YoTeams

Five years! It’s been five years seen I first published the Microsoft Teams apps generator - yo teams, and in a few days we also have the 5th anniversary for the official Microsoft Teams launch. It’s been five very interesting years that has changed how we collaborate and communicate. It all started long before March of 2017. I had the opportunity to work for an organization that was one of the early adopters of Microsoft Teams, and driven by my curiosity I immediately saw that with this new tool had some amazing opportunities to create even better experiences for my customers. Without essentially any documentation, and without no tooling whatsoever I handed responded to a couple of call for papers for conferences during 2017 on the topic on how to extend Microsoft Teams (at that time only with Tabs, Connectors and Bots). And that’s where my struggles started - I had to build everything from scratch all the time, working on plumbing, packaging, deployment and it took ages before I could create the real solution. With the experience from the beta and the version 1 release of SharePoint Framework in February that same year - I decided that why don’t I use the same tech stack as SPFx and create a generator to scaffold out all that plumbing for my Teams tabs. That would be a great challenge, and something that would allow me to create demos for conferences and customers faster as well as something I could share with the broader community. And that’s how the Yeoman generator for Teams Tabs was birthed.

We’re getting closer to the holidays and we all like to both give and receive gifts at this time of the year. Here is an early Christmas gift from me, and the amazing Microsoft teams that’s been building out these new features, to all of you fantastic people out there. A few months ago Microsoft announced the capabilities where we can deploy Microsoft Teams apps and use them across other high-usage areas of Microsoft 365 and now those areas has been extended even further and covers Office.com, Outlook web and the old fat Outlook client. This great feature allows us to create a personal tab, that when deployed can be used inside Microsoft Teams just as normal, but also in the Office.com portal (if you haven’t visited that portal in a while - do it, there’s some great new features in there) and Outlook (both web and desktop).

When building applications for Microsoft Teams, the very first hurdle essentially all developers will try to jump over is the one with getting an access token to be able to communicate with Microsoft Graph. This is something that can be done fairly easy, if you know what to do, but requires you as a developer to connect a few dots. Over the last year this has become way easier, and there are a few great examples out there - you can find some great ones in the PnP Teams Samples.

When building software the most common scenario is that you have a team building the solution, application and/or service. You typically have front-end, back-end and full-stack developers, you have testers and designers, and more. However, working in a team is not always easy. Back in the days we could all have our software running locally and we just grabbed the latest version/commit and hacked away. For web applications the use of localhost worked just fine for almost everyone. But with cloud based solutions where you have a strong connection to one or more cloud services, it becomes a little bit more complex - you might have connections to cloud services such as storage, databases, web service and more. In most cases these resources can be spun up by each developer or shared and then managed by a configuration/environment file.

The growth of using Yo Teams - the Microsoft Teams Apps generator - has been tremendous over the last year, and I can really tell that it’s not just being used for development and testing by the number of questions and requests I get on how to make a proper deployment of the solution to Azure. In this post I will share how I most often do it. The initial version of Yo Teams shipped with simple instructions on how to do Git deploy of your application to Azure. A method that worked most often, but was very error prone and very slow. This is still in the documentation of any generated project (yes, will change in 2.17 and later). That method was never intended for any production scenarios, but more as a quick start for developers to get going. But now, with Azure DevOps pipelines being available to almost everyone, and with Github Actions, I think it is about time to document this down so I have something to share when this question comes up.

Hey, I’m back. Long time since I did some writing on this blog. But I needed to get this one out. As you all know I’m a huge fan of the Microsoft Teams extensibility model and now with the SSO support for Tabs, it’s even easier to create integrated experiences for your end users where they can consume data and information from the Microsoft Graph or LOB systems. I recently did a small appearance at the Microsoft 365 PnP webcast showcasing how to configure and scaffold a Microsoft Teams project that uses this new SSO Tab feature. You can watch the recording here:

Happy Easter everyone, I have fantastic news. After seven preview versions (and even a skipped version - 2.6) the Microsoft Teams Apps Yeoman generator 2.7.0 is now available for you to use! Just like tons of others do; there’s been over 6.000 downloads of the generator, it’s generating a handful of new Teams projects every day and it’s done from all parts of the world! Join the movement!