Customize dev boxes to meet the unique needs of your teams, no custom images required.

In this article

When should I use Dev box Team customizations?
Why should I use Dev Box customizations instead of creating my own custom image?
How is this different from the Dev Box customization feature that I’ve already used?
Register for the private preview
Next Steps:
Sharing feedback with the Microsoft Dev Box team

Welcome, Insider! We’re excited to share with you a private preview of a new set of team-level customization features that are coming to Microsoft Dev Box.

Dev Box Team Customizations builds on top of the Dev Box customization platform, by providing a workflow where you as a Project Admin or a Dev Center Admin can use the familiar Dev Box yaml-based customization platform to create ready-to-code Dev Box configurations for entire teams of developers, and optimize them through Dev Center’s inbuilt imaging capabilities without additional investment, and without having developers to find and pick the most relevant configuration file each time.

When should I use Dev box Team customizations?

We recommend using Dev Box team customizations to create ready-to-code configuration for your DevCenter project(s), so that developers who use those projects inherit that configuration whenever they create a Dev Box, without any additional instructions or investment from their side. Typical scenarios include developer tools, repositories, code libraries and packages, running build scripts, and others that complete the set up of a developer environment for a given team.

Why should I use Dev Box customizations instead of creating my own custom image?

Dev Box customizations allows you to define a shared Dev Box configuration for your whole team without having to invest in setting up an imaging solution like Packer and Azure VM Image Templates, and provides a light weight alternative that allow central platform engineering teams to delegate Dev Box configuration management to the teams that use them. Dev Box customizations also provides an in-built way of optimizing your team’s Dev Box customizations by flattening them into a custom image using the same customization file, without the need to manage additional infrastructure or maintain image templates

How is this different from the Dev Box customization feature that I’ve already used?

The public preview of the customization platform is catered towards personal settings of every individual developer: it allows developers to attach a yaml based customization file when creating their Dev Box to control the development environment that their Dev Box contains. While teams of developers can share common yaml files, we recognize that this might be inefficient and error-prone, or against compliance policies. Dev Box team customizations provides a workflow for team leads, project admins, and devcenter admins to pre-configure these on Dev Box pools, so that a developer creating a Dev Box does not need to source and find a configuration for themselves.

Register for the private preview

Please skip this step if your subscription has already been onboarded to the preview. While in private preview now, you’ll need to contact the Microsoft Dev Box product team to register your subscription with the feature. You can use the following form to provide the required details to our team and we’ll follow-up once you’re registered:

New to Microsoft Dev Box? You’ll first need to setup your own Microsoft Dev Box instance before you try out Customizations - learn more.

Next Steps:

By using this private preview of Dev Box you agree to the license terms of the Private Preview Agreement

During the Private Preview of Dev Box Customizations, we’ll use the https://github.com/Azure/dev-box repo to communicate with Insiders like yourself.

Use Issues to report any new issues or track any ongoing support requests.
Chat with the team using Discussions to submit any feedback, ideas, new feature requests or to collaborate asynchronously.