How'd you like to listen to dot net rocks with no ads? Easy? Become a patron for just five dollars a month. You get access to a private RSS feed where all the shows have no ads. Twenty dollars a month, we'll get you that and a special dot net Rocks patron mug. Sign up now at Patreon dot dot NetRocks dot com. Hey, welcome back to dot net rocks. It's Carl Franklin and I'm Richard Cawell and wow, wow, wow, wow. It's been a while. Yeah, it's been a ride.
It's been a holiday season. You know, we've done them things, so it all is well.
Well, you know, it's it's been a good first month of the year, I think pretty much.
I'm in London and you're not if I'm not doing the timeshofting aarage.
Although two days after this come out, I will be going to a wine and food festival at Mohegan Sun where a lot of the chefs from the Food Network will be hanging out. Very nice, so I'm looking forward to Yeah, it'll be good. Abnombing with Food Royalty anyway. Isaac Levin is here talking about something called dev Box, but we'll get to that in a minute. First, we have better no framework, A man, what do you got?
All right?
Well, quickly, I wanted to announce my new YouTube show called Guitar Carl.
Oh you are a guitar Carl.
Yeah, and you know I've been playing since I did The Math since nineteen seventy seven.
Yeah, it's been a while.
Yeah, that's when I started playing, so almost fifty years. And geez, I just I got inspired because I was out playing a gig and this guy who had started guitar later in life, I think he's even retired now, when he started learning songs and playing them out and he was just asking me questions about, you know, how
do you get over anxiety and imposter syndrome? And so we had this chat and I offered him some advice and he thought it was very very helpful, and I said, you know, maybe I had to do like a show. Well you know the things that I've learned about guitars and playing and sure all those things, because you know, we forget what we know. Yeah, And I think you're the one who told me that is that we have a tendency to assume that everybody knows.
That we know. Yeah, yeah, we keep forgetting that that. No, that's harder and knowledge.
Right. So the one thing I am not doing in this show is overplaying, like, you know, hitting you over the head with my guitar playing so that it makes you feel like why should I go on less then? Because I don't like that. I don't like when people do. Hey, just learn this magic formula and you two can be a rock star whatever.
No, Yeah, what I learned from you is that you're a great guitar player for exactly one reason. Tons of practice, tons of practice, tons, right, I've watched you do it.
So anyway, check that out. It's a just search YouTube for guitar Karl and there's a link too. And but before we move on, Richard, let's talk about nineteen thirty four.
Well it's a good one.
This is episode nineteen thirty four, and I went looking and we'll put the link to you know, take me back to Yeah, there was just so much that happened in nineteen thirty four. It's great that only I only got through three months and then I said, screw it, I can't.
You just had to stop.
I just had to stop. So that's why the link. But let me just summarize here. So Nazi Germany had its rise in nineteen thirty four. Thirty four was a big year. It was a big year. So they made it illegal for pastors and church officials to oppose the Nazi Party. Nice they abolished the Upper Chamber of the
German Parliament, further dismantling their democratic institutions. They enacted a eugenics law to prevent genetically inferior offspring, and that kind of paved the way towards some of their other halacious things that they went through. An anti Semitic stage performance ban forbid Jews from performing on German stages. This is all nineteen thirty but this is all like January February rights Nazi Germany's military issued a discriminatory policy banning Jews
from enlisting in the German military. Himmler consolidated police power in Nazi Germany, assuming complete command of all police forces in Germany, significantly expanding the centralized control and potential for state sponsored oppression. Moving on to Austria, it was the Austrian Civil War, short lived, but still it was there. Chancellor Engelbert Daulphuss dissolved. I don't know it was dissolved all political parties except his own right wing Fatherland Front.
That's nice effect.
Yeah, all other parties are illegal.
You can have one party.
Yeah, one party in Italy. Mussolini gave his famous sixty year Planned speech. That was on March eighteenth. And in some good news, Edwin Hubble discovered galaxy population.
He made that great photograph.
Yep, and that photograph revealed the number of galaxies in the Obserble universes comparable to the number of stars in the Milky Way.
And he was underestimating. Yes, it's more. And that was all before April. Yeah, no kidding.
So I encourage you to it's good to know history, and just go take a look through those events that happened in nineteen three.
Look at a year each week as we do.
Yeah, you have anything to add, Richard, throw.
In a couple. One is this is the year that the ham And organ was patented. Wow, got to do a music one, you know, Yeah.
Wow. Mother's Day. The first Mother's Day was in nineteen three.
Yeh, this is when the dust storms began, the giant dust storms. It was a two day dust storm across the West, such fine dust that it penetrated absolutely everything coded everything with dust, and the dust went up in the atmosphere and stayed there. It snowed red snow in New England that winter. The dust storm was in the summer.
That is crazy.
And I'll end with a fun one. The game Monopoly was created in nineteen thirty Oh wow wow, which was an indictment about concentration of wealth. The game, Yeah, that's right.
It was actually a cautionary game, wasn't it. That's right, and it was stolen and turned into a capitalistic celebration. So that's what I got. Richard, who's talking to us today.
