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Build apps from the cloud with Dev Box, Azure Deployment Environments & more
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Unlock developer potential with Microsoft Dev Box
AI agents, model context protocols (MCPs), and emerging AI workflows are fundamentally transforming software development paradigms and broadening the range of a...
Latest posts
🎉 Now in Public Preview: Create Dev Boxes on Behalf of Your Developers
We’re excited to announce that one of our most-requested features is officially in Public Preview: You can now create Dev Boxes on behalf of your developers. Waiting around to get started is a thing of the past. Whether you're onboarding a new hire, running a hackathon, or setting up for a customer demo, this feature makes it easy for admins to set developers up for success. No “how do I do this?” required. ✨ Why We Built It From Ignite sessions to customer labs to hallway chats, the feedback was clear. You needed a faster, more flexible way to spin up Dev Boxes for your team. Here are just a few re...
💻 Spring Cleaning for Dev Boxes: Mastering Manual & Automatic Offboarding
Let’s face it. Sometimes your Dev Box just… hangs around too long. Whether you’ve moved to a new project, left the company, want to create a new dev box with the latest tools, it's time to clean things up. 🎯 With Dev Box Auto-Deletion now in public preview, offboarding just got a whole lot easier. Here's everything you need to know to keep your environment tidy and your costs under control (without deleting anything you still need!). 🚀 Step 1: Enable the Auto-Deletion Preview Feature Before anything else, you need to register the preview feature in your Azure subscription: ✨ You're now r...
Balance governance and flexibility with Dev Box project policies
As organizations scale their development efforts, managing access to cloud resources becomes critical. Platform engineers need to strike a balance between enforcing governance and enabling developer agility. At Build 2025, we announced the general availability of project policies in Microsoft Dev Box, which provides a powerful way to improve resource control and governance for cloud development environments while boosting security and compliance. What are project policies? With project policies, platform engineers can set guardrails on a per-project basis, to ensure that each project has access only to the nece...
Control cloud costs with Dev Box hibernation features
Cost is one of the most important concerns in any cloud-native rollout. IT admins need powerful tools to control costs without slowing development. At Build 2025, we were excited to announce the general availability of hibernation in Microsoft Dev Box. This feature empowers platform engineers to optimize resource usage while empowering developers to get what they need when they need it. Core cost-saving features—auto-stop schedules, hibernate on disconnect, and hibernate on no connect—offer different ways to automatically hibernate idle dev boxes, ensuring that resources aren’t wasted and budgets stay predic...
Supercharge AI development with new AI-powered features in Microsoft Dev Box
AI is reshaping how we build, deploy, and scale software. As more apps become AI-powered, developers need environments that can keep up with speed and demands of innovation. We've heard from customers just how critical it is to have a zero-config experience when building AI applications, with streamlined access to compute, prebuilt models, and environment configuration tools. We’ve been listening—and are excited to announce a new wave of capabilities in Microsoft Dev Box to accelerate AI development. Dev Box now empowers you to get started rapidly with ready-to-code cloud development environments optimized for...
Elevate Your Virtual Machine Management with Multi-Select, Sorting, Grouping, and Tags in Azure DevTest Labs
We are thrilled to unveil exciting new enhancements in the My Virtual Machine view within Azure DevTest Labs that will revolutionize your VM management experience. With these updates, managing your virtual machines has never been easier or more efficient. Imagine being able to multi-select VMs to start, stop, restart, or delete them all at once – saving you valuable time and effort. But that's not all! You can now sort your VMs and group them by various attributes such as type, status, size, and more, making it simpler to organize and locate the VMs you need. Additionally, the My Virtual Machine view now suppo...
How Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University scaled hands-on learning with Microsoft Dev Box
As AI and data science rapidly reshape industries, universities worldwide are rethinking how they deliver hands-on learning. At Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University (XJTLU) in China, the School of AI and Advanced Computing embraced Microsoft Dev Box to give students a modern, scalable, and real-world development environment—right from their first year. Here’s how XJTLU transformed their curriculum and operations with Dev Box, helping 460+ students access powerful computing resources effortlessly. 🎯 The challenge XJTLU is a leader in AI and data science education, with over 700 new students joining each ye...
How to get started quickly with setting up the Microsoft Dev Box service
Last updated: April 21, 2025 🎯 Introduction Are you an IT admin, platform engineer, or a developer looking to explore a developer-centric, cloud-powered workstation experience? In this post, I’ll show you how to start quickly and try out Microsoft Dev Box using either a Microsoft 365 Business Premium or Microsoft 365 E3 plan — both of which come with licenses of Windows 10/11, Microsoft Entra ID, and Microsoft Intune and offer free trials. Check out my other post about subscriptions and licensing requirements for Microsoft Dev Box to understand what subscriptions and licenses are required to successfully ge...
Microsoft Dev Box subscriptions and licensing requirements demystified: What You Need and Why
Thinking of deploying Microsoft Dev Box service but want to understand the licensing and subscription requirements first? Then, you have come to the right place. This blog post breaks it all down—clearly and simply—so you know exactly what you need and why, whether you’re an IT admin, platform engineer, developer, or a decision-maker. Microsoft Dev Box is a cloud-based service that provides secure, fully managed developer workstations (virtual machines) hosted in Azure. It’s designed for organizations that want fast, scalable, and policy-compliant dev environments for their developer teams. But before you spin...