Supercharge your productivity with Microsoft's Dev Home and Dev Drive for Windows 11. Streamline workflows, optimize filesystem performance, and more.- Story published by Kunal Chowdhury on .
During the //BUILD/2023 conference, Microsoft made an exciting announcement that aims to enhance the productivity of developers working on the Windows 11 operating system. The tech giant introduced two new features called "Dev Home" and "Dev Drive", which are designed to streamline the development process and improve workflow efficiency. Let's take a quick look at these two new features here.
One of the key introductions is Dev Home, a new experience within Windows 11 that serves as a dedicated hub for developers. Available in preview, Dev Home acts as a productivity companion, empowering developers to focus on their work without unnecessary distractions.
The new features and improvements offered by Dev Home include WinGet configuration for faster and easier setup, Dev Drive for enhanced filesystem performance, and a customizable dashboard that consolidates all workflows and tasks in one centralized location.
Dev Home simplifies the process of connecting to GitHub and configuring development machines to work with specific repositories. It facilitates the seamless installation of necessary tools and packages required for coding.
Additionally, Dev Home enables developers to configure their coding environments in the cloud using Microsoft Dev Box and GitHub Codespaces. By providing an optimized workspace environment, Dev Home allows developers to concentrate on their coding tasks effortlessly.
Dev Drive, another noteworthy introduction, is a specialized storage volume designed exclusively for developers. Acknowledging that developers frequently work with repositories containing thousands of files and directories, Microsoft has developed Dev Drive to address the challenges posed by heavy input/output (I/O) operations like builds.
Dev Drive utilizes the Resilient File System, which, when combined with the new performance mode capability in Microsoft Defender for Antivirus, delivers significant improvements in file system performance, resulting in up to 30% faster build times for file I/O scenarios. This performance mode, offering enhanced security for workloads compared to folder or process exclusions, ensures a balanced solution between security and performance.
Setting up a Dev Drive is a straightforward process. Developers can access Windows Settings and navigate to System > Storage > Advanced Store Settings > Disks & volumes to create a new Dev Drive.
However, a few prerequisites need to be met before setting up Dev Drive, including being part of the Windows 11 Insider Program Build in the Dev Channel, having a minimum of 16GB memory (recommended), and ensuring a minimum of 50GB free disk space.
By introducing Dev Home and Dev Drive, Microsoft demonstrates its commitment to empowering developers and enhancing their productivity on the Windows platform. These new features streamline the development process, minimize disruptions, and provide optimized environments for coding, ultimately enabling developers to focus on what they do best—writing code.
Developers can download the preview version of Dev Home from the Microsoft Store (https://aka.ms/installdevhome) and look forward to trying out Dev Drive, which will be available in preview later this week.
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