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.