Microsoft Delivers Windows 10 Technical Preview 2 Build 10061

Three weeks after the previous drop, Microsoft has shipped a new build of Windows 10 Technical Preview 2 to Fast Ring testers. Build 10061 includes a number of new features, a number of fixes, and of course a number of known issues as well.

Here’s what’s new.

Start, Taskbar, and Action Center improvements: While we saw this first in the leaked 10056 build, this is the first public build to include the new black system theme across the Start menu, taskbar, and Action Center. The Start menu and Taskbar now have transparency. You can resize the Start menu. AutoColor has been added, which will pull the primary color from your desktop background, and you can customize the color of Start, taskbar, and Action Center, as well as transparency, in Settings. Finally, based on feedback, the power button was moved to the bottom left from the top right of the Start menu to make it more accessible.

New Mail and Calendar apps. Mail includes customizable Swipe Gestures, letting you swipe right or left to take actions like delete, flag, move or mark as read/unread, plus a new email authoring experience that leverages the Word capabilities so you can insert tables, add pictures and use bullets and color. Mail and Calendar both support Office 365, Exchange, Outlook.com, Gmail, IMAP, POP and other popular account types.

Continuum improvements. The taskbar is now “more optimized” for tablets, Microsoft says: When you enter Tablet Mode, the Start button, Cortana, Task View buttons and notification area items all grow larger so they are more touchable, and pinned and running apps are removed (by default) to reduce clutter. Start and Task View remain available for launching and switching.

Task View improvements. Microsoft made several visual updates to Task View, including refined window icons, close buttons, and thumbnails.

Virtual Desktop improvements. You can now create as many Virtual Desktops as you’d like, and a new overflow experience will let you access any of them when you’ve reached the limits of onscreen real estate.

Fixed issues. Microsoft fixed a number of issues in this build. Outlook now indexes email correctly. Hyper-V can be enabled normally. Visual Studio no longer crashes when you create a universal app project. And a number of problems with Project Spartan were fixed too.

Known issues. You can check out Microsoft’s blog post for a complete list of known issues with this build, but I will highlight a few of the big ones. You can’t launch desktop (Win32) apps from the Start menu (though Search works fine). The built-in Mail and Calendar apps need to be updated from the Windows Store Bet app to work properly. You can’t download songs from Music or Music Preview (though a fix is coming). And minimized apps that are playing audio will mute.

If you’re really paying attention, you may be curious about the previous build, build 10049, which never made its way to the Slow ring despite a number of fixes that were clearly aimed at getting it there. Microsoft says a bug with long upgrade times caused by installing all Language Packs prevented it from making that release, and it hopes that 10061 is stable enough to make the cut. (And if you did install build 10049, Microsoft has provided some instructions for reclaiming storage space from the extra Language Pack installs.)