This article provides answers to some of the most commonly asked questions about Microsoft Dev Box.
Why does it take 25 minutes or more to provision a dev box?
The provisioning process for a dev box involves interacting with several services, including authenticating with Microsoft Entra ID. The new dev box must be created, initiate networking connectivity services, authenticate to and join the Microsoft Entra ID, register with Intune, and check for any Microsoft Entra security requirements. Depending on the complexity of the dev box definition, there might also be installation and configuration tasks on the dev box itself to provide you with the environment you need to start work. When your dev box is fully provisioned, it's running, ready for you to sign in.
Where should I create my Dev Center, Projects and Pools for optimal performance?
Your Dev Center and Projects are generally created where your resources are located. For example, if your headquarters is in California, we would recommend the West US region.
For optimal latency, we recommend creating pools close to the developer's physical location. For example, if a developer is based in India, we recommend creating a dev box in the Central India region. This is generally thought of as a best practice to improve typing speeds as developers work within their dev boxes.
Developers primarily spend their time typing and moving their mouse within their Dev Box. We recommend optimizing for typing latency, since these actions affect development teams the most.
How are backup, high-availability, and disaster recovery implemented in Microsoft Dev Box?
Dev Box doesn't provide high-availability and disaster recovery functions. If there's an Azure regional outage, customers lose access to Dev Box in that region. They must implement manual disaster recovery and re-create new Dev Boxes. Customers should design and implement high-availability and disaster recovery solutions that suit their requirements.
What is the preferred monitoring solution?
- Project admins can view dev box usage at pool level. Project admins can select a pool and see list of dev boxes that are currently in use.
- For Dev Box connectivity metrics, use the Cloud PC connection quality report (preview). Dev Box is built on top of Cloud PC. So, you can see the connectivity health of each dev box by using the Cloud PC dashboard in the Microsoft Intune admin center.
Can I use a smart card, or other physical device with Dev Box?
Yes. Dev Box users can use smart card and other devices that are connected to the physical machine. Since Dev Box uses same RDP client as Azure Virtual Desktop, you can review following documentation to learn about all the different capabilities supported by RDP client. You can also review RDP client capabilities on different operating systems. Compare the features of remote desktop clients - Redirection comparison
Can I use Linux as my development environment?
Microsoft Dev Box supports Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) for Linux scenarios. This support enables users to use Linux environment alongside Windows tools. GitHub users who use VS Code for development can use GitHub Codespaces.
What should I do when a network connection health check fails?
Dev Box service is built on top of Windows 365 Enterprise and uses the same Azure network connection health checks. Such health checks ensure that Dev Box provisioning is successful and end-user experiences are optimal. If a health check fails, select view details to see what is causing the failure and address the issue from there. For example, your network policy might block the following service URLs and ports Network requirements for Windows 365.
Can I prevent users copying data or code from the Dev Box to their laptop using the clipboard?
You can prevent users copying data or code from the Dev Box to their local machine by disabling the clipboard redirection feature in the RDP client. You can manage this setting through a device configuration policy in Microsoft Intune. For more information, see RDP device redirection settings.