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Microsoft Dev Box

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44 pointsMikusR17 comments

I’m (cautiously) optimistic about this. I’ve found that magic of writing code evaporated for me when I joined the industry and spent most of my time fiddling with environments. Your workstation crashed? Be prepared to spend an entire day doing nothing but getting another one initialized.

After a few weeks on the job this dies down, but I can’t count how many times I’ve been curious to try something, only to dismiss it because I might have to mess with my environment for a good chunk of time.

I’m so sick of the sensation of getting a ticket, knowing immediately the 5 minutes of coding I need to do, and then spend the rest of the day with a flaky environments until my tests successfully run. This is at a major, FAANG-size tech company.

This is probably even more acute for people inside Microsoft that are running Windows daily builds from their team's branch on their main machines.

Microsof is only making a service that many of us already do in-house with cloud based devenvs for contractors.

Nowadays I only get to deal with external laptops from customers when dealing with those that are yet to get into cloud stuff.

Definitely looking into this. We don't have a particularly complex development environment, but there is that little box of tools, CLI tricks, processes, environment variables, etc. which still cause troubles across the team.

I really want to build some golden development machine image so that everyone can start working in exactly the same terms. For example, instead of having to manually go out to a QA server to copy some state down for testing, we could add a script to the desktop that every developer can just double-click for convenience. I know IT folks at F500 companies are reading this and rolling their eyes right now, but we are a tiny shop and don't have a lot of time or money for managing this sort of thing. We already do everything in Azure, so this fits super well (if its actually good).

The dream is to have the desktop so intuitive (i.e. "new hire start here.pdf") that most of the boilerplate training is more-or-less automatic.

The easy way is the to take a azure vm, get it exactly how you want it, and take a snapshot.

Now when you want a new dev vm just build it from the snapshot.

Not the best way, but one of the easier ways

Would this be a competitor to https://www.gitpod.io/ ?

It isn't a match, because this is a full Windows desktop running over Web streams/RDP.

It is a competitor to Citrix, VMWare and similar offerings.

As a founder in a competing company and someone that works from different devices and coffee shops, I'm very pumped for this!

The thing that people underestimate how incredibly freeing it is to work from any device and not have to worry about the setup.

Also hoping that Microsoft educates the market and the typical vendor lock-in bullshit pushes everyone to us

Does it still use RDP for connectivity? I want to like these cloud workstations but typing latency just doesn’t make it very enjoyable

I have a local dev station that I connect to over wifi, but Windows RDP is still pretty laggy over wifi. And solutions like Parsec have their own issues…

I'm curious. What kind of latency do you feel over rdp? I use it 10 hours a day for the last 2 years. One when its over local WiFi and second over zerotier and over Ethernet.

I do NOT find it annoying to make it any less enjoyable or even that I cannot differentiate between which connection i am running over at a moment.

Is there a subjective test we can do over ethernet and WiFi and even that zerotier to find latency issues like you mentioned ?

There is a great comparison between various terminals' latency https://danluu.com/term-latency/ (it comes up periodically on HN too - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19443076), so once when I was curious if it was just me or if RDP was indeed slower, I did a quick test using the same toolset - https://github.com/pavelfatin/typometer

It is not a super-scientific test since:

0) I didn't spend too much time on this

1) I wasn't able to test Sublime Text or VSCode over RDP as the tool would stop "typing" after a few characters

2) I did test Visual Studio 2022 though - since this is the primary reason of why I even have a remote Windows box

3) When running on M1 mac, Java can't seem to use native APIs for screen capture, so I'm not sure how much that affects the results

Parameters:

1) Remote - Windows 11, hard-wired LAN, running in 4K using an HDMI emulator plug

2) Local - MacBook Pro M1 Max, over wifi (speed test around 400mbps)

3) Using the official RDP mac app

4) Using Retina mode, True color when connecting (essentially making a 4K HIDPI connection, just checked right now using https://whatismyviewport.com/ - Chrome gives 2560x1339px screen size with DPR 2.0)

Testing typometer on local (Mac's) Sublime Text:

  Average latency: 20.9ms, SD 16.7ms

Typometer running on the remote box itself, Sublime Text:

  Average: 51.7ms, SD 39.8ms

Running on the remote box, testing Visual Studio 2022:

  Average: 62.7ms, SD 10.2ms

And finally running VS2022 over RDP:

  Average: 216.9ms, SD 106.1ms

So overall it is not VERY bad, but it is still very noticeable. For example, autocomplete/suggestions popups feel definitely laggy

hey... thanks for typometer. i tested it on the main "computer" running win10 itself running notepad. that gave me

avg: 16.2 ms max:18,8 min:14.9 while i set up krdc to use rdp over "wifi" within the same network and i got the result avg:33.9 ms max:75.8 min:29

the max and min are a lot but not in the 200 range. i will confirm again by testing it over zerotier today from a remote location but i don't think it would be as bad.

> For example, autocomplete/suggestions popups feel definitely laggy

So replicating the local experience on many source code bases, not bad.

Also for what its worth, I usually get around 90ms typing latency with Parsec...

RDP is the only remote desktop tool I've ever used that provides acceptable latency, fidelity, etc.

RDP beats hands down any experience I previously had with VNC or X Windows.

Citrix was comparable, then again that is where RDP was born.

If it’s priced right this could be great. My big issue is avoiding an upgrade to a new pc because of the downtime recreating my bespoke environment.

If they can make it attractive for the VM time and visual studio it could be a hit…

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