Microsoft Dev Box Virtualizes Your Windows Development PC in a Browser Window

Among the announcements made at the Microsoft Build developer conference yesterday was a new service for organizations that want to offer pre-configured virtualized developer workstations on demand. Microsoft Dev Box is designed to simplify the process of getting up and running new developer workstations with all the necessary tools and dependencies installed and working out of the box (so to speak) and with access to the latest updates. source code and fresh copies of any nightly builds.

The Dev Box is built on top of Windows 365, a service that IT administrators can use to provide users with pre-configured virtual PCs. Administrators can create operating system images and offer hardware configurations with different CPU, storage, and RAM capacities depending on what specific users (or workloads) need. Windows 365 virtual machines, including but not limited to Dev Box virtual machines, can be accessed from other Windows PCs or devices running macOS, iOS, Android, Linux, or ChromeOS.

Virtualized development environments can offer developers and testers many benefits beyond the ability to access a pre-configured development box from anywhere. If you install software or make changes that break your development environment, you can easily revert to a known working version. Your administrator can offer different environments for different applications to prevent software conflicts, or offer multiple environments for different versions of your application so that you can easily maintain, test, and support multiple versions at the same time.

“The Microsoft Dev Box supports any development environment, SDK, or internal tool that runs on Windows,”writes Microsoft Product Manager Anthony Cangialosi. “Dev Boxes can target any development workload you can create on the Windows desktop, and are particularly well suited to desktop, mobile, IoT, and gaming. You can even build cross-platform apps with the Windows Subsystem for Linux.”

Dev Box is currently available in closed preview. If you’d like to test it out when the preview goes public, you can sign up to learn more here.