{"id":72,"date":"2024-05-21T08:31:00","date_gmt":"2024-05-21T15:31:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/develop-from-the-cloud\/?p=72"},"modified":"2024-11-19T10:45:27","modified_gmt":"2024-11-19T18:45:27","slug":"microsoft-dev-box-is-leveling-up-to-support-your-development-needs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/develop-from-the-cloud\/microsoft-dev-box-is-leveling-up-to-support-your-development-needs\/","title":{"rendered":"Microsoft Dev Box is leveling up to support your development needs"},"content":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s hard to believe Microsoft Dev Box has already been generally available for almost a year. Since its inception, we\u2019ve seen Dev Box as a fundamental shift in the way we think about developer workstations\u2014moving from static, physical dev machines to ready-to-code, cloud-based workstations. The response to Dev Box\u2014and the feedback we\u2019ve received from the community\u2014has been crucial in helping us understand how to further refine the service, and today we\u2019re excited to announce several new features coming to Dev Box.<\/p>\n

From enhanced Dev Box personalization in the Dev Home to team-based image customization and management, we\u2019re committed to making the Dev Box experience a positive one for developers and team leads alike. But beyond the developer experience, we\u2019re also introducing new management features for admins and platform engineers that make it easier to control costs and see how dev boxes are being used across teams.<\/p>\n

Of course, this list barely scratches the surface of all the new features we\u2019ve added\u2014read on to find out more about all the enhancements we\u2019re working on in Dev Box.<\/p>\n

A platform for teams<\/h2>\n

In the past, we\u2019ve talked a lot about how Dev Box supports individual developers as well as admins and platform engineers. What we haven\u2019t talked about as much is the impact Dev Box has on the entire developer team. While Dev Box is great for getting developers spun up quickly with self-service, ready-to-code machines, it\u2019s still difficult for dev leads to manage tool sprawl when the typical developer uses up to 250 tools and services<\/a> in their day-to-day workflows. To account for this, we\u2019re excited to announce several new features that make it easier to manage project configurations and turn Dev Box into a true platform for teams.<\/p>\n

One of these new features is team-based customizations for Dev Box<\/a>, now in private preview. Team-based customizations enable project leads to create customized dev boxes based on each project\u2019s needs, giving them new ways to optimize their teams\u2019 performance. \u00a0The new Dev Center imaging service, now in private preview, further optimizes the creation and customization experiences. By leveraging pre-generated Dev Box images that serve as a foundation for customization, team leads can quickly create custom dev boxes for their teams. We\u2019re also constantly expanding our roster of developer-optimized base images. Images for Visual Studio, Docker, Windows, and more can be found on the Azure Marketplace<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Also in preview are project-based catalogs. With these, team leads can create customized templates for Dev Box or Azure Deployment Environments that contain necessary resources for a project. Attaching these as repositories to a project catalog makes them available to developers on the project to use in their work\u2014without having to ask IT for assistance or wait for a ticket to be completed.<\/p>\n

Personal and powerful<\/h2>\n

As devs, it’s critical that we can personalize our machines with the tools we know and love, and that we have the compute power needed to complete every task. Dev Box already enables you to get started faster using VS and Docker base images and leverage shared Single Sign On (SSO) between Dev Box and VS. Config-as-code customizations, announced in preview at Ignite, allow teams to efficiently customize dev boxes without custom images, both speeding up the process and making it more accessible. A great example of this in action is our new Intelligent Apps Dev Box customization<\/a>. And because coding is for everyone, we’ve created a\u00a0new accessibility template for Dev Box<\/a>, designed to simplify starting NonVisual Desktop Access within Dev Box.<\/p>\n

Today, we’re also excited to announce that you can now customize your dev boxes through Dev Home, using any available Winget package through a new graphical user interface, making it even easier\u2014and more satisfying\u2014to get set up how you want.<\/p>\n

\"Image<\/a><\/p>\n

Additionally, prepopulated caches for Visual Studio on Dev Box is now in preview. This feature allows teams to pre-generate startup data, allowing for blazing fast access to IDE features like Find In Files and IntelliSense on Dev Box start. Combined with Dev Drive, which is optimized for developer workloads, developers can expect to see significant improvements to startup time and Dev Box performance.<\/p>\n

We\u2019re also excited to announce eight new regions with Dev Box availability, helping ensure low latency and better support for developers around the world:<\/p>\n