On June 29, 2026, Microsoft officially launched the public preview of the "WSL Container" functionality. This feature, first unveiled at the Build 2026 developer conference, is not "WSL 3" but a new functionality layer developed on top of the existing WSL infrastructure. It enables developers to directly create, run, and manage Linux containers on Windows systems without installing additional third-party container tools. WSL Containers introduce built-in Linux container command-line tool wslc.exe (also known as container.exe) and WSL Container APIs. The syntax of wslc.exe is highly similar to Docker, supporting the complete container development workflow; the WSL Container APIs allow native Windows applications to programmatically invoke Linux containers, supporting C, C++, and C# languages, and integrating with MSBuild and CMake build systems. In terms of enterprise-level management, WSL Containers provide functionality to control usage permissions and set container image pull sources via group policies and ADMX templates. Official support for the Intune dashboard will be rolled out in the coming weeks, and the WSL plugin for Microsoft Defender for Endpoint has been updated to perceive container-internal events (currently in private preview). A pre-release version of the Dev Containers extension for Visual Studio Code has also added support for wslc. Alongside the introduction of WSL Containers, Microsoft has made several improvements to the underlying technology. The new default file system, "virtiofs," doubles Windows file access speed, while the new default network mode, "consomme," enhances compatibility in complex network environments. Additionally, the memory reclamation mechanism has been optimized to release unused memory back to the host machine. These changes are currently enabled by default only in WSL Containers and are planned to be rolled out to standard WSL in the future. Third-party container tools will also benefit from these underlying improvements. Currently, the WSL Container functionality is available as part of the WSL 2.9.3 pre-release version, which users can install via command or download from GitHub. Microsoft plans to release it as a stable version in the fall of 2026.