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Speaker 1: dot com. Hey, welcome back to dot net rocks. It's
Speaker 1: Carl Franklin and I'm Richard Cawell and wow, wow, wow, wow.
Speaker 1: It's been a while. Yeah, it's been a ride.
Speaker 2: It's been a holiday season. You know, we've done them things,
Speaker 2: so it all is well.
Speaker 1: Well, you know, it's it's been a good first month
Speaker 1: of the year, I think pretty much.
Speaker 2: I'm in London and you're not if I'm not doing
Speaker 2: the timeshofting aarage.
Speaker 1: Although two days after this come out, I will be
Speaker 1: going to a wine and food festival at Mohegan Sun
Speaker 1: where a lot of the chefs from the Food Network
Speaker 1: will be hanging out. Very nice, so I'm looking forward
Speaker 1: to Yeah, it'll be good. Abnombing with Food Royalty anyway.
Speaker 1: Isaac Levin is here talking about something called dev Box,
Speaker 1: but we'll get to that in a minute. First, we
Speaker 1: have better no framework, A man, what do you got?
Speaker 2: All right?
Speaker 1: Well, quickly, I wanted to announce my new YouTube show
Speaker 1: called Guitar Carl.
Speaker 2: Oh you are a guitar Carl.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and you know I've been playing since I did
Speaker 1: The Math since nineteen seventy seven.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's been a while.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's when I started playing, so almost fifty years.
Speaker 1: And geez, I just I got inspired because I was
Speaker 1: out playing a gig and this guy who had started
Speaker 1: guitar later in life, I think he's even retired now,
Speaker 1: when he started learning songs and playing them out and
Speaker 1: he was just asking me questions about, you know, how
Speaker 1: do you get over anxiety and imposter syndrome? And so
Speaker 1: we had this chat and I offered him some advice
Speaker 1: and he thought it was very very helpful, and I said,
Speaker 1: you know, maybe I had to do like a show.
Speaker 1: Well you know the things that I've learned about guitars
Speaker 1: and playing and sure all those things, because you know,
Speaker 1: we forget what we know. Yeah, And I think you're
Speaker 1: the one who told me that is that we have
Speaker 1: a tendency to assume that everybody knows.
Speaker 2: That we know. Yeah, yeah, we keep forgetting that that. No,
Speaker 2: that's harder and knowledge.
Speaker 1: Right. So the one thing I am not doing in
Speaker 1: this show is overplaying, like, you know, hitting you over
Speaker 1: the head with my guitar playing so that it makes
Speaker 1: you feel like why should I go on less then?
Speaker 1: Because I don't like that. I don't like when people do. Hey,
Speaker 1: just learn this magic formula and you two can be
Speaker 1: a rock star whatever.
Speaker 2: No, Yeah, what I learned from you is that you're
Speaker 2: a great guitar player for exactly one reason. Tons of practice,
Speaker 2: tons of practice, tons, right, I've watched you do it.
Speaker 1: So anyway, check that out. It's a just search YouTube
Speaker 1: for guitar Karl and there's a link too. And but
Speaker 1: before we move on, Richard, let's talk about nineteen thirty four.
Speaker 2: Well it's a good one.
Speaker 1: This is episode nineteen thirty four, and I went looking
Speaker 1: and we'll put the link to you know, take me
Speaker 1: back to Yeah, there was just so much that happened
Speaker 1: in nineteen thirty four. It's great that only I only
Speaker 1: got through three months and then I said, screw it,
Speaker 1: I can't.
Speaker 2: You just had to stop.
Speaker 1: I just had to stop. So that's why the link.
Speaker 1: But let me just summarize here. So Nazi Germany had
Speaker 1: its rise in nineteen thirty four. Thirty four was a
Speaker 1: big year. It was a big year. So they made
Speaker 1: it illegal for pastors and church officials to oppose the
Speaker 1: Nazi Party. Nice they abolished the Upper Chamber of the
Speaker 1: German Parliament, further dismantling their democratic institutions. They enacted a
Speaker 1: eugenics law to prevent genetically inferior offspring, and that kind
Speaker 1: of paved the way towards some of their other halacious
Speaker 1: things that they went through. An anti Semitic stage performance
Speaker 1: ban forbid Jews from performing on German stages. This is
Speaker 1: all nineteen thirty but this is all like January February
Speaker 1: rights Nazi Germany's military issued a discriminatory policy banning Jews
Speaker 1: from enlisting in the German military. Himmler consolidated police power
Speaker 1: in Nazi Germany, assuming complete command of all police forces
Speaker 1: in Germany, significantly expanding the centralized control and potential for
Speaker 1: state sponsored oppression. Moving on to Austria, it was the
Speaker 1: Austrian Civil War, short lived, but still it was there.
Speaker 1: Chancellor Engelbert Daulphuss dissolved. I don't know it was dissolved
Speaker 1: all political parties except his own right wing Fatherland Front.
Speaker 2: That's nice effect.
Speaker 1: Yeah, all other parties are illegal.
Speaker 2: You can have one party.
Speaker 1: Yeah, one party in Italy. Mussolini gave his famous sixty
Speaker 1: year Planned speech. That was on March eighteenth. And in
Speaker 1: some good news, Edwin Hubble discovered galaxy population.
Speaker 2: He made that great photograph.
Speaker 1: Yep, and that photograph revealed the number of galaxies in
Speaker 1: the Obserble universes comparable to the number of stars in
Speaker 1: the Milky Way.
Speaker 2: And he was underestimating. Yes, it's more. And that was
Speaker 2: all before April. Yeah, no kidding.
Speaker 1: So I encourage you to it's good to know history,
Speaker 1: and just go take a look through those events that
Speaker 1: happened in nineteen three.
Speaker 2: Look at a year each week as we do.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you have anything to add, Richard, throw.
Speaker 2: In a couple. One is this is the year that
Speaker 2: the ham And organ was patented. Wow, got to do
Speaker 2: a music one, you know, Yeah.
Speaker 1: Wow. Mother's Day. The first Mother's Day was in nineteen three.
Speaker 2: Yeh, this is when the dust storms began, the giant
Speaker 2: dust storms. It was a two day dust storm across
Speaker 2: the West, such fine dust that it penetrated absolutely everything
Speaker 2: coded everything with dust, and the dust went up in
Speaker 2: the atmosphere and stayed there. It snowed red snow in
Speaker 2: New England that winter. The dust storm was in the summer.
Speaker 1: That is crazy.
Speaker 2: And I'll end with a fun one. The game Monopoly
Speaker 2: was created in nineteen thirty Oh wow wow, which was
Speaker 2: an indictment about concentration of wealth. The game, Yeah, that's right.
Speaker 1: It was actually a cautionary game, wasn't it. That's right,
Speaker 1: and it was stolen and turned into a capitalistic celebration.
Speaker 1: So that's what I got. Richard, who's talking to us today.
Speaker 2: Grabbing coppin tov our show eighteen thirteen, the one we
Speaker 2: did with one Isaac Levin maybe've heard of him m
Speaker 2: talking about developing on developing dot net on AWS. This
Speaker 2: is back in twenty two, so a couple of years back.
Speaker 2: And Aaron Morgan had this great comment again two years old,
Speaker 2: this great show. Guys really loved Isaac's knowledge of AWS
Speaker 2: and Azure and his ability to communicate the ins and
Speaker 2: outs without over complicating things. So Coffee and open Source
Speaker 2: has a new subscriber, and that's Isaac's podcasts. Yeah, so
Speaker 2: I'll include I link in the show notes for that
Speaker 2: if you want to catch it. The first thing I
Speaker 2: did was go check to see if you still go
Speaker 2: on Isaac, because I know it's hard, but still do it.
