Microsoft has released a preview version of Dev Home, a new control center for Windows that makes it easy to connect to GitHub and configure cloud development environments like Microsoft Dev Box and GitHub Codespaces.

Dev Home provides a way to monitor projects in a dashboard using customizable widgets, as well as configuring your dev environment by downloading apps, packages, or repositories, connecting to your developer accounts and tools (such as GitHub), and creating a Dev Drive for storage all in one place.

Dev Home is open source and Microsoft says it is fully extensible so developers can choose to create a customizable dashboard and the tools they need. The dashboard has customizable widgets to monitor workflows, track your dev projects, coding tasks, GitHub issues, pull requests, available SSH connections, and system CPU, GPU, Memory, and Network performance. There's also a Machine configuration tool that can be used to set up your development environment on a new device.

Alongside Dev Home, Microsoft also announced Dev Drive, a new option for storage that is designed to improve performance for key developer workloads. Dev Drive uses ReFS (Resilient File System) technology to optimize the file system based on developer use. It also enables Dev Drive to provide more control over storage volume settings and security, including trust designation, antivirus configuration, and administrative control over what filters are attached.

The Resilient File System (ReFS) is a newer Microsoft file system format than NTFS, and has been designed to maximize data availability, scale efficiently to large data sets across diverse workloads, and ensure data integrity with resiliency to corruption.

Microsoft says that there is typically a tradeoff between performance and security, but using a Dev Drive places control over this balance in the hands of developers. This includes a performance mode for Microsoft Defender that Microsoft says provides a faster build time for heavy I/O operations by up to 30 percent. 

More Information

What is Dev Home?

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