Microsoft Dev Box, which provides software development workstations in the Azure cloud, will be generally available in July, the company announced on May 24. The service is currently available for preview.
Microsoft Dev Box offers application-specific development workstations with pre-configured and centralized management. Dev Boxes can be accessed from Windows, macOS, iOS, and Android devices and supports the use of any development tool running Windows or Windows Subsystem for Linux. Microsoft itself has deployed Dev Box to more than 9,000 of its own engineers in Microsoft’s Developer Division, as well as Azure, Office, Bing and Windows teams. The Dev Box public preview was announced last August.
Developers can configure Dev Box SKUs to run high-capacity, high-performance, compute-intensive and memory-intensive workloads. To help development and infrastructure teams get started quickly with Dev Box, several developer-oriented starter images are available in the Azure Marketplace, including the Windows client for developers, Visual Studio 2019, and Visual Studio 2022.
Dev Box images can be used as is or serve as base images for further customization. Also available in the private preview are Dev Box Customizations, which are configure-as-code capabilities that enable development teams to customize base images with tools, source, binaries, and caches using YAML configuration files. Developers can sign up for a private preview here.
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