Personal blog of Yzmir Ramirez

At its (virtual) Build conference today, Microsoft launched a number of new features, tools and services for developers who want to integrate their services with Teams, the company’s Slack competitor. It’s no secret that Microsoft basically looks at Teams, which now has about 145 million daily active users, as the new hub for employees to get work done, so it’s no surprise that it wants third-party developers to bring their services right to Teams as well. And to do so, it’s now offering a set of new tools that will make this easier and enable developers to build new user experiences in Teams.

There’s a lot going on here, but maybe the most important news is the launch of the enhanced Microsoft Teams Toolkit for Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code.

“This essentially enables developers to build apps easier and faster — and to build very powerful apps tapping into the rich Microsoft stack,” Microsoft group program manager Archana Saseetharan explained. “With the updated toolkit […], we enable flexibility for developers. We want to meet developers where they are.”

Image Credits: Microsoft

The toolkit offers support for tools and frameworks like React, SharePoint and .NET. Some of the updates the team enabled with this release are integration with Aure Functions, the SharePoint Framework integration and a single-line integration with the Microsoft Graph. Microsoft is also making it easier for developers to integrate an authorization workflow into their Teams apps. “Login is the first kind of experience of any user with an app — and most of the drop-offs happen there,” Saseetharan said. “So [single-sign on] is something we completely are pushing hard on.”

The team also launched a new Developer Portal for Microsoft Teams that makes it easier for developers to register and configure their apps from a single tool. ISVs will also be able to use the new portal to offer their apps for in-Teams purchases.

Other new Teams features for developers include ways for developers to build real-time multi-user experiences like whiteboards and project boards, for example, as well as a new meeting event API to build meeting-related workflows for when a meeting starts and ends, for example, as well as new features for the Teams Together mode that will let developers design their own Together experiences.

There are a few other new features here as well, but what it all comes down to is that Microsoft wants developers to consider Teams as a viable platform for their services — and with 145 million daily active users, that’s potentially a lucrative way for software firms to get their services in front of a new audience.

“Teams is enabling a new class of apps called collaborative apps,” said Karan Nigam, Microsoft’s director of product marketing for Teams. “We are uniquely positioned to bring the richness to the collaboration space — a ton of innovation to the extensibility side to make apps richer, making it easier with the toolkit update, and then have a single-stop shop with the developer portal where the entire lifecycle can be managed. Ultimately, for a developer, they don’t have to go to multiple places, it’s one single flow from the business perspective for them as well.”

Microsoft didn’t rush to bring blockchain technology to its Azure cloud computing platform, but over the course of the last year, it started to pick up the pace with the launch of its blockchain development kit and the Azure Blockchain Workbench. Today, ahead of its Build developer conference, it is going a step further by launching Azure Blockchain Services, a fully managed service that allows for the formation, management and governance of consortium blockchain networks.

We’re not talking cryptocurrencies here, though. This is an enterprise service that is meant to help businesses build applications on top of blockchain technology. It is integrated with Azure Active Directory and offers tools for adding new members, setting permissions and monitoring network health and activity.

The first support ledger is J.P. Morgan’s Quorum. “Because it’s built on the popular Ethereum protocol, which has the world’s largest blockchain developer community, Quorum is a natural choice,” Azure CTO Mark Russinovich writes in today’s announcement. “It integrates with a rich set of open-source tools while also supporting confidential transactions—something our enterprise customers require.” To launch this integration, Microsoft partnered closely with J.P. Morgan.

The managed service is only one part of this package, though. Microsoft also today launched an extension to Visual Studio Code to help developers create smart contracts. The extension allows Visual Studio Code users to create and compiled Etherium smart contracts and deploy them other on the public chain or on a consortium network in Azure Blockchain Service. The code is then managed by Azure DevOps.

Building applications for these smart contracts is also going to get easier thanks to integrations with Logic Apps and Flow, Microsoft’s two workflow integration services, as well as Azure Functions for event-driven development.

Microsoft, of course, isn’t the first of the big companies to get into this game. IBM, especially, made a big push for blockchain adoption in recent years and AWS, too, is now getting into the game after mostly ignoring this technology before. Indeed, AWS opened up its own managed blockchain service only two days ago.

 Fans of cross-platform coding will be happy to know that Visual Studio, “a true mobile-first, cloud-first development tool for .NET and C#,” will arrive for Mac during the Connect() conference in November. The move places Microsoft’s IDE on Macs. The IDE follows Visual Studio Code, Microsoft’s code editor, to OS X. Why is Microsoft seemingly abandoning the quest for… Read More