How To Optimize Your Windows OS Development Environment

There are several strategic practices to optimize your Windows OS development environment. Even for the most experienced developers, the Windows operating system can be complex and challenging. Luckily, there are dozens of methods to optimize your OS development environment. Whether you are developing custom software, mobile applications, or web pages in Windows, the best techniques help you streamline performance and improve efficiency. Read on to learn about how to optimize your Windows OS development environment.

Do You Need UNIX Like Environment on Windows?

With Windows 10, Microsoft introduced Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). With WSL 2, there is a real Linux kernel through a subset of Hyper-V features. We can choose different distros such as Ubuntu, OpenSUSE, Kali Linux, Debian, Fedora, Pengwin and Alpine. Within Ubuntu WSL, we can install the software packages just like a regular Linux distro with acceptable limitations. This made the story of the developers quite different than it was a decade back. WSL is much faster and more popular than the previous UNIX-on-Windows projects like Cygwin.

Select A Reputable Coding Languages

The first step to optimizing your Windows OS development environment is to select a reputable coding language which you’ll mainly work with. The coding language you select is essentially the backbone of your software, website, or mobile application. The common programming languages like Python, C, C++, PHP, Ruby, Java, GoLang etc need some IDE specific for either Windows OS or Linux OS. Microsoft Visual Studio is a robust IDE. If you use Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) for development, then you should have a proper plan what to install on Windows and what to install on Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL).

Just as an example – if you work with Python or C or C++ for electronics, then you should use Windows system on a Windows PC. Using different prototyping boards with Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) is still not that easy compared to a native unix OS environment. You’ll not get many users utilizing such system. Configuring Python on native Windows system and Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) can complicate your life.

Utilize A Structured Logger

Using logs as data gives us the chance to have a great insight into the activity of the things we build. A structured logger (also called semantic logger) is an excellent tool to optimize your Windows OS development environment. If you are using popular coding languages like Google’s Go, structured loggers like Logrus are relatively available and easy for integration. Logrus is a structured logger for GoLang that is completely API compatible with the standard library logger. Currently, the structured Logrus tool is being consistently maintained to ensure adequate security, backwards-compatible bug fixes, and performance. To effectively optimize your development environment on Windows, utilize a structured logger. Windows Event Viewer helps to view and navigate the logs, search and filter particular types of logs, export logs for analysis, and so on. Unfortunately, there is no way to run Graylog on Windows operating system but we can run Graylog on Windows Subsystem for Linux. But there are some other tools, such as Neologger and Logit.

Address Minor Errors

To effectively optimize your Windows operating system development environment, it is essential to address the minor errors. Even with minimal impact on your overall performance, minimal errors can take away from the visuals, professional design, and sophistication particularly if you are building a Windows program. First, you need to analyze your fonts. Make sure that all fonts used across your thing has a consistent style, colour, and grouped sizes. This minor thing can have a major impact on the overall vision of your program. Be sure to constantly review your program performance to quickly identify any minor errors which are often not listed but terrific on Windows.

Improve Your System Responsiveness

To effectively optimize the environment, it is essential to improve the responsiveness of your system. Your system responsiveness ultimately determines your programs proactivity, adaptability, and functionality during change. Using Windows OS, there are several easy steps to improve responsiveness system-wide. First, you need to turn off your User Account Control, or UAC. Additionally, you may want to turn off Windows Defender as well. You should lower the cl.exe priority within your program to keep your machine responsive. At the same time, you need to turn off your transparency, animation, and sliding. Finally, you can allow all of your Powershell scripts to operate, and show all tray icons available. To substantially optimize your development operating system in Windows, be sure to improve your system responsiveness.

Test Your Development Environment

You need to consistently test your development environment to effectively optimize your performance. Frequent testing verifies that everything is configured properly throughout your system. There are several comprehensive strategies to help you run tests for several different operating systems. After conducting an initial round of tests, be sure to schedule frequent evaluations. Expert developers recommend testing applications every month at the minimum. Be sure to constantly test your environment to optimize your Windows OS development procedures to utilize a reputable, advanced computer programming language.

Final Words

Organizing and customizing windows for work is not quite easy today. We had a bunch of tutorials for organization the things on Windows PC, such as Cascading list of folders in right-click context menu in Windows 7. It is time taking and difficult to configure Microsoft Windows for a modern software development environment. Invariably, today a professional software developer will need DevOps tools like Jenkins and configure with Docker registry and GitHub. Without Microsoft Windows, it is impossible to develop software intended for Microsoft Windows. It is quite important to keep an eye on what the others doing.