Grabbing coppin tov our show eighteen thirteen, the one we did with one Isaac Levin maybe've heard of him m talking about developing on developing dot net on AWS. This is back in twenty two, so a couple of years back. And Aaron Morgan had this great comment again two years old, this great show. Guys really loved Isaac's knowledge of AWS and Azure and his ability to communicate the ins and outs without over complicating things. So Coffee and open Source
has a new subscriber, and that's Isaac's podcasts. Yeah, so I'll include I link in the show notes for that if you want to catch it. The first thing I did was go check to see if you still go on Isaac, because I know it's hard, but still do it.
The thing I did one this morning earlier today.
Yeah, Hey, we did too, how about that? Yeah, and I've done one, So Aaron, thank you so much for your comment, and a copy of music go ba is on its way to you. And if you'd like a copy of music, Cobey, I read a comment on the website at dot NetRocks dot com or on the facebooks. We publish every show there and if you comment there and every did on the show, we'll send you a copy of music go by.
And you can definitely follow us on social media to get a copy of music to codey. We've been on ex Twitter forever and we're also on mastadon and on blue Sky and some form of at Carl Franklin and at Rich Campbell you can find us. So with that, let us bring back to dot net ry our friend Isaac Levin. He is a now a developer advocate as well as a Microsoft MVP. He has over ten years of experience working as a developer for the web, mostly
a Microsoft ecosystem. Outside of work, he hosts a podcast called Coffee and open Source, where he interviews folks from across the tech industry, as well as building open source projects like presence Light and GitHub stat Tracker. He lives outside of Seattle, Washington, and likes to wind down from work with his wife, Ariana and his two children, Isaac and Avery. Welcome back.
Thank you for having me. Before we get started, I had because I'm a valid listener. I came up with some also cool things from nineteen thirty four if you don't mind cool ooh, yes, yeah, so's a big year. Yeah, well January first, a little facility called Alcatraz is opened for the first time.
Wow.
Also, if you're a baseball fan, big year in baseball, Babe Ruth and Nautra's retirement, and the Yankees had a player called up named Joe DiMaggio.
Nope, so I think there was a fire in Fenway Park. Wasn't there? Also?
There was there was?
Yep?
Yeah, yeah, no, yeah, again, thank you so much for having me. It's great to be here.
Great to have you again.
Always get to talk to you, Brod.
Last time we talked to you at Amazon, Right, that was correct? Dang aws stuff. Ye, and you've moved on. So are you're independent?
Now?
You work for Microsoft? Exactly where are you?
Yeah? So I'm I am a contractor, I mean vendor at Microsoft, focusing primarily on developer marketing, specifically around all the things that Microsoft talks about these days, get a co pilot, dev box, visual studio vs. Code AI, all the fun.
Things, you know. After I became an MVP, every year i'd get a dev box in the mail. Is that what we're talking That's what we're talking about here, right, Yeah? Yeah, yeah, the dev box. Yeah. No, I have to admit this is so new. I didn't I hadn't heard about it, and then I went out and took a look at it, and I looked at the website and I still don't know what it is.
So fair enough, fair enough, it's like.
Some cloud service for managing development teams in the cloud.
Yeah, let me So. I've been doing this for a while, not as long as you folks, but I remember a very particular point in time when you didn't really do
any development on your machine. You had vms right that had very specific things, right like that was a development uh and a way of managing developer teams is that you'd have VMS and then that VM maybe had this app on it, and you'd have like maybe two or three or four vms, right, and whether they were local on your machine or hosted somewhere like internally at your company didn't really matter. So what I like to think of when I think about Microsoft dev Box is that
but based in the cloud. Uh, there's a whole lot of other things that come for the ride as well. But I think if you're if you've been developing for a while, you remember remoting into VMS to do your developer work. Sure, sure, yeah, so just think of it as that, but you get access to a bunch of other stuff, and I'm as we'll talk about some of that throughout this conversation.
Yeah, it's kind of nice to have a dedicated machine for dev that you can access anywhere. Anytime you have to reinstall Windows, anytime you have to get a new laptop or whatever. It's it's just another thing that you have to install all this stuff. Yeah, I mean third party tools, everything I've you.
Know, I've switched jobs a few times. I've switched jobs since the last time I spoke with you folks, Right, so creating a like getting the machine to your happy place can be challenging. It's gotten a lot better, right Like, there are things like wind get, DSc and all sorts of cool things to be able to get you to where you want. But you still got to do all the Windows updates, make sure all the software is installed, make sure you're setupnd like, this is something that you know.
It can take days, if not weeks. Yeah, no for non sophisticated teams to do.
Right start organizations where they brought a new developer and it was two weeks before they could check in a piece of code.
Yeah yeah.
And with dev box, the goal is to kind of streamline that, like in a self service manner. So, for instance, I need dev box. There's a developer portal that I can go to. I literally click create dev box with some specifications that are defined by my team, and how over long it takes to provision that resource. I'm able to then connect to it via the Windows app via Bastion and the browser via RDP.
You just said it, You said it. The Windows app probably the most ubiquitous and mysterious and non specific term for a new product. Sure, the Windows App. Yeah, now, I kind of think of this as just like an RDP client.