Speaker 3: The thing I did one this morning earlier today.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Hey, we did too, how about that? Yeah, and
Speaker 2: I've done one, So Aaron, thank you so much for
Speaker 2: your comment, and a copy of music go ba is
Speaker 2: on its way to you. And if you'd like a
Speaker 2: copy of music, Cobey, I read a comment on the
Speaker 2: website at dot NetRocks dot com or on the facebooks.
Speaker 2: We publish every show there and if you comment there
Speaker 2: and every did on the show, we'll send you a
Speaker 2: copy of music go by.
Speaker 1: And you can definitely follow us on social media to
Speaker 1: get a copy of music to codey. We've been on
Speaker 1: ex Twitter forever and we're also on mastadon and on
Speaker 1: blue Sky and some form of at Carl Franklin and
Speaker 1: at Rich Campbell you can find us. So with that,
Speaker 1: let us bring back to dot net ry our friend
Speaker 1: Isaac Levin. He is a now a developer advocate as
Speaker 1: well as a Microsoft MVP. He has over ten years
Speaker 1: of experience working as a developer for the web, mostly
Speaker 1: a Microsoft ecosystem. Outside of work, he hosts a podcast
Speaker 1: called Coffee and open Source, where he interviews folks from
Speaker 1: across the tech industry, as well as building open source
Speaker 1: projects like presence Light and GitHub stat Tracker. He lives
Speaker 1: outside of Seattle, Washington, and likes to wind down from
Speaker 1: work with his wife, Ariana and his two children, Isaac
Speaker 1: and Avery. Welcome back.
Speaker 3: Thank you for having me. Before we get started, I
Speaker 3: had because I'm a valid listener. I came up with
Speaker 3: some also cool things from nineteen thirty four if you
Speaker 3: don't mind cool ooh, yes, yeah, so's a big year. Yeah,
Speaker 3: well January first, a little facility called Alcatraz is opened
Speaker 3: for the first time.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 3: Also, if you're a baseball fan, big year in baseball,
Speaker 3: Babe Ruth and Nautra's retirement, and the Yankees had a
Speaker 3: player called up named Joe DiMaggio.
Speaker 1: Nope, so I think there was a fire in Fenway Park.
Speaker 1: Wasn't there? Also?
Speaker 3: There was there was?
Speaker 2: Yep?
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, no, yeah, again, thank you so much for
Speaker 3: having me. It's great to be here.
Speaker 1: Great to have you again.
Speaker 2: Always get to talk to you, Brod.
Speaker 1: Last time we talked to you at Amazon, Right, that
Speaker 1: was correct? Dang aws stuff. Ye, and you've moved on.
Speaker 1: So are you're independent?
Speaker 2: Now?
Speaker 1: You work for Microsoft? Exactly where are you?
Speaker 3: Yeah? So I'm I am a contractor, I mean vendor
Speaker 3: at Microsoft, focusing primarily on developer marketing, specifically around all
Speaker 3: the things that Microsoft talks about these days, get a
Speaker 3: co pilot, dev box, visual studio vs. Code AI, all
Speaker 3: the fun.
Speaker 1: Things, you know. After I became an MVP, every year
Speaker 1: i'd get a dev box in the mail. Is that
Speaker 1: what we're talking That's what we're talking about here, right, Yeah? Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: the dev box. Yeah. No, I have to admit this
Speaker 1: is so new. I didn't I hadn't heard about it,
Speaker 1: and then I went out and took a look at it,
Speaker 1: and I looked at the website and I still don't
Speaker 1: know what it is.
Speaker 2: So fair enough, fair enough, it's like.
Speaker 1: Some cloud service for managing development teams in the cloud.
Speaker 3: Yeah, let me So. I've been doing this for a while,
Speaker 3: not as long as you folks, but I remember a
Speaker 3: very particular point in time when you didn't really do
Speaker 3: any development on your machine. You had vms right that
Speaker 3: had very specific things, right like that was a development
Speaker 3: uh and a way of managing developer teams is that
Speaker 3: you'd have VMS and then that VM maybe had this
Speaker 3: app on it, and you'd have like maybe two or
Speaker 3: three or four vms, right, and whether they were local
Speaker 3: on your machine or hosted somewhere like internally at your
Speaker 3: company didn't really matter. So what I like to think
Speaker 3: of when I think about Microsoft dev Box is that
Speaker 3: but based in the cloud. Uh, there's a whole lot
Speaker 3: of other things that come for the ride as well.
Speaker 3: But I think if you're if you've been developing for
Speaker 3: a while, you remember remoting into VMS to do your
Speaker 3: developer work. Sure, sure, yeah, so just think of it
Speaker 3: as that, but you get access to a bunch of
Speaker 3: other stuff, and I'm as we'll talk about some of
Speaker 3: that throughout this conversation.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's kind of nice to have a dedicated machine
Speaker 1: for dev that you can access anywhere. Anytime you have
Speaker 1: to reinstall Windows, anytime you have to get a new
Speaker 1: laptop or whatever. It's it's just another thing that you
Speaker 1: have to install all this stuff. Yeah, I mean third
Speaker 1: party tools, everything I've you.
Speaker 3: Know, I've switched jobs a few times. I've switched jobs
Speaker 3: since the last time I spoke with you folks, Right,
Speaker 3: so creating a like getting the machine to your happy
Speaker 3: place can be challenging. It's gotten a lot better, right Like,
Speaker 3: there are things like wind get, DSc and all sorts
Speaker 3: of cool things to be able to get you to
Speaker 3: where you want. But you still got to do all
Speaker 3: the Windows updates, make sure all the software is installed,
Speaker 3: make sure you're setupnd like, this is something that you know.
Speaker 3: It can take days, if not weeks. Yeah, no for
Speaker 3: non sophisticated teams to do.
Speaker 2: Right start organizations where they brought a new developer and
Speaker 2: it was two weeks before they could check in a
Speaker 2: piece of code.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah.
Speaker 3: And with dev box, the goal is to kind of
Speaker 3: streamline that, like in a self service manner. So, for instance,
Speaker 3: I need dev box. There's a developer portal that I
Speaker 3: can go to. I literally click create dev box with
Speaker 3: some specifications that are defined by my team, and how
Speaker 3: over long it takes to provision that resource. I'm able
Speaker 3: to then connect to it via the Windows app via
Speaker 3: Bastion and the browser via RDP.
Speaker 1: You just said it, You said it. The Windows app
Speaker 1: probably the most ubiquitous and mysterious and non specific term
Speaker 1: for a new product. Sure, the Windows App. Yeah, now,
Speaker 1: I kind of think of this as just like an
Speaker 1: RDP client.
Speaker 3: It's similar, right, So I think what's cool about it
Speaker 3: is that it gives you in the RDP client, it
Speaker 3: gives you a lot of flexibility. But it's it's a
Speaker 3: bit behind the times, Like I don't remember when the
Speaker 3: like the last time the UI for it was was
Speaker 3: updated for it. Yes, but what the Windows app does
Speaker 3: It provides basically a single point of entry for all
Speaker 3: of your quote unquote like remote things. So like if
Speaker 3: you have other VDI services that you might take advantage of,
Speaker 3: like Windows sixty five or as your virtual desktop, you
Speaker 3: can connect to those it also you can run it
Speaker 3: on other platforms, not just Windows.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: So I think it's one of those things where you know,
Speaker 3: it's it's bringing a similar concept but to a new world.
