Microsoft improves Dev Boxes and prepares for launch

Microsoft has announced a number of improvements to the Dev Box preview, a managed service due to launch this summer.

The Dev Box can be used to create “workstations” in the Azure cloud on demand for a specific project, providing a high-performance, secure, and production-ready development environment.

Dev Boxes are created by the organization so that developers can quickly start programming. They are pre-configured with all the tools and settings developers need for their projects and tasks. If a developer needs to move on to a new project, experiment with a trial, or run a full build in the background while he moves on to the next task, he can do so in a pre-configured environment.

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

The second improvement is the ability to view, manage and launch Dev Boxes for all developer projects from a dedicated developer portal. Developers can also use this portal to manage environments in Azure Deployment Environments.

The Dev Box is also getting better support for Visual Studio: improvements make it easier to get started using the Dev Box from within Visual Studio. You no longer need to enter your credentials as Visual Studio automatically logs you in based on the ID you used to create and sign in to the Dev Box. There’s also a new settings option called Unified Settings that you can use to share personal and team Visual Studio settings, as well as use settings you’ve shared.

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