Microsoft releases Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 25931 with Emoji 15 support, improved voice access and more

Today, Microsoft announced the release of Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 25931 to the Canary Channel. This Windows 11 preview build comes with Unicode Emoji 15 support, voice access support on the Lock screen, and more. Also, Microsoft is killing Windows Internet Name Service (WINS) and Remote Mailslots in Windows 11. So, the DC location will no longer use NetBIOS\WINS\mailslot-based discovery by default. Find the full change log below.

What’s new in Build 25931

New features from the Dev Channel

This build includes new features from the Dev Channel such as Unicode Emoji 15 support, voice access is available to use on more areas in Windows such as the Lock screen, and more.

DC location will no longer use NetBIOS\WINS\mailslot-based discovery by default

We have previously announced the deprecation of both Windows Internet Name Service (WINS) and Remote Mailslots (see this blog post here for information on Remote Mailslots). These deprecations are legacy technologies that are no longer secure in today’s environments. As part of these deprecations, DC location in your environment may be affected mainly because many legacy applications still specify short NetBIOS-style domain names when trying to locate a domain controller (DC). To help ease this transition with these deprecations, we are making two improvements to the DC locator algorithm in Windows.

First, we are blocking by default the use of NetBIOS\WINS\mailslot-based methods for DC-discovery. This behavior can be reverted with the use of a new Group Policy setting (BlockNetBIOSDiscovery). In addition to disabling the new BlockNetBIOSDiscovery policy, reversion to default behavior also requires enabling the EnableMailslots SMB configuration option. (You can query and set the EnableMailslots setting using the Get-SmbClientConfiguration and Set-SmbClientConfiguration PowerShell cmdlets.)

PLEASE NOTE: Reversion should be considered only as a temporary measure while more viable, longer-term solutions are explored.

Second, we have added additional client-side logic to aid in the mapping of short NetBIOS-style domain names to DNS domain names. This improvement consists of two parts:

1. DC locator will now automatically download additional information about the child domains in trusting forests and use that information as part of the discovery algorithm.
2. As a last-resort fallback, and to accommodate unforeseen situations, forest administrators can manually configure a set of DNS-to-NetBIOS-domain-name mappings (using the Active Directory Domains and Trusts management snap-in) which are also downloaded and used by DC Locator during discovery.

Additional information is available here for DC locator changes.

Microsoft also released ISO files for this Windows 11 build. You can download them here.