Speaker 1: I guess you could say, and is it more integrated
Speaker 1: with Windows? I guess what I'm saying, is there more
Speaker 1: stuff that you can do through the Windows app that
Speaker 1: you can't do through an RDP client.
Speaker 3: I think it's a it's a bit it's definitely more straightforward, right,
Speaker 3: Like you can also create these things through dev hoome,
Speaker 3: which connects to Windows App. Uh, you know it it's
Speaker 3: one of those things where it just gives you a
Speaker 3: better pane of glass. It's also thinking. So what was
Speaker 3: it called RDC man does it do you folks?
Speaker 2: Remember that where you.
Speaker 3: Can manage like a bunch of them.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, to day.
Speaker 3: So like for instance, the Windows App, regardless of what
Speaker 3: sort of service it is, it's all available for you
Speaker 3: in one single pane of glass too. So if you
Speaker 3: have like five or six step boxes, it's literally just
Speaker 3: a grid or a card system and you can connect
Speaker 3: to them, you can manage them, you can change settings.
Speaker 1: For them, so it's not just a drop down correct.
Speaker 3: Where you put in like an arbitrary IP address right
Speaker 3: or if you're fancy a host name right. You can
Speaker 3: also do things like you could do this in our
Speaker 3: in like the traditional like RDP tool as well, but
Speaker 3: can figure like multi moder support and in other things
Speaker 3: just to make your life as a developer a bit better.
Speaker 2: Yeah, okay, all right, so all of this, and this
Speaker 2: is different from Windows Terminal, which is more about PowerShell
Speaker 2: and SSH yeah and that kind of thing. This is,
Speaker 2: I mean, RDP is one of the things that Windows
Speaker 2: app does, yes, but it does a bunch of other
Speaker 2: things as well, it's about all to do with remote connections, yep.
Speaker 1: So what else does it do?
Speaker 3: What else is Windows app do? Or what else is
Speaker 3: death box do?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 1: What else does Windows app do? And then we'll get
Speaker 1: back to debt box.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So like being able to I think one of
Speaker 3: the things that's also interesting is just the ability to
Speaker 3: create groups, so like you can specify like a these
Speaker 3: are the specific Basically, just think of it as a
Speaker 3: management utility for remote for remote connections, Carl. So it's
Speaker 3: you know, and it sinks with all of the other
Speaker 3: like developer productivity services that exist for Windows, like you know,
Speaker 3: Richard mentioned terminal, there's also dev home, there's also dev drive,
Speaker 3: so all these things are kind of seamlessly connected and
Speaker 3: kind of managed by the looking of team.
Speaker 1: All right.
Speaker 2: So yeah, and it's also available on all the platforms
Speaker 2: Like rdpm app was only for Windows, but wind app
Speaker 2: is on a Mac and Android and you name it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I believe, yeah, believe it's I believe it's. Yeah,
Speaker 3: it's available for Android, iPhone, Windows. I'm not sure if
Speaker 3: there's a Linux client, so don't don't quote me on that.
Speaker 3: But again, it just gives you the ability also like
Speaker 3: web browser stuff too, Like you could do it via
Speaker 3: like using Bastion in the browser, which is which is
Speaker 3: a pretty cool thing to Oh and I just looked
Speaker 3: at the website metaquest VR headset. If you want to
Speaker 3: do that.
Speaker 2: Too, that's something you want to do, Okay. I mean
Speaker 2: I'm also looking at this from a security perspective that
Speaker 2: now I don't if I got a work from Homer,
Speaker 2: I don't have to have them have a whole deb
Speaker 2: environment on their machine anymore. They just they only need
Speaker 2: a front end basically to call into a dev box
Speaker 2: that I have control over.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: I think one of the things too, would be helpful
Speaker 3: to talk about is like who are the different kind
Speaker 3: of customers for dev box? Sure, because I think that
Speaker 3: there's some value there. Like the end customer obviously is
Speaker 3: the developer who's using the portal to create these things, right,
Speaker 3: But if you're an organization, more than likely you just
Speaker 3: don't give developers like, hey, here you go, just go
Speaker 3: and create this thing and install whatever software on there
Speaker 3: and all of that sort of stuff. Like there's some
Speaker 3: management to it, right, So if you're in it, or
Speaker 3: if you're in OPS or quote unquote platform engineering, like
Speaker 3: the ability to put these guardrails on these systems to
Speaker 3: be able to say, oh, we have connected to intunes,
Speaker 3: so we have endpoint security, like that's provided by default,
Speaker 3: the ability to you know, configure network isolations, so like
Speaker 3: these particular dev boxes don't have access to certain resources, right.
Speaker 3: Also there's some cool things around like not being able
Speaker 3: to like take screenshots of dev box, which is kind
Speaker 3: of a which is an interesting thing as well, for
Speaker 3: like the extra level of security, right, So like that's
Speaker 3: like the platform like OPS Systems administrator sort of lens, right,
Speaker 3: and then you have like this developer lead lens. Like
Speaker 3: think about it like this, Like I'm a developer lead,
Speaker 3: I'm a manager. You know, we have four or five
Speaker 3: different projects that we're running at any particular point in time,
Speaker 3: and I need to kind of ensure that my developers
Speaker 3: are delivering code as quickly as possible and as efficiently
Speaker 3: as possible. So the ability to define the environments that
Speaker 3: these that these developers are creating is really valuable too.
Speaker 3: So taking advantage of things like customization, so like hey,
Speaker 3: maybe I want this suite of software on the machine.
Speaker 3: Right when we get going, I can create base images
Speaker 3: off of that I can then type into things like
Speaker 3: making sure that I have the latest extensions and sold
Speaker 3: for vs code or visual Studio, making sure that caching
Speaker 3: is set up, like all of those things are done
Speaker 3: for me as well with dev box. And then obviously
Speaker 3: is the end user, Like I literally choose my project
Speaker 3: that I want, It shows me what the SKU is
Speaker 3: going to be. It shows me where the region is
Speaker 3: going to be of that particular remote compute, and then
Speaker 3: I could create and then after spread time, I can
Speaker 3: just connect to it and then it's like it was there,
Speaker 3: which I think is pretty cool.
Speaker 1: Right. So I think the question that's on a lot
Speaker 1: of people's mind is, yeah, what's the difference between I mean,
Speaker 1: is the f box and Windows App going to now
Speaker 1: be applicable for environments other than developer environments that are
Speaker 1: sort of just like client vms and the cloud. Like
Speaker 1: we have an Azure now that we use RDP for
Speaker 1: and by the same the inversion of that is, would
Speaker 1: we maybe use the Windows app to connect to our
Speaker 1: existing vms. Yeah.
Speaker 3: So Windows App actually supports like all of the different
Speaker 3: remote services for like a remote desktop, So it supports
Speaker 3: azrovirsual desktop, it supports dev box, Windows sixty five Remote
Speaker 3: PC remote desktop services, right, So it supports all of
Speaker 3: those things already the Windows app does.
Speaker 1: So it's really the new RDP client that we should
Speaker 1: think about using.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, think about it like that, right, with a
Speaker 3: with a with a more fluent looking UI and a
Speaker 3: management utility built into it instead, like you said, just
Speaker 3: want to drop down?
Speaker 2: Cool?
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: The whole point here is I don't have to ask
Speaker 2: the dev to set up their machine and make sure
Speaker 2: they actually did it, right. It's that I specify a
Speaker 2: manifest of what's going to be on that machine, yep,
Speaker 2: and they when they when we go to make an
Speaker 2: instance for them, it stands it up with all the
Speaker 2: right stuff.
