At its Build 2023 conference today, Microsoft announced the general availability time-frame for its Dev Box, which is basically its cloud workstation. The company shared more details about it, like updated specifications which now includes the option for 2TB SSD storage, as well as new vCPU hibernation technology.
These weren't the only changes unveiled though. Microsoft also claims to have made performance optimizations for Dev Box in the case of Visual Studio 2019 and Visual Studio 2022. This is due to better cache management designed specifically for the Dev Box, among other changes. These improvements should be visible with VS 2022 preview version 17.7. Microsoft outlines these as follows:
Starting with the 17.7 previews, Visual Studio 2022 includes several new features designed to make it easier to onboard to a dev box and boost your performance in Visual Studio.
These include:
- Pre-built Visual Studio 2019 and 2022 images
- Automatic sign-in to Visual Studio using the account tied to your dev box
- Git Credential Manager integration with the Web Account Manager in Windows
- Faster performance through pre-generated caches deployed with your dev box
Microsoft has added that the pre-built Visual Studio Starter images contain Windows optimizations, and other changes to improve the overall developer experience. These images can also be customized further. The Starter images will be available at the Azure marketplace. You can avail them at links below:
Dev Box has also received Config-as-code definitions which are available as private preview at the moment. Microsoft has explained the benefits of the feature and how it can help developers:
One of the great things about Dev Box is that it enables you to deploy more than one workstation at a time, each with a different configuration for a different project or task. But setting up multiple custom images for all the dev teams across an organization puts stress on dev infra teams.
To remove some of this burden, we’re adding config-as-code capabilities to Dev Box. This will enable dev teams to customize the secure, base images provided by IT with all the tools, source, binaries, caches, and more using YAML configuration files stored in a git repository.
You can sign up for a private preview of config-as-code at this link. You can head over to the dedicated Dev Box webpage to find more details.
In case you want to read more, you can find the rest of the Build 2023 coverage here.
