Software update: PowerToys 0.29.3

Microsoft has released a new version of PowerToys. The PowerToys are a collection of small programs for power users. There were PowerToys for Windows 95 and Windows XP, and since mid-2019 Microsoft has also been developing a version for Windows 10. At the moment there are only a small number of programs left in the collection, including FancyZones, Windows key shortcut guide, PowerRename, PowerToys Run and Keyboard Manager. The release notes for this release can be found below.

Release v0.29.3

This is patch release to fix two bugs 0.29.0 we deemed important for stability based on user feedback. 0.29.1 and 0.29.2 were internally tested but not publicly released.

• #8808 – FancyZone zones would occasionally not appear. This was caused by two uninitialized variables. During testing, there was a race condition so we missed it. Our push on adding in additional code analysis tools will hopefully catch these types of bugs.
• #8787 – PowerRename would throw regex errors when it shouldn’t. We removed the error dialog for now and will add in a more targeted error catching block at a later time.

Release v0.29.0

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.