Microsoft Dev Box, providing software development workstations in the Azure cloud, will be generally available in July, the company said on May 24. The service is currently available for preview.
Microsoft Dev Box offers project-specific development workstations, preconfigured and centrally managed. Dev Boxes can be accessed from Windows, macOS, iOS, and Android devices, and support the use of any development tool that runs on 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 in Azure, Office, Bing, and Windows teams. A public preview of Dev Box was announced last August.
Developers can configure high-powered Dev Box SKUs to develop and run high-performance, compute-intensive and memory-intensive workloads. To help ensure development and infrastructure teams can quickly get started with Dev Box, several developer-focused starter images are available in the Azure Marketplace, including 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 a 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 the private preview here.