Speaker 3: Well, think about it like this, Richard, Like you mentioned
Speaker 3: you were talking to a client and it took them
Speaker 3: two weeks to stand up an environment, yeah, right, before
Speaker 3: they could commit code. Like I mean, let's just call
Speaker 3: it is what it is.
Speaker 2: Like.
Speaker 3: That's like money spent on somebody who's not doing the
Speaker 3: thing you hired them to do.
Speaker 2: Totally and very frustrated, right.
Speaker 3: Like, yeah, exactly. I can imagine. I've been in situations
Speaker 3: where it took a couple of days and that was frustrating.
Speaker 3: I couldn't imagine starting a new job. You're excited starting
Speaker 3: a new job. You're getting like like I'm going to
Speaker 3: commit some code, I'm gonna do this thing, and then like, oh,
Speaker 3: by the way, it's going to take two weeks to
Speaker 3: provision an environment for you.
Speaker 2: Now we're we're missing this license. We got to order
Speaker 2: it in because it was a physical thing, right, like
Speaker 2: I can't just get it online. And as well as
Speaker 2: do we have hardware for you? Da da da da da,
Speaker 2: Like all of that is irrelevant.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and just replace that with what dev box offers,
Speaker 3: where it's hey, day one, go to the website. You've
Speaker 3: already been set up with access to be able to
Speaker 3: create a dev box for these particular projects that you're
Speaker 3: going to be working on. We'll walk you through, I'll
Speaker 3: show you how to do it. You go there, you
Speaker 3: click drop down, you click create, and then when it's done,
Speaker 3: you can go and look at all of them, or
Speaker 3: you can connect via the Windows app. Again, like you're
Speaker 3: taking two weeks and you're taking it into like an hour.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: What about the first part of my question, which is
Speaker 1: is dev box applicable to environments other than developer environments?
Speaker 1: Is it good for just setting up client PCs with
Speaker 1: installed software.
Speaker 2: I think you'd useual as your virtual desktop for that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so I think that there's some value in talking
Speaker 3: about like what all the different offerings are.
Speaker 2: Ye.
Speaker 3: So, like Microsoft provides a few different options in this space,
Speaker 3: like this VDI or you know, Virtual Integrade Desktop, I
Speaker 3: think is what VDI stands for. But like there's three
Speaker 3: big ones. There's Azure Virtual Desktop, there's Windows to sixty five,
Speaker 3: and there's dev Box. So you know, all of these
Speaker 3: things kind of sit like stand on top of the
Speaker 3: same infrastructure, right. I think what's really different among them
Speaker 3: is the use case. Right, So if you're connecting to
Speaker 3: a thin client or you're doing like light productivity services,
Speaker 3: like you're just using and Outlook and things like that,
Speaker 3: like Azure Virtual Desktop or Windows sixty five is probably
Speaker 3: the better option for you. But what dev box provides
Speaker 3: is access to more high performance compute, so the be
Speaker 3: able to have like sixty four cores or you know
Speaker 3: a whole bunch of ram.
Speaker 1: Okay, what I have is I have a virtual machine
Speaker 1: in Azure right now, but I set up as a
Speaker 1: VM with Windows Desktop right client Windows ten and you
Speaker 1: know you pay for use right, and I have that
Speaker 1: up there to do my various videos that I do.
Speaker 1: But I think what I hear you saying is that
Speaker 1: you're going to pay a lot more in that situation
Speaker 1: then you would pay to access the same kind of
Speaker 1: resources like the cores and the RAM and all that
Speaker 1: stuff that you would get an Azure dev box. Am
Speaker 1: I reading that correctly? Yeah?
Speaker 3: So, like Microsoft dev Box more than likely is less
Speaker 3: expensive than just hosting a VM and Azure and then
Speaker 3: opening the RDP port and then doing it like that.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Also, like I don't know if you have gone down
Speaker 3: the path of like making sure that that OS is
Speaker 3: up to date and most secure. Yeah, but yeah, like
Speaker 3: it's just one of those things. Yeah, Like it's one
Speaker 3: of those things where it's kind of done for you
Speaker 3: with depth box, right, Like it it's a managed service
Speaker 3: for developer compute, which I think is pretty cool.
Speaker 1: And when you go in with it, is it just
Speaker 1: like accessing a Windows desktop?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 1: I mean, are you accessing a Windows desktop? Yeah?
Speaker 3: So yeah, So, I mean the experience with the Windows
Speaker 3: app is very similar to RDP, right, Like a window
Speaker 3: pops up and you see the desktop and all of that,
Speaker 3: And like I said, it supports Bastion and the browser.
Speaker 3: So like if you wanted to connect to your remote
Speaker 3: compute via the browser, you have the ability to do
Speaker 3: that too. Obviously, the experience has a bit different versus
Speaker 3: your connecting via the browser versus just connecting via the
Speaker 3: Windows app. But it's one of those things where it
Speaker 3: just it makes a ton more sense to use the
Speaker 3: infrastructure and you the managed service then kind of rolling
Speaker 3: it yourself, depending what your use case is.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, well in my case, it's going to save
Speaker 1: a lot of money, and that's very compelling. Like you
Speaker 1: wouldn't think, Okay, it's just a VM, but now you're
Speaker 1: you're talking about a lot more resources for a lot
Speaker 1: less money.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and I know that. It's like like the idea
Speaker 3: of like talking about pricing is is probably scary, but
Speaker 3: I'll just I'll just throw this out there right, Like
Speaker 3: I'm looking at the pricing calculator for debt for dev boxes.
Speaker 3: I was curious, So if you want thirty two CPUs
Speaker 3: ordering twenty gigs a RAM and two Terribyte hard drive,
Speaker 3: the max monthly price is six hundred and twenty eight
Speaker 3: dollars a month.
Speaker 1: Yeah, okay, and you probably.
Speaker 3: Don't need that but that's that's my point. If you want,
Speaker 3: if you want something that's a bit more manageable, like
Speaker 3: most of it is around like the one thirty to
Speaker 3: two fifty price point per month.
Speaker 2: You know, really this gets huge is if you're not
Speaker 2: working on it every day, right, yes, right right, Like
Speaker 2: if you've got a debt, you don't want to license
Speaker 2: a copy of studio and in all that to a manager
Speaker 2: who fires it up once a week, the fact that
Speaker 2: they can run it for a day, yeah and then
Speaker 2: be done.
Speaker 1: Right now, in my VM, I only turned on when
Speaker 1: I use it because if it's just sitting there running,
Speaker 1: you're just throwing money down the tooth to throwing money.
Speaker 3: But yeah, yeah, and like there's also like cost like
Speaker 3: savings like options built into dev box too, So like
Speaker 3: when you so when you create a dev box, you
Speaker 3: have the ability to specify like if you want it
Speaker 3: to auto hibernate, so if it hasn't been used for
Speaker 3: sixty minutes, shut it down, right, if you want to
Speaker 3: shut down at particular time, like maybe seven seven at
Speaker 3: night and shut it down, it shuts it down for you.
Speaker 3: So it's one of those things where it's not continuously
Speaker 3: running unless you want it to continuously.
Speaker 2: Run, right, and you are charged by the hour. Right, Yes,
Speaker 2: so you know the two hundred and fifty dollars a
Speaker 2: max month price is based on three bucks an hour.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, in this particular case, it's a five ninety
Speaker 3: six right for that. Yeah, So, like I mean more
Speaker 3: than likely if you're working forty hours a week, you know,
Speaker 3: forty times six.
