Set up a Windows dev box on DeskBoot: Visual Studio, WSL2, VS Code in 10 minutes

A real workflow customers walk in with: "I'm on a MacBook, my new employer's stack is Windows-only, and I need Visual Studio + WSL2 + a working local dev environment. Where do I start?"

Here's the DeskBoot version, timed. Whole thing is roughly 10 minutes if you don't stop to Google anything.

Minute 0–2: Signup + first session

1. Sign up at deskboot.store — Google sign-in or magic link, whichever's faster
2. Add a card or top up via M-Pesa. Minimum useful balance is about $2 (covers 4h of Standard tier). $50 launch promo applies if you're one of the first 50.
3. Launch a session. Pick:
   • OS: Windows 11-style (Server 2025 base with the Win 11 UI generation)
   • Size: Standard (2 vCPU, 8 GiB) is enough for VS Code. Performance (4/16) if you're compiling anything serious.
   • Region: whichever's closest to you — us-east-1 for North America, eu-west-1 for Europe, af-south-1 for Africa.

Session is provisioning. ~2-3 minutes for the box to come up, plus a bootstrap that installs Chrome and enables audio.

Minute 3–5: Connect via RDP

Once the session is "running," open the session detail page:

1. Click Reveal credentials. You'll see the username (Administrator) and a strong random password.
2. Click Download .rdp file — pre-configured for your session's IP + port.
3. Open the file. On Mac, use Microsoft Remote Desktop (free App Store). On Linux, use Remmina. On Windows, RDP is built in.
4. Paste the password. Accept the certificate warning (self-signed on a fresh session).

You're in.

Minute 5–8: Install what you need

DeskBoot doesn't pre-install Visual Studio (licensing + size), but it's straightforward:

• VS Code: open Chrome, download the installer, next-next-finish. 90 seconds.
• Visual Studio Community: slower — the Visual Studio installer downloads ~4-8 GiB depending on workloads you pick. Standard tier's 100 GiB SSD is plenty of room.
• WSL2: open PowerShell as admin, wsl --install. Reboot the session (Reboot button on the DeskBoot dashboard, back in about 2 min). Ubuntu WSL is up.
• Git for Windows: winget install Git.Git.

Minute 8–10: Get your work in there

Two clean options:

• Clone from Git: SSH key pair, git clone, done.
• Copy from local: RDP supports clipboard + file drag-and-drop by default (some clients need a shared folder mount — Microsoft Remote Desktop Mac supports it in the "Redirection" tab).

Compile something to prove the toolchain works. If it does, you're done — this is your Windows dev box now.

What to remember

• Click Stop when done for the day. Storage keeps accruing (~$0.15/mo for Standard), but compute stops. Next time, click Start; the box comes back up in ~90 seconds with everything you installed.
• Terminate when the project ends. Wipes the disk, ends storage cost.
• Auto-stop at $0 kicks in if you forget to top up — your box gets stopped, not terminated.

Total time invested: ~10 minutes. Total monthly cost if you use it 2h/day, 20 days/month: about $10.