One thing developers need is the flexibility to set up and maintain their workstation, but even “small changes” can unexpectedly plague their development environments, interrupting workflow and costing hours to undo.
Today at Microsoft Build 2022 ConferenceMicrosoft Dev Box, a new cloud service that provides developers with secure, ready-to-code desktops for hybrid teams of any size, has been announced.
Microsoft Dev Box allows developers to focus on the code that only they can write, giving them easy access to the tools and resources they need without worrying about system setup and maintenance. workplace.
“Development teams pre-configure Dev Boxes for specific projects and tasks, allowing developers to get started quickly with an environment ready to build and run their application in minutes. At the same time, Microsoft Dev Box ensures that management , unified security and compliance stays in the hands of IT by leveraging Windows 365 to integrate Dev Boxes with Intune and Microsoft Endpoint Manager,” says Antoine Cangialosi from the Microsoft Developer Division.
Transforming the developer’s workstation
Contemporary development workstations present a plethora of challenges. New developers can spend days setting up a working environment and weeks before making their first commit.
Senior developers often work on multiple projects which can lead to conflicting dependencies and bog down their development workstation. And we’ve all made a change that unexpectedly left us with a broken environment.
With Microsoft Dev Box, development teams build and manage Dev Box images with all the tools and dependencies their developers need to build and run their apps. Teams can include their app’s source code and binaries built overnight, allowing developers to immediately start running and understanding the code without having to wait for lengthy rebuilds.
Developers stay in control of their Dev Boxes with a developer portal that allows them to create and delete their Dev Boxes for any of their projects.
Developers can create Dev Boxes to experiment with a proof of concept, separate their projects, or even parallelize tasks across multiple Dev Boxes to avoid bogging down their main environment.
For developers working on legacy applications, they can maintain development boxes for older versions of an application to quickly create an environment that can reproduce and diagnose critical customer issues as they arise.
Microsoft Dev Box supports any developer IDE, SDK, or in-house tool that runs on Windows. Dev Boxes can target any development workload you can build from a Windows desktop and are especially well suited for desktops, mobile devices, IoT, and games. You can even build cross-platform apps using the Windows Subsystem for Linux.
And because Microsoft Dev Boxes are hosted in the Microsoft cloud, you can access them from anywhere: Windows, MacOS, Android, iOS, or your web browser.
Microsoft Dev Box ensures developers always have the right tools and resources based on the project, task, and even role. When creating Dev Boxes, development teams select from a range of SKUs to set the right level of compute for each project and instantly scale aging physical hardware.
With Azure Active Directory integration, teams can quickly onboard new members by assigning them to Azure Active Directory groups that provide access to the Dev Boxes they need for their projects.