Azure DevTest Labs - Add Windows Virtual Machine Along With Visual Studio "15"

In our previous article,  Azure DevTest Labs: A Self-Service Sandbox Environment – Basics, we learned the basics of Azure DevTest Labs and how to create the DevTest Labs. In this tutorial, we will learn how to add a Virtual Machine with Windows Server 2012 R2 along with Visual Studio “15” Enterprise Preview.

Navigate to the Azure Management portal and go to “All Resources” and click DevTest Labs that we created in our previous article.



You will be taken to the “Essentials” blade of the DevTest Lab, as shown below.



There are no VMs currently created in this DevTest Lab, as shown in the above screenshot. Let’s go ahead and create a new Virtual Machine.

Click “Virtual Machine” and it will take you to the “Choose a base” blade, which displays all the configurations that Azure supports.



Search for “15” in the “Search for filter items” text box, as shown below:



Selecting the “Visual Studio “15” Preview 2” option above and it will display “Virtual Machine – Configuration Settings” blade, as shown below:



By default, “Standard_A0” is selected, which is a bit costly. Let’s change the size of the VM to A1 Basic, as shown below:



Click “Select” button of the “Choose a Size” button and you will see “A1 Basic” being selected in the “Virtual Machine Size” blade, as shown below. Also, save the credentials that you provide in this step. These are used for logging into the VM remotely.



Now, click “Artifacts” and you will see the “Add artifacts” blade as shown in the above screenshot.

Artifact: Basically, artifacts are like tools that can be added to our virtual machine after they are provisioned.

Let’s go ahead and try to add “Chrome” Browser in our new virtual machine by clicking “Chrome” artifact, which would open the details as shown below:



You can add multiple artifacts. For this tutorial, we will add only one article “Chrome”. Now, click “Add” in the “Add Artifact” blade and click OK in the “Add Artifacts” blade.

Now, the virtual machine settings will show “1 artifact(s) selected” as shown below:



Now, click “Create” to create the virtual machine with Visual Studio “15” Preview 2 along with Chrome Browser.

It will take a couple of minutes to create the VM.

Virtual machine is now created after 10 minutes or so.



As per the above screenshot, we can see the new virtual machine named “VisualStudioVM” in the “My Virtual machines” section of the above screenshot.

Let’s view the virtual machine settings by clicking on the virtual machine name, shown in the above screenshot.



The above screenshot shows the details of the VM that we have created. Click “Connect” and it will download a Remote Desktop connection file. Provide the credentials that you have shared while creating the virtual machine.



Clicking on the above .rdp file will open up a popup and prompt for the credentials, as shown below:



Provide the credentials that you have saved and click “OK” button. That’s it. You will now be logged into the new VM, as shown below:



Note that a shortcut to Chrome is also available, as we have selected Chrome as an artifact. (It would have been very nice if we also had a shortcut for Visual Studio “15” preview as well).

Here is the screenshot capture of the Apps of the virtual machine.



You can now play around with Visual Studio 15 Preview 2, with all the great features that Microsoft releases for us! Happy coding.

Your feedback or suggestions are greatly appreciated!