Azure's Microsoft Dev Box Strides into the Marketplace as a 'Ready-To-Code' Developer Workstation

The podium of cloud services has a fresh entrant as Microsoft rolls out its much-anticipated Microsoft Dev Box. The service, launched on the tech giant's Azure platform, is billed as a 'ready-to-code' workstation designed exclusively for software developers. The general availability announcement was made recently by Microsoft, concluding its public preview phase that began in August 2022.

Resting in the Microsoft's Azure ecosystem, Dev Box provides project-centric developer workstations that come handily pre-configured and centrally administered. The service tags along with a bevy of benefits, one of them being seamless access from multiple platforms. Whether you're on a Windows PC, a Mac, or an iOS and Android device, getting onboard the Dev Box ship is effortlessly easy, thanks to its universal accessibility.

In an exciting development, Microsoft has dramatically upscaled the capabilities of Dev Box by integrating it with the Visual Studio IDE. The addition of configuration-as-code customization also takes a bow here, reinforcing the prominence of Microsoft Dev Box as enterprise-ready. The service has already garnered an impressive adoption rate, amassing more than 10,000 Microsoft developers since its inception.

The brains behind the product conceived Microsoft Dev Box to bill customers based on a consumption model. It was brainchild to make users shell out only when their Dev Box was operational. However, the initial pricing strategy was deemed too much of a variable for administrators as they looked out for a flat-rate monthly expense for ceaseless usage. In response to these needs, Microsoft did a slight makeover by ushering in a new monthly price model for full-time users while maintaining the earlier pay-as-you-go pricing that taps out at the monthly price gap.

Managing access to and usage of Dev Box turn out to be a breeze with Windows 365 and Microsoft Intune. As observed in the tech market, Dev Box appears to be a successor to Microsoft's Azure DevTest Labs that brought a service to create template-based virtual machines for development and trials. The legacy of Visual Studio Codespaces, presently recognized as GitHub Codespaces, has also motivated the inception of this ready-to-code workstation. The latter had its focus on delivering pre-configured, container-based, and Linux-driven development surroundings, summoned via the Visual Studio Code editor.

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