It's similar, right, So I think what's cool about it is that it gives you in the RDP client, it gives you a lot of flexibility. But it's it's a bit behind the times, Like I don't remember when the like the last time the UI for it was was updated for it. Yes, but what the Windows app does It provides basically a single point of entry for all
of your quote unquote like remote things. So like if you have other VDI services that you might take advantage of, like Windows sixty five or as your virtual desktop, you can connect to those it also you can run it on other platforms, not just Windows.
Yeah.
So I think it's one of those things where you know, it's it's bringing a similar concept but to a new world.
I guess you could say, and is it more integrated with Windows? I guess what I'm saying, is there more stuff that you can do through the Windows app that you can't do through an RDP client.
I think it's a it's a bit it's definitely more straightforward, right, Like you can also create these things through dev hoome, which connects to Windows App. Uh, you know it it's one of those things where it just gives you a better pane of glass. It's also thinking. So what was it called RDC man does it do you folks?
Remember that where you.
Can manage like a bunch of them.
Yeah, yeah, to day.
So like for instance, the Windows App, regardless of what sort of service it is, it's all available for you in one single pane of glass too. So if you have like five or six step boxes, it's literally just a grid or a card system and you can connect to them, you can manage them, you can change settings.
For them, so it's not just a drop down correct.
Where you put in like an arbitrary IP address right or if you're fancy a host name right. You can also do things like you could do this in our in like the traditional like RDP tool as well, but can figure like multi moder support and in other things just to make your life as a developer a bit better.
Yeah, okay, all right, so all of this, and this is different from Windows Terminal, which is more about PowerShell and SSH yeah and that kind of thing. This is, I mean, RDP is one of the things that Windows app does, yes, but it does a bunch of other things as well, it's about all to do with remote connections, yep.
So what else does it do?
What else is Windows app do? Or what else is death box do?
Yeah?
What else does Windows app do? And then we'll get back to debt box.
Yeah, So like being able to I think one of the things that's also interesting is just the ability to create groups, so like you can specify like a these are the specific Basically, just think of it as a
management utility for remote for remote connections, Carl. So it's you know, and it sinks with all of the other like developer productivity services that exist for Windows, like you know, Richard mentioned terminal, there's also dev home, there's also dev drive, so all these things are kind of seamlessly connected and kind of managed by the looking of team.
All right.
So yeah, and it's also available on all the platforms Like rdpm app was only for Windows, but wind app is on a Mac and Android and you name it.
Yeah, I believe, yeah, believe it's I believe it's. Yeah, it's available for Android, iPhone, Windows. I'm not sure if there's a Linux client, so don't don't quote me on that. But again, it just gives you the ability also like web browser stuff too, Like you could do it via like using Bastion in the browser, which is which is a pretty cool thing to Oh and I just looked at the website metaquest VR headset. If you want to do that.
Too, that's something you want to do, Okay. I mean I'm also looking at this from a security perspective that now I don't if I got a work from Homer, I don't have to have them have a whole deb environment on their machine anymore. They just they only need a front end basically to call into a dev box that I have control over.
Yeah.
I think one of the things too, would be helpful to talk about is like who are the different kind of customers for dev box? Sure, because I think that there's some value there. Like the end customer obviously is the developer who's using the portal to create these things, right, But if you're an organization, more than likely you just don't give developers like, hey, here you go, just go and create this thing and install whatever software on there
and all of that sort of stuff. Like there's some management to it, right, So if you're in it, or if you're in OPS or quote unquote platform engineering, like the ability to put these guardrails on these systems to be able to say, oh, we have connected to intunes, so we have endpoint security, like that's provided by default, the ability to you know, configure network isolations, so like these particular dev boxes don't have access to certain resources, right.
Also there's some cool things around like not being able to like take screenshots of dev box, which is kind of a which is an interesting thing as well, for like the extra level of security, right, So like that's like the platform like OPS Systems administrator sort of lens, right, and then you have like this developer lead lens. Like think about it like this, Like I'm a developer lead,
I'm a manager. You know, we have four or five different projects that we're running at any particular point in time, and I need to kind of ensure that my developers are delivering code as quickly as possible and as efficiently as possible. So the ability to define the environments that these that these developers are creating is really valuable too. So taking advantage of things like customization, so like hey, maybe I want this suite of software on the machine.
Right when we get going, I can create base images off of that I can then type into things like making sure that I have the latest extensions and sold for vs code or visual Studio, making sure that caching is set up, like all of those things are done for me as well with dev box. And then obviously is the end user, Like I literally choose my project that I want, It shows me what the SKU is
going to be. It shows me where the region is going to be of that particular remote compute, and then I could create and then after spread time, I can just connect to it and then it's like it was there, which I think is pretty cool.
Right. So I think the question that's on a lot of people's mind is, yeah, what's the difference between I mean, is the f box and Windows App going to now be applicable for environments other than developer environments that are sort of just like client vms and the cloud. Like we have an Azure now that we use RDP for and by the same the inversion of that is, would we maybe use the Windows app to connect to our existing vms. Yeah.
So Windows App actually supports like all of the different remote services for like a remote desktop, So it supports azrovirsual desktop, it supports dev box, Windows sixty five Remote PC remote desktop services, right, So it supports all of those things already the Windows app does.
So it's really the new RDP client that we should think about using.
Yeah, yeah, think about it like that, right, with a with a with a more fluent looking UI and a management utility built into it instead, like you said, just want to drop down?