Speaker 2: It's you're going to hit the max.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: That's the whole thing is they've capped it. Yeah, well
Speaker 2: below that.
Speaker 3: But it's one of those things too where it's just
Speaker 3: all of these different experiences that come with it as well, right,
Speaker 3: Like you know, the customization's thing, Like we'll talk about
Speaker 3: that for a second, like being able to define, like
Speaker 3: with Yamil, like all of the things that you want
Speaker 3: installing that machine when it gets created, and you can
Speaker 3: specify that in a get up repo. You can point
Speaker 3: dev box their dev center, which is the underlying you know,
Speaker 3: resource and Azure to that get up repo. So whenever
Speaker 3: a developer in that particular project creates something, all that
Speaker 3: stuff is there. That's cool, right, So it's just yeah,
Speaker 3: like again, these things are just done for you instead
Speaker 3: of you having to kind of do all that work
Speaker 3: yourself and it's great and experiences like you know, maybe
Speaker 3: you have Like I was talking about this with somebody
Speaker 3: at a conference a couple of months ago, Like he
Speaker 3: had a VM on a machine that like had an
Speaker 3: old wind like dot net framework app. And I've been there,
Speaker 3: like I had to remote into a VM that when
Speaker 3: like dott net one dot one on it, for instance.
Speaker 3: And like with dev box, you can just have a
Speaker 3: dev box that just lives in the world that has
Speaker 3: you know, visual Zuo twenty nineteen and you know, a
Speaker 3: dot net framework four dot seven app, and you can
Speaker 3: just leave that there and we need to make changes
Speaker 3: to it. You remote into it, you do your thing,
Speaker 3: and then you get rid of it. And these things
Speaker 3: are ephemeral too, like they don't have to live forever.
Speaker 3: Like you can do your work. Maybe you're doing a
Speaker 3: maybe you're reviewing a PR. You log in, you get
Speaker 3: the code down, you review the PR, everything works, and
Speaker 3: then when you're done, you just get rid of the thing.
Speaker 2: I wonder if you build this per project.
Speaker 3: Yes, well that's the whole. That's one of the underlying
Speaker 3: core concepts of dev box. So like there's dev Center,
Speaker 3: which is the thing that holds like the underlying resources
Speaker 3: for dev box, as well as Azur diploma environments, which
Speaker 3: is the other thing that exists in this space. That's
Speaker 3: like creating and provisioning like environments in Azure. Like dev
Speaker 3: environment says numbers, what have you? So at the dev
Speaker 3: center level, a dev center can have x amount of
Speaker 3: projects and those projects you define them as basically a
Speaker 3: combination of two things image like what the actual environment
Speaker 3: is and networking. Right, and you have the flexibility to
Speaker 3: you know, bring your own networking configurations like your own
Speaker 3: v net, your own network connection, or you can just
Speaker 3: check a box says hey, just post this as somewhere
Speaker 3: in Microsoft's network that's close to.
Speaker 2: Where I live. Right, Very cool, But you also want
Speaker 2: to be close to company resources for example, like there's
Speaker 2: a bunch of a bunch of interesting questions there again
Speaker 2: that mostly ad men would care about more than the
Speaker 2: dev They just wanted to work. Yeah, what about Actually
Speaker 2: let's take a break, and then I want to talk
Speaker 2: about licensing because it's really romantic.
Speaker 1: Nice. We'll be right back. You know, dot net six
Speaker 1: has officially reached the end of support and now is
Speaker 1: the time to upgrade dot net eight is well supported
Speaker 1: on aw Learn more at AWS dot Amazon dot com,
Speaker 1: slash dot net and we're back. It's dot netrock some
Speaker 1: Carl Franklin. It's my friend Richard Campbell, Hey, and our
Speaker 1: friend Isaac Levin, and we're talking about Microsoft dev Box.
Speaker 1: And I'll tell you what, man, this sounds so cool.
Speaker 1: I mean I kind of thought it was okay, yeah,
Speaker 1: another way to access VMS, but no, it's really cool. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's accessing large amounts of RAM and compute. If
Speaker 1: you want to, you turn it on, you do your thing,
Speaker 1: you turn it off, You provision easily and create on
Speaker 1: a project by project basis is one of the things
Speaker 1: that Richard was just asking about and Isaac was just
Speaker 1: about to go into some details about that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, like you wanted to talk about licensing, right, licensing?
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, like how many copies of visual studio I
Speaker 2: need to own here?
Speaker 3: M Well, so that's so with visual studios specific Like
Speaker 3: visual studio licensing is how it's always going to be.
Speaker 3: It's per user, per month, right, right, So like if
Speaker 3: you have a dev box, if you have six dev boxes,
Speaker 3: it's just one visual stuio license.
Speaker 2: Interesting for as long as it's one user.
Speaker 1: Correct.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so when you log into visual Studio for the
Speaker 3: first time, like it'll ask for your MSA, like your
Speaker 3: Microsoft identity or your Gettel identity or whatever. Like, I mean,
Speaker 3: there's nothing different than having like three or four different
Speaker 3: work machines, right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but it's only one person work on at a time.
Speaker 2: But it doesn't help me for that manager that occasionally
Speaker 2: wants access to dev tools, I still have to get
Speaker 2: a full license for them, correct, Yeah, although I'm not
Speaker 2: consuming dev box resources when it's not running.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and you know, like this and one thing to
Speaker 3: maybe call out as well is that this is like
Speaker 3: full blown Windows. So it's got WSL, right, it's got
Speaker 3: hypervisor support, it's got Docker support. Like, it's not like
Speaker 3: other services that you know, I'll just say it, like
Speaker 3: maybe it's like vs code in the browser that you
Speaker 3: can access, which is cool. But like if you're building
Speaker 3: apps and you want to build it in a Windows environment,
Speaker 3: but maybe you need to hop down to WSL to
Speaker 3: do a couple of things or whatever, like you have
Speaker 3: that flexibility to do.
Speaker 2: So, right, right, not things you would normally do. Certainly,
Speaker 2: I think you want to do an Azure desktop or
Speaker 2: an Attrir virtual desktop talk to me about GitHub code
Speaker 2: spaces because are these kind of the same thing.
Speaker 3: So it's it's funny because I kind of I go
Speaker 3: back and forth with this a little bit, but I
Speaker 3: think at the end of the day, they both satisfy
Speaker 3: a specific use case. I'm a developer. I want to
Speaker 3: be able to build my app, but I don't want
Speaker 3: to do it on my machine. I want to take
Speaker 3: advantage of remote services to.
Speaker 2: Do that, right, right.
Speaker 3: The primary difference between code spaces and dev box is
Speaker 3: what I just said. So code spaces it's kind of
Speaker 3: vs code in the browser. You're remoting into a Linux
Speaker 3: container and you're doing all that stuff. Great experience, especially
Speaker 3: if you come from a VS code background for sure,
Speaker 3: so like you know the tools. But like if you're
Speaker 3: a Windows developer and you've been building things in Windows
Speaker 3: and you can use visual Studio and you've been doing
Speaker 3: all these things or even writer, like, it's just a
Speaker 3: better experience for that person to use debt box because
Speaker 3: it is fully managed Windows and you.
Speaker 2: Like IDEs like that's why you're in Rider or studio
Speaker 2: because you see the ID is valuable to you. Yeah,
Speaker 2: and where VS code is very much more a role
Speaker 2: of your own Yeah.
