Alice Chambers |
Microsoft Dev Box, a cloud-based developer workstation service, is now generally available.
Dev Box streamlines the tools developers need to enable them to focus on writing code for the solutions they are creating. Developers can also use this portal to quickly deploy environments for any stage of development using Microsoft Azure Deployment Environments.
“Developers work on all sorts of projects, many of which require specific tools,” said Anthony Cangialosi, principal group programme manager at Microsoft, in a recent Microsoft blog. “For these developers, a blanket, role-based configuration would require them to spend time tailoring their workstation and installing additional tools once it was provisioned. IT admins and developer leads alike needed a way to create multiple, tailored configurations and enable developers to spin up a new workstation on-demand that would be ready to code for their current project.”
Dev Box was first announced at Microsoft Build 2022 but has been in development for more than seven years following the introduction of Azure DevTest Labs, a service that enables development teams to create templates of virtual machines for development and testing use cases.
To date, Microsoft has rolled out the solution to more than 10,000 of its engineers and several of its customers.
“Dev Box has already transformed the developer workstations at Microsoft from rigid, long-running desktops to project-specific, ready-to-code workstations in the cloud,” said Cangialosi. “We’re excited to see more developers leave behind the challenges of physical workstations to focus on writing the code only they can write.”