Cool?
Yeah.
The whole point here is I don't have to ask the dev to set up their machine and make sure they actually did it, right. It's that I specify a manifest of what's going to be on that machine, yep, and they when they when we go to make an instance for them, it stands it up with all the right stuff.
Well, think about it like this, Richard, Like you mentioned you were talking to a client and it took them two weeks to stand up an environment, yeah, right, before they could commit code. Like I mean, let's just call it is what it is.
Like.
That's like money spent on somebody who's not doing the thing you hired them to do.
Totally and very frustrated, right.
Like, yeah, exactly. I can imagine. I've been in situations where it took a couple of days and that was frustrating. I couldn't imagine starting a new job. You're excited starting a new job. You're getting like like I'm going to commit some code, I'm gonna do this thing, and then like, oh, by the way, it's going to take two weeks to provision an environment for you.
Now we're we're missing this license. We got to order it in because it was a physical thing, right, like I can't just get it online. And as well as do we have hardware for you? Da da da da da, Like all of that is irrelevant.
Yeah, and just replace that with what dev box offers, where it's hey, day one, go to the website. You've already been set up with access to be able to create a dev box for these particular projects that you're going to be working on. We'll walk you through, I'll show you how to do it. You go there, you click drop down, you click create, and then when it's done, you can go and look at all of them, or
you can connect via the Windows app. Again, like you're taking two weeks and you're taking it into like an hour.
Yeah.
What about the first part of my question, which is is dev box applicable to environments other than developer environments? Is it good for just setting up client PCs with installed software.
I think you'd useual as your virtual desktop for that.
Yeah, so I think that there's some value in talking about like what all the different offerings are.
Ye.
So, like Microsoft provides a few different options in this space, like this VDI or you know, Virtual Integrade Desktop, I think is what VDI stands for. But like there's three big ones. There's Azure Virtual Desktop, there's Windows to sixty five, and there's dev Box. So you know, all of these things kind of sit like stand on top of the same infrastructure, right. I think what's really different among them
is the use case. Right, So if you're connecting to a thin client or you're doing like light productivity services, like you're just using and Outlook and things like that, like Azure Virtual Desktop or Windows sixty five is probably the better option for you. But what dev box provides is access to more high performance compute, so the be able to have like sixty four cores or you know a whole bunch of ram.
Okay, what I have is I have a virtual machine in Azure right now, but I set up as a VM with Windows Desktop right client Windows ten and you know you pay for use right, and I have that up there to do my various videos that I do. But I think what I hear you saying is that you're going to pay a lot more in that situation then you would pay to access the same kind of resources like the cores and the RAM and all that stuff that you would get an Azure dev box. Am I reading that correctly? Yeah?
So, like Microsoft dev Box more than likely is less expensive than just hosting a VM and Azure and then opening the RDP port and then doing it like that.
Yeah.
Also, like I don't know if you have gone down the path of like making sure that that OS is up to date and most secure. Yeah, but yeah, like it's just one of those things. Yeah, Like it's one of those things where it's kind of done for you with depth box, right, Like it it's a managed service for developer compute, which I think is pretty cool.
And when you go in with it, is it just like accessing a Windows desktop?
Yeah?
I mean, are you accessing a Windows desktop? Yeah?
So yeah, So, I mean the experience with the Windows app is very similar to RDP, right, Like a window pops up and you see the desktop and all of that, And like I said, it supports Bastion and the browser. So like if you wanted to connect to your remote compute via the browser, you have the ability to do that too. Obviously, the experience has a bit different versus your connecting via the browser versus just connecting via the
Windows app. But it's one of those things where it just it makes a ton more sense to use the infrastructure and you the managed service then kind of rolling it yourself, depending what your use case is.
Yeah, yeah, well in my case, it's going to save a lot of money, and that's very compelling. Like you wouldn't think, Okay, it's just a VM, but now you're you're talking about a lot more resources for a lot less money.
Yeah, and I know that. It's like like the idea of like talking about pricing is is probably scary, but I'll just I'll just throw this out there right, Like I'm looking at the pricing calculator for debt for dev boxes. I was curious, So if you want thirty two CPUs ordering twenty gigs a RAM and two Terribyte hard drive, the max monthly price is six hundred and twenty eight dollars a month.
Yeah, okay, and you probably.
Don't need that but that's that's my point. If you want, if you want something that's a bit more manageable, like most of it is around like the one thirty to two fifty price point per month.
You know, really this gets huge is if you're not working on it every day, right, yes, right right, Like if you've got a debt, you don't want to license a copy of studio and in all that to a manager who fires it up once a week, the fact that they can run it for a day, yeah and then be done.
Right now, in my VM, I only turned on when I use it because if it's just sitting there running, you're just throwing money down the tooth to throwing money.
But yeah, yeah, and like there's also like cost like savings like options built into dev box too, So like when you so when you create a dev box, you have the ability to specify like if you want it to auto hibernate, so if it hasn't been used for sixty minutes, shut it down, right, if you want to shut down at particular time, like maybe seven seven at night and shut it down, it shuts it down for you.
So it's one of those things where it's not continuously running unless you want it to continuously.
