Windows 11 developers are getting a productivity enhancement today from Microsoft Corp. with a new feature announced at Microsoft Build 2023 called Dev Home: an open-source dashboard with a set of tools to act as a one-stop development companion.

Microsoft says Dev Home will help streamline developer workflows by making it easy to connect tools such as GitHub and set up machine code for repositories, configure cloud-based developer workstations with Dev Box, connect to a new storage volume called Dev Drive and more.

“Dev Home also helps you manage any type of project you’re working on — Windows, cloud, web, mobile or AI — providing all the information you need, right at your fingertips, in one customizable dashboard,” Panos Panay, chief product officer at Microsoft, said in the announcement.

In the dashboard, developers will be able to customize their experience with GitHub widgets that will allow them to track their project code status, tasks and pull requests all in one central location. They can also add system widgets that can enable them to track central processing unit and graphics processing unit performance and process that information. The team is also collaborating with the Xbox team to bring the game development toolkit into Dev Home to jumpstart developers on game creation.

Windows Package Manager now uses WinGet configuration for setting up new machines, which greatly speeds up and reduces the effort of setting up new developer machines without needing to attend to its process manually. WinGet is a configuration process that assists with discovering, installing, upgrading and configuring Windows 11 computers and checks and updates most applications that run on Windows with ease by reducing manually going through multiple app updates into one command. Once it’s complete, developers can get down to coding.

Microsoft introduced Dev Drive today, a new type of storage volume that is specifically designed for developers, based on the Resilient File System, which is designed to maximize data availability and scale for large data sets and resilience against data corruption. Combined with a new performance mode and compatible with Microsoft Defender for antivirus and security, it offers a 30% speed improvement for build times and file access speeds.

“With Dev Home, designed by and for developers, you now have your ultimate productivity companion so you can focus on what you do best — writing code,” said Panay.

Dev Home itself is an open-source project and Microsoft says it welcomes community feedback. It’s available for contributions and engagement in its own GitHub repository. Dev Home is currently in preview starting today and can be installed via the Microsoft Store.

Microsoft cloud-based workstations with Dev Box

Developers often must maintain a workstation capable of building, running and debugging applications that can keep up with their fast-paced workflows. That also means the ability to quickly tear down and build up developer tools when small changes are needed because something was modified or a piece of software was corrupted and needed to be cleaned out and rebuilt. Hours or days can be lost by re-imaging a developer machine to bring it back online.

That’s why Microsoft announced a public preview of Dev Box in August 2022. It’s a cloud-based managed service based in Azure for self-serve developer workstations that will be launched into general availability in July.

Dev Box has already been deployed internally to more than 9,500 engineers at Microsoft across multiple divisions, including Azure, Bing and Windows. Over the last year, Microsoft worked with more than 50 organizations to get feedback on the service including financial services, retail and automotive.

With Dev Box, developers gain access to powerful virtual workstations with SKUs that range from eight to 32 cores, up to 128 gigabytes of memory and 2 terabytes of storage. They can spin them up with project-specific images that are pre-built with tools, configurations, source and binaries that will allow them to get straight to coding. Administrators can also place developers through project-based virtual networks that limit access to sensitive databases, resources and internal endpoints in order to reduce the chances of leaks.

As the launch into general availability approaches, Microsoft has added several developer-focused starter images to the Azure Marketplace including a Windows client for developers, Visual Studio 2019 and Visual Studio 2022. These images contain optimized Windows installations with apps and settings for improved developer experiences and can be customized by the developer teams.

Visual Studio will automatically sign in using the account tied to a developer’s Dev Box, Git Credential Manager will integrate with the Web Account Manager in Windows and there is faster performance through pre-generated caches on dev boxes.

Although it is possible to deploy more than one workstation at a time using Dev Box, each with a different configuration, setting up multiple custom images can be a burden on the information technology team. To make this easier, Microsoft has added a “config-as-code” feature that will allow dev teams to customize base images provided by the information technology department with tools, source, binaries, caches and more using YAML configuration files stored in a Git repository. This feature is currently in private preview.

Image: Microsoft