Speaker 3: And even like let's just just throw on the other
Speaker 3: side too, Like maybe you are a developer who takes
Speaker 3: advantage of something like dev containers, which is kind of
Speaker 3: like being able to create like a singular environment for
Speaker 3: your app inside of visual CEO code. Like that's what
Speaker 3: a lot of code spaces and some of these other
Speaker 3: tools are kind of built on top of or are
Speaker 3: used in insul it in in in help with that,
Speaker 3: like you can do that in Windows as well in
Speaker 3: dev box. So it's just a it's a more end
Speaker 3: to end full experience. You don't have subsets of different
Speaker 3: developer experiences. You can do everything. The only thing is
Speaker 3: it's Windows. It's Windows. So like if you come from
Speaker 3: a developer team that they don't use Windows, maybe they
Speaker 3: use mac os or maybe they use Linux, Like it's
Speaker 3: a different experience for them.
Speaker 2: Sure, but it doesn't sound like they won't work together too.
Speaker 2: That If I've got folks that would prefer to work
Speaker 2: in that Linux space, they can work in code spaces
Speaker 2: and they'll be fine checking in code into the same
Speaker 2: repository and the same set of actions kicking off Like
Speaker 2: all that's fine. And for those who prefer a Windows
Speaker 2: and studio experience. They're in dev box yep.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's I couldn't have said it better myself.
Speaker 2: Okay, well, I appreciate it like that. Bring the tools
Speaker 2: where people are right, don't try and and scram square
Speaker 2: peg square peg in a round hole like nobody's happy
Speaker 2: when you do that. And either way, I think I
Speaker 2: think the studio I've always found it amusing. Like visual
Speaker 2: studio me seems like the perfect beginner's tool in the
Speaker 2: fact that everything is already there, except that it looks
Speaker 2: like a cockpit of a seven forty seve when you
Speaker 2: open it up, like it intimidates everyone. Even I've been
Speaker 2: used the flipping things as it was invented, it's still
Speaker 2: scares me. Where studio, you know, code seems way more approachable,
Speaker 2: But it's really not that easy to learn on either
Speaker 2: because you've got to pull all the pieces together. You've
Speaker 2: got to make decisions you're not qualified to make. Early on, I.
Speaker 3: Was having a conversation and I love visual coeo code.
Speaker 3: I want to say that before I make this next statement.
Speaker 3: I was having a conversation with somebody and they were
Speaker 3: talking about like how loaded visual studio is, for instance, right,
Speaker 3: and they were talking about how Vigius code is so
Speaker 3: lightweight and whatever, and I asked them, like, oh, so,
Speaker 3: what's it like without extensions in Vision CEO code And
Speaker 3: they said, what do you mean, I have a bunch
Speaker 3: of extensions. I'm like, so you should open up your
Speaker 3: task manager and look at the RAM usage for VS code.
Speaker 2: Then how lightweight is it?
Speaker 1: Now? Yeah?
Speaker 3: Exactly right. So I mean again, these are great tools,
Speaker 3: and they and they solve very specific purposes and they're
Speaker 3: all awesome, But like, let's not kid ourselves that, like
Speaker 3: Visual Studio code can get just as big as Visual Studio.
Speaker 2: But it's a difference between having a knife drawer and
Speaker 2: a Swiss Army knife. Right, like the Night Story, you
Speaker 2: do get to pick which ones you put in the
Speaker 2: Swiss Army knife, they're all there, and the studio is
Speaker 2: a Swiss Army knife. There's stuff in there you don't need.
Speaker 2: Also all the stuff you do need.
Speaker 1: I don't know. I've I really still love visual studio
Speaker 1: and I have my way of working and my layouts
Speaker 1: and stuff, and I don't find it a you know,
Speaker 1: a barrier to working at all, and I don't find
Speaker 1: it gets in the way. Then again, I have an
Speaker 1: I nine with sixty four gigs of rice.
Speaker 2: And you look at the available sex for a dev box,
Speaker 2: there's a reason.
Speaker 3: Well, I think too, Like, I think it just depends
Speaker 3: on what kind of developer you probably started as, right,
Speaker 3: Like if you were a developer and maybe you were
Speaker 3: building client apps, like yeah, like Visual Studio is great
Speaker 3: for building client aps. Still is great for building client apps.
Speaker 3: And I think if you're maybe of a younger generation
Speaker 3: where you have been building more like web first apps, yep,
Speaker 3: Like you're like, Okay, why do I need all of
Speaker 3: this popum circumstance of Visual Studio if I'm just building
Speaker 3: a web app?
Speaker 2: Yea, yeah, so that's Yeah, it's a lot of ceremony
Speaker 2: that isn't necessary for them until you teach them the debugger. Like,
Speaker 2: if you're gonna win anybody over on visual Studio, it's
Speaker 2: experienced this debugging experience. And now when differently, when.
Speaker 1: If Blazer is your web framework of choice, the debugger
Speaker 1: is just absolutely amazing.
Speaker 2: It's magic. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, But I will say that the Visual Stuio code
Speaker 3: experience for dot net is getting better and better every day,
Speaker 3: So let's let's let's not throw that away.
Speaker 2: Everybody's making make trying to make tools better, and it's
Speaker 2: like again it's I'm not hating on it. You can
Speaker 2: all work together, work a way you like.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and that Yeah, I'm not hating on code either.
Speaker 1: I just know I do. I just do. It's comfortable and.
Speaker 3: That kind of like if thinking about dev box, like
Speaker 3: if you if thinking about like the different types of
Speaker 3: dot net developers that are right, Like you know, you
Speaker 3: might have a developer that's building WPF apps, or maybe
Speaker 3: they're building Maui apps, or maybe they're building something with
Speaker 3: a spire, right, like you know, those in my brain
Speaker 3: are completely different workloads. So if I had one singular
Speaker 3: developer environment, I would have to install every workload for
Speaker 3: visual Studio to be able to do that work. And
Speaker 3: that's kind of a bummer, right. What a better solution is,
Speaker 3: at least to me, is you have a dev box
Speaker 3: for this project that's a Maui app, this project that's
Speaker 3: in a spire app, this project I need Docker and
Speaker 3: a bunch of other stuff, and then that way, like
Speaker 3: all of your stuff is like in this nice little
Speaker 3: containerized like world. You don't have to mess with stuff
Speaker 3: to get like oh I have to go and switch
Speaker 3: over to this project app, and I have to do
Speaker 3: these things.
Speaker 2: I'm thinking in terms of five years down the road
Speaker 2: where you still got a client running V two and
Speaker 2: you're on V six yep, and you can have a
Speaker 2: dev environment for working in V two. Yeah.
Speaker 3: And one thing too. I was thinking about this the
Speaker 3: other day, Like I used to work help desk when
Speaker 3: I was in college, and they this is back in
Speaker 3: the back in the crazy days when there was people
Speaker 3: whose job it was the test.
Speaker 1: Products weird answer phones for that matter.
Speaker 3: Right, And I remember, like I was having a conversation
Speaker 3: with one of these QA folks and she was telling
Speaker 3: me about like how she needed a VM that had
Speaker 3: different versions of browsers on them, right, because you build
Speaker 3: an app for the web and all of a sudden
Speaker 3: this st offs working on the latest version of Edge
Speaker 3: or the latest version of Firefox or whatever. Right, And
Speaker 3: I was thinking about, like, that's a pretty good use
Speaker 3: case for dev box too, where it's like, hey, I
Speaker 3: need a very specific version of this browser. It's available
Speaker 3: to me, said me. Having to figure out how to
Speaker 3: uninstall and then get an installer for an old version
Speaker 3: and then do all of that dance.
