

The changes I’ll discuss today apply to conhost.exe, the window that manages input and output for character-mode applications. Since Windows Vista, all console functionality has lived in this single conhost executable. Under the covers, the architecture has changed a bit. The primary function of Conhost.exe now is to load either a DLL containing the original console or one that contains our new code.

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While there have been a number of Windows 10 TP Console (aka the one of the "shiny" new features in Win10) posts, I think this one should be put to the top of the list. It's really nice and deep, we're talking reg keys, and more.

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