Run, right, and you are charged by the hour. Right, Yes, so you know the two hundred and fifty dollars a max month price is based on three bucks an hour.
Yeah, yeah, in this particular case, it's a five ninety six right for that. Yeah, So, like I mean more than likely if you're working forty hours a week, you know, forty times six.
It's you're going to hit the max.
Right.
That's the whole thing is they've capped it. Yeah, well below that.
But it's one of those things too where it's just all of these different experiences that come with it as well, right, Like you know, the customization's thing, Like we'll talk about that for a second, like being able to define, like with Yamil, like all of the things that you want installing that machine when it gets created, and you can specify that in a get up repo. You can point dev box their dev center, which is the underlying you know,
resource and Azure to that get up repo. So whenever a developer in that particular project creates something, all that stuff is there. That's cool, right, So it's just yeah, like again, these things are just done for you instead of you having to kind of do all that work yourself and it's great and experiences like you know, maybe you have Like I was talking about this with somebody at a conference a couple of months ago, Like he had a VM on a machine that like had an
old wind like dot net framework app. And I've been there, like I had to remote into a VM that when like dott net one dot one on it, for instance. And like with dev box, you can just have a dev box that just lives in the world that has you know, visual Zuo twenty nineteen and you know, a dot net framework four dot seven app, and you can just leave that there and we need to make changes to it. You remote into it, you do your thing,
and then you get rid of it. And these things are ephemeral too, like they don't have to live forever. Like you can do your work. Maybe you're doing a maybe you're reviewing a PR. You log in, you get the code down, you review the PR, everything works, and then when you're done, you just get rid of the thing.
I wonder if you build this per project.
Yes, well that's the whole. That's one of the underlying core concepts of dev box. So like there's dev Center, which is the thing that holds like the underlying resources for dev box, as well as Azur diploma environments, which is the other thing that exists in this space. That's like creating and provisioning like environments in Azure. Like dev
environment says numbers, what have you? So at the dev center level, a dev center can have x amount of projects and those projects you define them as basically a combination of two things image like what the actual environment is and networking. Right, and you have the flexibility to you know, bring your own networking configurations like your own v net, your own network connection, or you can just check a box says hey, just post this as somewhere in Microsoft's network that's close to.
Where I live. Right, Very cool, But you also want to be close to company resources for example, like there's a bunch of a bunch of interesting questions there again that mostly ad men would care about more than the dev They just wanted to work. Yeah, what about Actually let's take a break, and then I want to talk about licensing because it's really romantic.
Nice. We'll be right back. You know, dot net six has officially reached the end of support and now is the time to upgrade dot net eight is well supported on aw Learn more at AWS dot Amazon dot com, slash dot net and we're back. It's dot netrock some Carl Franklin. It's my friend Richard Campbell, Hey, and our friend Isaac Levin, and we're talking about Microsoft dev Box. And I'll tell you what, man, this sounds so cool. I mean I kind of thought it was okay, yeah,
another way to access VMS, but no, it's really cool. Yeah, it's it's accessing large amounts of RAM and compute. If you want to, you turn it on, you do your thing, you turn it off, You provision easily and create on a project by project basis is one of the things that Richard was just asking about and Isaac was just about to go into some details about that.
Yeah, like you wanted to talk about licensing, right, licensing?
Yeah, yeah, like how many copies of visual studio I need to own here?
M Well, so that's so with visual studios specific Like visual studio licensing is how it's always going to be. It's per user, per month, right, right, So like if you have a dev box, if you have six dev boxes, it's just one visual stuio license.
Interesting for as long as it's one user.
Correct.
Yeah, so when you log into visual Studio for the first time, like it'll ask for your MSA, like your Microsoft identity or your Gettel identity or whatever. Like, I mean, there's nothing different than having like three or four different work machines, right.
Yeah, but it's only one person work on at a time. But it doesn't help me for that manager that occasionally wants access to dev tools, I still have to get a full license for them, correct, Yeah, although I'm not consuming dev box resources when it's not running.
Yeah, and you know, like this and one thing to maybe call out as well is that this is like full blown Windows. So it's got WSL, right, it's got hypervisor support, it's got Docker support. Like, it's not like other services that you know, I'll just say it, like maybe it's like vs code in the browser that you
can access, which is cool. But like if you're building apps and you want to build it in a Windows environment, but maybe you need to hop down to WSL to do a couple of things or whatever, like you have that flexibility to do.
So, right, right, not things you would normally do. Certainly, I think you want to do an Azure desktop or an Attrir virtual desktop talk to me about GitHub code spaces because are these kind of the same thing.
So it's it's funny because I kind of I go back and forth with this a little bit, but I think at the end of the day, they both satisfy a specific use case. I'm a developer. I want to be able to build my app, but I don't want to do it on my machine. I want to take advantage of remote services to.
Do that, right, right.
The primary difference between code spaces and dev box is what I just said. So code spaces it's kind of vs code in the browser. You're remoting into a Linux container and you're doing all that stuff. Great experience, especially if you come from a VS code background for sure,
so like you know the tools. But like if you're a Windows developer and you've been building things in Windows and you can use visual Studio and you've been doing all these things or even writer, like, it's just a better experience for that person to use debt box because it is fully managed Windows and you.