Speaker 2: I know, this isolating my project and possibly even isolating
Speaker 2: my version number. I mean, you want to retire those
Speaker 2: old VERSI numbers. But sooner or later you get a customer,
Speaker 2: you know, like the US Navy is still running Windows XP.
Speaker 2: You get a customer says, no, we will be running
Speaker 2: this until it wouldn't have time.
Speaker 1: They wouldn't do that, Richard, would me.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but it's okay because they're more than willing to
Speaker 3: pay the support charge.
Speaker 2: Sure, man, The money's not the issue now. The question
Speaker 2: is what do you got to do to not make
Speaker 2: yourself insane? Right? Like, how do you keep taking care
Speaker 2: of it? And this seems like a really great way
Speaker 2: to encapsulate those old versions, so you're right back in
Speaker 2: the environment meant for that version.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: One of my favorite things to do at conferences if
Speaker 3: somebody from like the runtime team or the dot net
Speaker 3: team is there, just talking to them about like all
Speaker 3: of their fault Like Jared Parsons is a really good
Speaker 3: person to listen.
Speaker 2: To, right, that guy's been through it all, right.
Speaker 3: I'll just sit there and he'll be saying things that
Speaker 3: I'm like, I have no idea what you're talking about,
Speaker 3: but it's fascinating, absolutely fascinating.
Speaker 2: But yeah, these are the folks that are dealing with
Speaker 2: all of these different kinds of customers. Yeah, you know,
Speaker 2: and they've got you name it, like.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think it was a don At KOMF there
Speaker 3: was somebody on the Visual Studio team who did a
Speaker 3: session about dev box, specifically using dev box to like
Speaker 3: build different versions of Visual Studio because you know, twenty nineteen.
Speaker 3: If I need to do some work in twenty nineteen,
Speaker 3: like I don't want to have twenty nineteen and twenty
Speaker 3: twenty two and it's all on my machine, especially like
Speaker 3: the dev versions of them, which anybody who has got
Speaker 3: any insight into how Visual Studio is built, like, it
Speaker 3: is not a it is NI trivial process, no huge.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: So being able to kind of again segment out these
Speaker 3: things is cool.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it is interesting, and it is good not to
Speaker 2: install it on workstations when you don't have to, like yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2: Pretty quickly we get to a place where it's like,
Speaker 2: now you shouldn't have a local copy every time you
Speaker 2: start a project used to light up a dev box
Speaker 2: on this.
Speaker 3: Yeah, especially if all the licensing works right. So, like
Speaker 3: when you create a dev box, you already tied into
Speaker 3: like the licensing that you have because it's an Azure, right,
Speaker 3: and you're taking advantage of the licensing that you have
Speaker 3: for whatever tools you're installing on there.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 3: So again, like my question to anybody who is like
Speaker 3: why do I want this? Especially if you're work at a
Speaker 3: big company, Like why would I want this? It's like,
Speaker 3: have you ever had to like manage a VM yourself,
Speaker 3: like creating it, updating the software, dealing with it when
Speaker 3: they want to roll out patches? Like sounds like a bummer.
Speaker 3: Just you have dev box and just just code to
Speaker 3: your heart's content.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's sort of the platform as a service, software
Speaker 1: as a service. Yeah, it's a SaaS pass.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, like it's a I mean it yeah, it's but
Speaker 3: it's like technically infrastructure's service.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's all three.
Speaker 3: Right, yeah, So I mean let's just call it. Let's
Speaker 3: just call it service. It's just a service service.
Speaker 1: I like that. I like it's just a service.
Speaker 2: Yeah, very good.
Speaker 1: Okay, is there anything we haven't really covered? I mean
Speaker 1: I'm already sold, and I think anybody who's listening is
Speaker 1: already going there. Where do we get it? So?
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's it's crazy because I'll take credit cards over
Speaker 3: the phone. So if you wanted to just hand that
Speaker 3: over to me, we'll get you set up.
Speaker 1: With den box.
Speaker 2: Just the price doesn't scare people off, because we were
Speaker 2: talking about the maximum monthly price. Yeah, it's build out
Speaker 2: by the hour. There's a monthly storage fee, like yeah.
Speaker 3: And the price that I gave was like for the
Speaker 3: most powerful compete you could use, which I mean if
Speaker 3: you were if you were to if you were to
Speaker 3: build a desktop with thirty two virtual cpuke with thirty
Speaker 3: two cores, yeah, one and twenty eight gigs a RAM
Speaker 3: and two terribies a hard drive, it would cost you thousands.
Speaker 2: Thousands of dollar. Yeah, yeah for sure.
Speaker 3: But like like I mentioned, the hourly compute is what
Speaker 3: the real number is?
Speaker 1: You can go.
Speaker 3: I'll make sure there's a note to the pricing calculators.
Speaker 3: People could do it themselves, like it's six bucks an hour,
Speaker 3: and if you're doing forty hours a week, you know
Speaker 3: that's one hundred and sixty hours a year, one hundred
Speaker 3: and sixty hours time six Do the quick math, right,
Speaker 3: like it caps out around that number.
Speaker 2: Yeah right.
Speaker 1: So but for something that's more appropriate for you know,
Speaker 1: a developer, maybe thirty two gigs of RAM maybe maybe
Speaker 1: even eight CPUs or something like that, eight cores. You know,
Speaker 1: you're you're talking what a dollar an hour?
Speaker 3: It's like so like like I said, like I think
Speaker 3: I might mention this that the the ACPU thirty two
Speaker 3: gigs terabyte hard drive, it maxes out at one ninety five.
Speaker 3: It means it's a dollar fifty yeah a month, which
Speaker 3: is a dollar fifty hour.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's great. So that's great.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean especially when you compare it to like
Speaker 3: just running a VM.
Speaker 2: Yep, yes, like yeah, so and if you don't use
Speaker 2: it that month, you don't get built any hourly compute.
Speaker 2: You just get built a storage correct.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so, which which is which is another benefit of
Speaker 3: using these services, like they just you can turn them
Speaker 3: off or you can delete them completely.
Speaker 2: Yeah right, you can win. You can just leave them
Speaker 2: as a template. You could regenerate when you want it again.
Speaker 2: Just make sure you get the files towards somewhere else,
Speaker 2: which you're probably paying for.
Speaker 1: But can you attach data disks that already exists in Azure.
Speaker 3: If you would do If you could do that, I
Speaker 3: would need to look, but it would that would be
Speaker 3: a matter if you would probably have to do something
Speaker 3: via the Azure c l I.
Speaker 1: Right, because is it actually considered a VM, like can
Speaker 1: I because I can do that with vms and the
Speaker 1: cl I.
Speaker 3: Well, it's it's if you do a lot of digging around,
Speaker 3: you can look at some of the primitive resources that exist,
Speaker 3: like the NICK and the But like you're not going
Speaker 3: to have the ability to have that full level of
Speaker 3: management that you could if you were just to create
Speaker 3: like a VM scale set or whatever.
Speaker 1: But that might be good, Like I might have all
Speaker 1: my tools and all my you know, like I might
Speaker 1: have a a stash of code that's on a hard
Speaker 1: drive that's not in a repo somewhere, you know.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean especially like I mean if you have
Speaker 3: like if for instance, maybe you have it like an
Speaker 3: Azure Azure blob or as your filestore, like you could
Speaker 3: like when you provision the VM or provision the dev box,
Speaker 3: you can have a little you could say, hey, run
Speaker 3: this Azure CLI task and attaches to my to my PC,
Speaker 3: attaches this.
