Microsoft Announces Dev Box Public Preview

Microsoft announced today that it is making a preview of its Microsoft Dev Box managed service available to the public.

“Many IT organizations must choose between giving developers the flexibility they need to be productive and keeping developer workstations managed and secure,” Microsoft principle group program manager Anthony Cangialosi writes in the announcement post. “Supply chain challenges have led to developers waiting weeks or months to get the hardware they need, forcing them to use aging hardware or unsecured personal devices. At the same time, hybrid work has forced IT to open access to corporate and on-premises resources to developers around the world.”

Microsoft announced its Dev Box at Build 2022 in May, noting then that it was a new cloud service that provides developers with secure, ready-to-code developer workstations for hybrid teams of any size. Dev teams can preconfigure Dev Boxes for specific projects and tasks, enabling developers to get started quickly. Dev Box also provides unified management, security, and compliance for IT so that Dev Boxes can integrate with Intune and Microsoft Endpoint Manager.

The idea here is that developers can focus on writing code instead of configuring a working environment that can build and run their code. Dev boxes are preconfigured for various developer workloads, and they include the tools and settings developers need for their projects and tasks. They support any developer IDE, SDK, or tool that runs on Windows, and can be used to target desktop, mobile, IoT, and web applications, as well as cross-platform apps via the Windows Subsystem for Linux and Windows Subsystem for Android.

The public preview is available now via the Microsoft Azure portal. All you have to do is sign in and search for “dev box” to begin creating dev boxes for your organization.