Like IDEs like that's why you're in Rider or studio because you see the ID is valuable to you. Yeah, and where VS code is very much more a role of your own Yeah.
And even like let's just just throw on the other side too, Like maybe you are a developer who takes advantage of something like dev containers, which is kind of like being able to create like a singular environment for your app inside of visual CEO code. Like that's what a lot of code spaces and some of these other tools are kind of built on top of or are used in insul it in in in help with that, like you can do that in Windows as well in dev box. So it's just a it's a more end
to end full experience. You don't have subsets of different developer experiences. You can do everything. The only thing is it's Windows. It's Windows. So like if you come from a developer team that they don't use Windows, maybe they use mac os or maybe they use Linux, Like it's a different experience for them.
Sure, but it doesn't sound like they won't work together too. That If I've got folks that would prefer to work in that Linux space, they can work in code spaces and they'll be fine checking in code into the same repository and the same set of actions kicking off Like all that's fine. And for those who prefer a Windows and studio experience. They're in dev box yep.
Yeah, it's I couldn't have said it better myself.
Okay, well, I appreciate it like that. Bring the tools where people are right, don't try and and scram square peg square peg in a round hole like nobody's happy when you do that. And either way, I think I think the studio I've always found it amusing. Like visual studio me seems like the perfect beginner's tool in the fact that everything is already there, except that it looks like a cockpit of a seven forty seve when you
open it up, like it intimidates everyone. Even I've been used the flipping things as it was invented, it's still scares me. Where studio, you know, code seems way more approachable, But it's really not that easy to learn on either because you've got to pull all the pieces together. You've got to make decisions you're not qualified to make. Early on, I.
Was having a conversation and I love visual coeo code. I want to say that before I make this next statement. I was having a conversation with somebody and they were talking about like how loaded visual studio is, for instance, right, and they were talking about how Vigius code is so lightweight and whatever, and I asked them, like, oh, so, what's it like without extensions in Vision CEO code And they said, what do you mean, I have a bunch
of extensions. I'm like, so you should open up your task manager and look at the RAM usage for VS code.
Then how lightweight is it?
Now? Yeah?
Exactly right. So I mean again, these are great tools, and they and they solve very specific purposes and they're all awesome, But like, let's not kid ourselves that, like Visual Studio code can get just as big as Visual Studio.
But it's a difference between having a knife drawer and a Swiss Army knife. Right, like the Night Story, you do get to pick which ones you put in the Swiss Army knife, they're all there, and the studio is a Swiss Army knife. There's stuff in there you don't need. Also all the stuff you do need.
I don't know. I've I really still love visual studio and I have my way of working and my layouts and stuff, and I don't find it a you know, a barrier to working at all, and I don't find it gets in the way. Then again, I have an I nine with sixty four gigs of rice.
And you look at the available sex for a dev box, there's a reason.
Well, I think too, Like, I think it just depends on what kind of developer you probably started as, right, Like if you were a developer and maybe you were building client apps, like yeah, like Visual Studio is great for building client aps. Still is great for building client apps.
And I think if you're maybe of a younger generation where you have been building more like web first apps, yep, Like you're like, Okay, why do I need all of this popum circumstance of Visual Studio if I'm just building a web app?
Yea, yeah, so that's Yeah, it's a lot of ceremony that isn't necessary for them until you teach them the debugger. Like, if you're gonna win anybody over on visual Studio, it's experienced this debugging experience. And now when differently, when.
If Blazer is your web framework of choice, the debugger is just absolutely amazing.
It's magic. Yeah.
Yeah, But I will say that the Visual Stuio code experience for dot net is getting better and better every day, So let's let's let's not throw that away.
Everybody's making make trying to make tools better, and it's like again it's I'm not hating on it. You can all work together, work a way you like.
Yeah, and that Yeah, I'm not hating on code either. I just know I do. I just do. It's comfortable and.
That kind of like if thinking about dev box, like if you if thinking about like the different types of dot net developers that are right, Like you know, you might have a developer that's building WPF apps, or maybe they're building Maui apps, or maybe they're building something with a spire, right, like you know, those in my brain are completely different workloads. So if I had one singular developer environment, I would have to install every workload for
visual Studio to be able to do that work. And that's kind of a bummer, right. What a better solution is, at least to me, is you have a dev box for this project that's a Maui app, this project that's in a spire app, this project I need Docker and a bunch of other stuff, and then that way, like all of your stuff is like in this nice little containerized like world. You don't have to mess with stuff to get like oh I have to go and switch over to this project app, and I have to do these things.
I'm thinking in terms of five years down the road where you still got a client running V two and you're on V six yep, and you can have a dev environment for working in V two. Yeah.
And one thing too. I was thinking about this the other day, Like I used to work help desk when I was in college, and they this is back in the back in the crazy days when there was people whose job it was the test.
Products weird answer phones for that matter.
Right, And I remember, like I was having a conversation with one of these QA folks and she was telling me about like how she needed a VM that had different versions of browsers on them, right, because you build an app for the web and all of a sudden this st offs working on the latest version of Edge or the latest version of Firefox or whatever. Right, And I was thinking about, like, that's a pretty good use case for dev box too, where it's like, hey, I
need a very specific version of this browser. It's available to me, said me. Having to figure out how to uninstall and then get an installer for an old version and then do all of that dance.
