Microsoft Dev Box — a better path to provisioning and productivity?
Disclosure: Microsoft is a client of the author.
Microsoft is basically a platform and tools vendor, and it’s particularly good at developing tools largely because it’s made up of developers. But the problem with a company like Microsoft creating tools for others is that it firm doesn’t really know what “others” do. This is because, like any job, developers are focused on doing their own jobs and generally aren’t rotated through other positions in a company to better understand what other jobs consist of.
While I expect this is an issue that generative AI will eventually fix, when it comes to developing for developers, Microsoft tends to stand out because it knows better than most what they struggle with. That brings me to Microsoft Dev Box; initially announced at last year’s Microsoft Build, the effort dates back to 2016 when a then-new service, Azure DevTest Labs, was created to provide VMs for a variety of development and test instances.