At their recent BUILD developer conference, Microsoft launched a new open source project into preview release, Dev Home. Dev Home is aiming to be a portal or control center for Windows based developers to organize all their development tasks in a single place. This includes an interface to quickly configure your development machine by installing required software and cloning required GitHub repositories with just a few clicks. It also provides a dashboard that is widget driven, with an open API for developers to create their own extensions. Dev Home also enables you to create new Dev Drives, a new file system coming soon to Windows 11 specially designed and optimized for development tasks.
Details of Dev Home from the announcement blog:
Dev Home at its core
Dev Home is designed with customization and configurability in mind. It’s built as an open-source tool with an extension model to allow you to create your own customized Dev Home experience. Our team is striving to make Dev Home a great place for all developers and its extensibility can help make it tailored just for you.
Extensions
Extensions can provide their own experiences within the Dev Home and also provide widgets for the dashboard. If you’d like to learn how to create an extension for Dev Home, check out our docs. In the future, we’re looking to create a marketplace within Dev Home, to make finding and installing extensions that much easier. We welcome everyone and want to collaborate on how we can make Dev Home the best location for everyone.
Machine configuration using Dev Home
One of the biggest pain points we’ve heard from developers is the time and hassle it takes to set up a dev environment to code for an existing project. We’ve included a new environment configuration tool to help make it easy to set up your local machine as well as a remote environment like a Dev Box or GitHub Codespaces.
Dashboard and widgets
Dev Home includes a customizable dashboard with developer-focused widgets built using the Windows widget platform. Widgets we’ve shipped with this first release of Dev Home include system resource widgets with information based on your CPU, GPU, network, and memory usage. Additionally, the Dev Home GitHub extension provides GitHub widgets to display issue and pull request information based on a repository, plus issues and pull requests you’ve been mentioned in, assigned to, or have your review requested on. If you have more widgets you’d like to see, please file a feature request on GitHub!
Dev Home and Windows
We are working to ensure Dev Home and Windows are integrated together seamlessly. Using the Windows Insiders Program, we will be exploring different ways to bring you the Dev Home experience. As part of Windows OOBE (out of box experience), you can now select “Development” as an option for how you plan to use your device. We will experiment with different experiences such as recommending Dev Home in Start to help you finish getting your machine into a code-ready state. To learn more about Dev Drive, check out this blog post!
Dev Home is an open source project, hosted on GitHub under the MIT open source license.
Key Links
You can learn more about the preview release of Microsoft Dev Home and about the upcoming Dev Drive file system support in the video below.