I know, this isolating my project and possibly even isolating my version number. I mean, you want to retire those old VERSI numbers. But sooner or later you get a customer, you know, like the US Navy is still running Windows XP. You get a customer says, no, we will be running this until it wouldn't have time.
They wouldn't do that, Richard, would me.
Yeah, but it's okay because they're more than willing to pay the support charge.
Sure, man, The money's not the issue now. The question is what do you got to do to not make yourself insane? Right? Like, how do you keep taking care of it? And this seems like a really great way to encapsulate those old versions, so you're right back in the environment meant for that version.
Yeah.
One of my favorite things to do at conferences if somebody from like the runtime team or the dot net team is there, just talking to them about like all of their fault Like Jared Parsons is a really good person to listen.
To, right, that guy's been through it all, right.
I'll just sit there and he'll be saying things that I'm like, I have no idea what you're talking about, but it's fascinating, absolutely fascinating.
But yeah, these are the folks that are dealing with all of these different kinds of customers. Yeah, you know, and they've got you name it, like.
Yeah, I think it was a don At KOMF there was somebody on the Visual Studio team who did a session about dev box, specifically using dev box to like build different versions of Visual Studio because you know, twenty nineteen.
If I need to do some work in twenty nineteen, like I don't want to have twenty nineteen and twenty twenty two and it's all on my machine, especially like the dev versions of them, which anybody who has got any insight into how Visual Studio is built, like, it is not a it is NI trivial process, no huge.
Yeah.
So being able to kind of again segment out these things is cool.
Yeah, it is interesting, and it is good not to install it on workstations when you don't have to, like yeah, yeah, yeah. Pretty quickly we get to a place where it's like, now you shouldn't have a local copy every time you start a project used to light up a dev box on this.
Yeah, especially if all the licensing works right. So, like when you create a dev box, you already tied into like the licensing that you have because it's an Azure, right, and you're taking advantage of the licensing that you have for whatever tools you're installing on there.
Right.
So again, like my question to anybody who is like why do I want this? Especially if you're work at a big company, Like why would I want this? It's like, have you ever had to like manage a VM yourself, like creating it, updating the software, dealing with it when they want to roll out patches? Like sounds like a bummer. Just you have dev box and just just code to your heart's content.
Yeah, it's sort of the platform as a service, software as a service. Yeah, it's a SaaS pass.
Yeah.
Yeah, like it's a I mean it yeah, it's but it's like technically infrastructure's service.
Yeah, it's all three.
Right, yeah, So I mean let's just call it. Let's just call it service. It's just a service service.
I like that. I like it's just a service.
Yeah, very good.
Okay, is there anything we haven't really covered? I mean I'm already sold, and I think anybody who's listening is already going there. Where do we get it? So?
Yeah, it's it's crazy because I'll take credit cards over the phone. So if you wanted to just hand that over to me, we'll get you set up.
With den box.
Just the price doesn't scare people off, because we were talking about the maximum monthly price. Yeah, it's build out by the hour. There's a monthly storage fee, like yeah.
And the price that I gave was like for the most powerful compete you could use, which I mean if you were if you were to if you were to build a desktop with thirty two virtual cpuke with thirty two cores, yeah, one and twenty eight gigs a RAM and two terribies a hard drive, it would cost you thousands.
Thousands of dollar. Yeah, yeah for sure.
But like like I mentioned, the hourly compute is what the real number is?
You can go.
I'll make sure there's a note to the pricing calculators. People could do it themselves, like it's six bucks an hour, and if you're doing forty hours a week, you know that's one hundred and sixty hours a year, one hundred and sixty hours time six Do the quick math, right, like it caps out around that number.
Yeah right.
So but for something that's more appropriate for you know, a developer, maybe thirty two gigs of RAM maybe maybe even eight CPUs or something like that, eight cores. You know, you're you're talking what a dollar an hour?
It's like so like like I said, like I think I might mention this that the the ACPU thirty two gigs terabyte hard drive, it maxes out at one ninety five. It means it's a dollar fifty yeah a month, which is a dollar fifty hour.
Yeah, that's great. So that's great.
Yeah, I mean especially when you compare it to like just running a VM.
Yep, yes, like yeah, so and if you don't use it that month, you don't get built any hourly compute. You just get built a storage correct.
Yeah, so, which which is which is another benefit of using these services, like they just you can turn them off or you can delete them completely.
Yeah right, you can win. You can just leave them as a template. You could regenerate when you want it again. Just make sure you get the files towards somewhere else, which you're probably paying for.
But can you attach data disks that already exists in Azure.
If you would do If you could do that, I would need to look, but it would that would be a matter if you would probably have to do something via the Azure c l I.
Right, because is it actually considered a VM, like can I because I can do that with vms and the cl I.
Well, it's it's if you do a lot of digging around, you can look at some of the primitive resources that exist, like the NICK and the But like you're not going to have the ability to have that full level of management that you could if you were just to create like a VM scale set or whatever.
But that might be good, Like I might have all my tools and all my you know, like I might have a a stash of code that's on a hard drive that's not in a repo somewhere, you know.
