Ask HN: Windows 11 development environment discontinued?

I'm happy to report that I don't have to work on Windows on a daily basis. But for the few times I have to work on "legacy" WPF code I relied on [1], which is "temporarily down" (since October '24).

Having used up my slmgr /rearm-s I am now confronted with the evaluation-has-expired hourly shutdowns.

Does anyone have a clue whether Microsoft is really having issues with providing a VM-image for their development environment or if they are just silently discontinuing this otherwise superb service?

tl;dr is [1] gone for good?

[1] https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/downloads/virtual-machines/

7 points | by daef 82 days ago

2 comments

tizio13 82 days ago
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/download-windows-...
While not 100% what you were used to downloaded, I think you should be able to use these ISO’s for you needs.
You’ll need to setup everything up from scratch, luckily it’s not too much. I’d suggest capturing the post configured state of the machine and save it so you can reuse as needed.
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- daef 82 days ago
  that's exactly the thing I'm trying to avoid. since I really don't need windows very often I prefer to change win-vms like underpants (allowing me to deactivate defender/winupdates fearless) and would not like to spend hours for setting up win from scratch. I had to set up win11 for a friend a few days ago and - let me tell you - that experience sucked hard
runjake 82 days ago
Some people with ambiguous morals use https://github.com/massgravel/Microsoft-Activation-Scripts
Microsoft knows about this but seems to ignore it. I'll leave you to your own conclusions.
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- daef 82 days ago
  all the kms activators and the MAS-scripts never worked for evaluation editions
  edit: it seems like it at least doesn't work for expired evaluation editions. see https://massgrave.dev/evaluation_editions
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  - runjake 82 days ago
    Right, but the full versions are as easily downloadable directly from Microsoft.
    https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows11
    https://massgrave.dev/genuine-installation-media