Microsoft has announced several improvements to the preview of Dev Box, a managed service that is due for release this summer.

Dev Box can be used to create on-demand project-specific cloud-based "workstations" on Azure, providing development environments that are high-performance, secure, and ready-to-code.

Dev boxes are set up by an organization to be ready for developers to start coding and are pre-configured with all the tools and settings developers need for their projects and tasks. When a developer needs to move to a new project, experiment on a proof-of-concept, or run a full build in the background while they move on to the next task, they can do so in a pre-configured environment.

At the recent Build conference, Microsoft announced a number of improvements to Dev Box, and said it will be generally available in July. The first improvement is the addition of new starter developer images in the Azure Marketplace to provide dev teams with ready-to-use images that can be customized further for specific dev team needs.

A second improvement is the ability to view, manage and spin up dev boxes for all a developer's projects from a specialized developer portal. Developers can also use this portal to manage environments in Azure Deployment Environments.

Dev Box is also getting better Visual Studio support, with improvements making it easier to begin using a dev box from Visual Studio.  You'll no longer need to enter your credentials because Visual Studio automatically signs you in based on the identity you used to create and login into the Dev Box. There's also a new settings option called Unified Settings that can be used to share personal and team Visual Studio settings, and to make use of setting shared with you.

Another improvement is the ability to use git source control configuration files to customize dev box base images.

More Information

Azure Dev Box Website

Related Articles

Microsoft Dev Box Released In Preview

Microsoft Introduces Dev Box and Azure Deployment Environments

JetBrains Launches Containerized Development Environment

To be informed about new articles on I Programmer, sign up for our weekly newsletter, subscribe to the RSS feed and follow us on Twitter, Facebook or Linkedin.

Comments

Make a Comment or View Existing Comments Using Disqus

or email your comment to: comments@i-programmer.info