Wictor Wilen

Imagine you want to create a chat bot for Microsoft Teams in order to automate tasks, enhance the discussion or just feeling lonely and want someone to talk to. There’s many ways of doing this; you can start from scratch building a bot, using the Microsoft Bot framework and/or using the Microsoft Teams Yeoman generator, you can use the Azure Bot Service, you can use the FAQ bots to essentially create a no code solution.

A long overdue update of the Microsoft Teams Apps Yeoman generator – we’re now up to version 2.5.0! It’s a fairly substantial update both in the generator and in the generated code – this update will make future updates a lot smoother and will allow for enabling more features going forward. Thanks to all who provided feedback and input and has tested the generator over the last few months. You can get the latest generator by running

SharePoint Framework (SPFx) is a fantastic development model on top of (modern) SharePoint, for user interface extensibility, and it have evolved tremendously over the last year since it became general available. The framework is based on JavaScript extensibility in a controlled manner, compared to the older JavaScript injection mechanisms we used to extend (classic) SharePoint, that comes with a lot of power. Using SharePoint Framework our JavaScript has access to the whole DOM in the browser, meaning that we can do essentially what we want with the user interface – however, of course, we shouldn’t, only certain parts of the DOM are allowed/supported for modification. These areas are the custom client-side Web Parts we build (that squared box) or specific place holders (currently only two of them; top and bottom). For me that’s fine (although there’s a need for some more placeholders), but if you want to destroy the UX it is all up to you.

Microsoft Ignite is just around the corner and the sheer number of new announcements for SharePoint and SharePoint Online has been almost overwhelming. The team is making such a tremendous job right now! One of my favorite features, that I have requested both privately and openly with Microsoft, is the ability to have custom themes for SharePoint. Yes, we had the old “look and feel” thing, custom CSS thing, Office 365 suite bar branding, but there has never been a good way of using this in Modern sites or even the possibility to turn of the default themes. And now, last week, Microsoft announced a new set of features that can do all of this for us – create custom themes, a nice theme designer and the ability to hide the default themes.

I’ve been building chat-bots for a while now and I’m seeing more and more requests of building these bots for enterprises. For bots targeted at the enterprise, perhaps being hosted in Microsoft Teams, one of the first requirements is that they should get data from their internal systems and most specifically from Office 365, through the Microsoft Graph. The problem here is that we need to authenticate and authorize the user, through Microsoft Azure AD, to be able to access these resources. A Microsoft Bot Framework bot, does not inherit the credentials or security tickets from the application the bot is being invoked from, so we need handle this ourselves. For instance, even though you have logged in to Microsoft Teams, or Skype for Business or your Intranet – your security token cannot (and should not) be passed to the Bot.

Today is the day where the Microsoft community officially award the community with the Microsoft MVP award. We will all receive some new friends and old friends and also we loose some dear friends (that we of course hope to see back into the program again). I’ve been fortunate to be re-awarded with the Office Servers and Services Microsoft MVP award, for the 8th consecutive year. Thank you Microsoft!

A couple of months back I started creating a Yeoman generator to make it easier for me to scaffold, build and deploy the Microsoft Teams extensions (now apps). I’ve received very good feedback on it and had some very nice contributions to the project, which was hosted on my public Github account. To really make this available for everyone to use I’ve been discussing this project with the Microsoft Teams team about having it “officially backed” by the real team and nut just me as an individual. After some interesting discussions the Microsoft Teams generator now have a new home.

If you are an ISV or SI with multiple clients and are interested in building SharePoint Framework (SPFx) solutions that you would like to re-use you will face a huge issue when it comes to reference SharePoint JavaScript files and reference your SharePoint Framework bundles. All these URL’s are hardcoded into your solution configuration files and requires you to update these files and rebuild for each and every client environment. And not only that even in your own development team this will cause issues if you don’t have a shared development environment.

A couple of weeks back I published a Yeoman generator to build Tabs for Microsoft Teams. Since then I’ve continued to add stuff to it as the Teams team has continued to add features to their extensibility story. So, this generator is not only for creating Tabs, but now also for adding Bots and Custom Bots to Microsoft Teams. With that I decided to rename the generator to yo teams (generator name is generator-teams).