Speaker 1: Data disc external disc.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So that's something you can definitely do as well,
Speaker 3: especially if you have that use case where maybe you
Speaker 3: have like share, like maybe you're not fancying you don't
Speaker 3: use like private nugat feeds, Like maybe you still ship
Speaker 3: around DLLs on servers because that's the thing that people
Speaker 3: still do, like being able to link up those things
Speaker 3: as well.
Speaker 2: What's that?
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2: Very cool.
Speaker 1: Is there anything we missed?
Speaker 3: No, So we talked about like the customization experience, So
Speaker 3: you can customize dev box at the project level like
Speaker 3: what we were talking about, but also the individual level.
Speaker 3: Like maybe I'm a developer and I have very specific tastes,
Speaker 3: maybe I want dark theme in Windows, maybe I want
Speaker 3: specific settings and windows to be set. I can do
Speaker 3: that myself by when I create a dev box, I
Speaker 3: can just say use this customization file and that now
Speaker 3: be attached on top of the team's customization. Also, like
Speaker 3: you can define images in this space too, so like
Speaker 3: every single time a dev box, like I provision a
Speaker 3: new dev box resource, I can basically create an image
Speaker 3: from that directly. This could be referenced later. We didn't
Speaker 3: really talk about in tune, but I mean that's not
Speaker 3: super exciting, Like it's.
Speaker 2: Just what's the role of intune in this.
Speaker 3: It's it's true like every other device in your I
Speaker 3: guess fleet of devices, so you can get the endpoint security.
Speaker 3: You can make sure that you have like malware protection,
Speaker 3: all that stuff that you would get out of the
Speaker 3: box with Intune, even if you wanted to like push
Speaker 3: software right right, Like you can do that with dev
Speaker 3: box too. It's it's not slim thing. A lot of
Speaker 3: folks have asked me, like, okay, so it's completely separate
Speaker 3: from like my existing process, right, Like maybe you're an
Speaker 3: IT admin and you've like you live and die by
Speaker 3: in tune, right, and you've been doing all this stuff, like, Okay,
Speaker 3: now is dev box thing I have to learn this
Speaker 3: new dev box nomenclature and way of doing things. No,
Speaker 3: it's a device. You connect to it the same way
Speaker 3: when you built. When you create dev box, it automatically
Speaker 3: as a tier in Tune and from there, like it's
Speaker 3: just a matter of just managing it like you would
Speaker 3: any other device.
Speaker 1: How about chocolatey. Can we run chocolated scripts?
Speaker 2: Of course?
Speaker 3: Yeah, you can run whatever you want. You can run
Speaker 3: win get, you can run Chocolity, you can run uh,
Speaker 3: I don't know Bash scripts and WSL. It's Windows, so
Speaker 3: you can do whatever you want with it. Like, so
Speaker 3: the customization's experience that I was talking about there the
Speaker 3: team of Microsoft is built like a default catalog, which
Speaker 3: is basically like a set of predefined tasks like wind
Speaker 3: get is one, chocolate is one. So that means like
Speaker 3: every h dev box that you create, like it already
Speaker 3: has Chocolatey enabled by default. It has like power orshell
Speaker 3: wired up the exact way you want it, with all
Speaker 3: the paths mapped as when get DSSE set up for you,
Speaker 3: Like these are things that we take advance, we take
Speaker 3: for granted as developers because we just always had to
Speaker 3: do it. So it's like, Okay, I got to go
Speaker 3: and I got to get the Chocolatey installer. I got
Speaker 3: to get this installer path exactly, so it's kind of
Speaker 3: handled for you. So we talked about that. We talked
Speaker 3: about in tune like we just did. We talked about
Speaker 3: the Windows App, we talked about like you know, different projects,
Speaker 3: different versions of projects, different tasks. That's pretty cool. I mean,
Speaker 3: I think we hit a lot of the stuff. I
Speaker 3: mean I think the biggest thing is, you know, what
Speaker 3: are some of the things that you would like there
Speaker 3: to be right, Like you know, we've been talking about this.
Speaker 3: I think one thing that the team is always looking
Speaker 3: to do is is hear feedback from people like Carl,
Speaker 3: You've you've kind of had this pain of kind of
Speaker 3: doing it yourself, right, Like it sounds like you've already
Speaker 3: kind of been sold on dev box, But like, is
Speaker 3: there anything that I didn't mention that You're like, I
Speaker 3: need something like this, something like this around.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Basically, just the cost savings alone is worth it, because
Speaker 1: you know, I'm already used to tweaking systems, so that's
Speaker 1: a bonus for me. That's a little time saver, but
Speaker 1: it's not a it wouldn't be a deal breaker.
Speaker 2: Well, and they and the dev center having a repository
Speaker 2: of this is what the configuration.
Speaker 1: Is like, Yeah, that's right.
Speaker 2: It's kind of a force down the righteous path setting
Speaker 2: up dev box because it makes you do the right thing.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, yeah. The phrase that the phrase that we
Speaker 3: like to use is self service with guardrails, Right, I
Speaker 3: like it. That's like that, that's like the go to phrase.
Speaker 3: It's like, you want developers to have autonomy, you want
Speaker 3: them to be happy, but let's be real, like it,
Speaker 3: admin still have a role to play in organizations because
Speaker 3: they're always thinking about the bad actors, the what could
Speaker 3: go wrong, and you know, making sure that we're following
Speaker 3: all the right policies that our organization has in place
Speaker 3: is important. Also, one thing, like if anybody wants to know,
Speaker 3: like what's in the future for dev Box, like the
Speaker 3: roadmap is available publicly online, so you can like just
Speaker 3: you know, go to the go to the dev box
Speaker 3: docs and learn, or you can just use search engine
Speaker 3: and go dev Box roadmap and it'll take you in.
Speaker 3: Larro's a list of all the like the different like
Speaker 3: key like deliverable groups that exist and what's going on
Speaker 3: in each of those spaces.
Speaker 1: In true Microsoft fashion.
Speaker 2: Right, yeah, it's on.
Speaker 1: Get up. It's great, very cool, awesome, all right, Isaac,
Speaker 1: thanks very much. What's next for you? What's in your inbox?
Speaker 3: I think that the big thing, obviously we're recording this
Speaker 3: kind of at the beginning of twenty twenty five. My
Speaker 3: big thing is I started to do some tick talking.
Speaker 3: So I do this silly thing where I talk about
Speaker 3: tech in a cold plunge for five minutes because why not.
Speaker 3: And I think, and I think one of the things
Speaker 3: that I've kind of give myself as a resolution for
Speaker 3: this year is I want to understand how LMS work,
Speaker 3: Like I really I understand the concept. I understand a
Speaker 3: lot of the like the primitive sort of ideas, but
Speaker 3: I really want to understand like the different ways that
Speaker 3: MS can bring value to people, because I think it's
Speaker 3: not going away, that's for sure. And you know, I
Speaker 3: want to like learn how to build my own models.
Speaker 3: I want to learn how to you know, train those models,
Speaker 3: and evaluate those models and do all those things. So
Speaker 3: that's kind of the thing that I've been starting to
Speaker 3: pay attention.
Speaker 1: To this year.
Speaker 2: Well, I got a show coming up for you friend,
Speaker 2: all right, Well.
Speaker 3: I'll listen to it for sure. You already know I'm
Speaker 3: going to listen to it.
Speaker 1: All right, all right, this is great. It's been great
Speaker 1: talking to you again, Isaac.
Speaker 3: Thank you, Yeah, thanks for having me.
Speaker 1: All right, and we'll talk to you, dear listener next
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