Yeah, I mean especially like I mean if you have like if for instance, maybe you have it like an Azure Azure blob or as your filestore, like you could like when you provision the VM or provision the dev box, you can have a little you could say, hey, run this Azure CLI task and attaches to my to my PC, attaches this.
Data disc external disc.
Right.
Yeah, So that's something you can definitely do as well, especially if you have that use case where maybe you have like share, like maybe you're not fancying you don't use like private nugat feeds, Like maybe you still ship around DLLs on servers because that's the thing that people still do, like being able to link up those things as well.
What's that?
Yeah, exactly.
Very cool.
Is there anything we missed?
No, So we talked about like the customization experience, So you can customize dev box at the project level like what we were talking about, but also the individual level. Like maybe I'm a developer and I have very specific tastes, maybe I want dark theme in Windows, maybe I want specific settings and windows to be set. I can do that myself by when I create a dev box, I can just say use this customization file and that now
be attached on top of the team's customization. Also, like you can define images in this space too, so like every single time a dev box, like I provision a new dev box resource, I can basically create an image from that directly. This could be referenced later. We didn't really talk about in tune, but I mean that's not super exciting, Like it's.
Just what's the role of intune in this.
It's it's true like every other device in your I guess fleet of devices, so you can get the endpoint security. You can make sure that you have like malware protection, all that stuff that you would get out of the box with Intune, even if you wanted to like push software right right, Like you can do that with dev
box too. It's it's not slim thing. A lot of folks have asked me, like, okay, so it's completely separate from like my existing process, right, Like maybe you're an IT admin and you've like you live and die by in tune, right, and you've been doing all this stuff, like, Okay, now is dev box thing I have to learn this new dev box nomenclature and way of doing things. No, it's a device. You connect to it the same way
when you built. When you create dev box, it automatically as a tier in Tune and from there, like it's just a matter of just managing it like you would any other device.
How about chocolatey. Can we run chocolated scripts?
Of course?
Yeah, you can run whatever you want. You can run win get, you can run Chocolity, you can run uh, I don't know Bash scripts and WSL. It's Windows, so you can do whatever you want with it. Like, so the customization's experience that I was talking about there the team of Microsoft is built like a default catalog, which is basically like a set of predefined tasks like wind get is one, chocolate is one. So that means like every h dev box that you create, like it already
has Chocolatey enabled by default. It has like power orshell wired up the exact way you want it, with all the paths mapped as when get DSSE set up for you, Like these are things that we take advance, we take for granted as developers because we just always had to do it. So it's like, Okay, I got to go and I got to get the Chocolatey installer. I got to get this installer path exactly, so it's kind of handled for you. So we talked about that. We talked
about in tune like we just did. We talked about the Windows App, we talked about like you know, different projects, different versions of projects, different tasks. That's pretty cool. I mean, I think we hit a lot of the stuff. I mean I think the biggest thing is, you know, what are some of the things that you would like there to be right, Like you know, we've been talking about this.
I think one thing that the team is always looking to do is is hear feedback from people like Carl, You've you've kind of had this pain of kind of doing it yourself, right, Like it sounds like you've already kind of been sold on dev box, But like, is there anything that I didn't mention that You're like, I need something like this, something like this around.
Yeah.
Basically, just the cost savings alone is worth it, because you know, I'm already used to tweaking systems, so that's a bonus for me. That's a little time saver, but it's not a it wouldn't be a deal breaker.
Well, and they and the dev center having a repository of this is what the configuration.
Is like, Yeah, that's right.
It's kind of a force down the righteous path setting up dev box because it makes you do the right thing.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. The phrase that the phrase that we like to use is self service with guardrails, Right, I like it. That's like that, that's like the go to phrase. It's like, you want developers to have autonomy, you want them to be happy, but let's be real, like it, admin still have a role to play in organizations because they're always thinking about the bad actors, the what could go wrong, and you know, making sure that we're following all the right policies that our organization has in place
is important. Also, one thing, like if anybody wants to know, like what's in the future for dev Box, like the roadmap is available publicly online, so you can like just you know, go to the go to the dev box docs and learn, or you can just use search engine and go dev Box roadmap and it'll take you in. Larro's a list of all the like the different like key like deliverable groups that exist and what's going on in each of those spaces.
In true Microsoft fashion.
Right, yeah, it's on.
Get up. It's great, very cool, awesome, all right, Isaac, thanks very much. What's next for you? What's in your inbox?
I think that the big thing, obviously we're recording this kind of at the beginning of twenty twenty five. My big thing is I started to do some tick talking. So I do this silly thing where I talk about tech in a cold plunge for five minutes because why not. And I think, and I think one of the things that I've kind of give myself as a resolution for this year is I want to understand how LMS work,
Like I really I understand the concept. I understand a lot of the like the primitive sort of ideas, but I really want to understand like the different ways that MS can bring value to people, because I think it's not going away, that's for sure. And you know, I want to like learn how to build my own models. I want to learn how to you know, train those models, and evaluate those models and do all those things. So that's kind of the thing that I've been starting to pay attention.
To this year.
Well, I got a show coming up for you friend, all right, Well.
I'll listen to it for sure. You already know I'm going to listen to it.
All right, all right, this is great. It's been great talking to you again, Isaac.
Thank you, Yeah, thanks for having me.
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