Rick Van Rousselt - Pro Microsoft Teams Development: A Hands-on Guide to Building Custom Solutions for the Teams Platform

Any source code or other supplementary material referenced by the author in this book is available to readers on GitHub via the books product page, located at www.apress.com/9781484263631 . For more detailed information, please visit http://www.apress.com/source-code .

Microsoft Teams is the new and exciting chat-based workspace in Microsoft 365. This new tool offers a whole new experience to collaborate and is the new standard for how people get their work done, both in the office and on the go with the mobile app. Because Microsoft Teams is a hub for teamwork, its only natural that people using the tool would want their other tools integrated into this hub, whether it is an existing application or a brand-new one thats developed. For us developers, this is an excellent opportunity. Our applications can get more visibility and are easier to use for people if we integrate them into the Teams developer platform.

There are lots of different ways that we can integrate our applications with Microsoft Teams, from surfacing our data so that its easily searchable to having a direct communication against the Microsoft Teams platform so that people perform better in their day-to-day jobs with the automatic creation of channels or teams.

Intended audience

This book is for developers and architects who want to know how the developer story for the Microsoft Teams platform unfolds and who wish to master developing apps inside and against Microsoft Teams. Existing Microsoft 365 developers who are already developing against one of the other services like SharePoint, Office, Dynamics, and so on can use this book to upgrade their existing skills and knowledge so that they can also develop on top of and against Microsoft Teams.

Organization of this book

This book is divided into seven major sections, each focusing on a different type of extension we can build on top of Teams, except for Part 1. Part 1 is a set of tips and tricks that extend your knowledge and make your development experience smoother and more manageable. The purpose of this book was not to help you get started with development for Microsoft Teams, because there is enough documentation, videos, and webinars out there to help you take the first baby steps into Teams development. This book starts in the first section with what to do after those first steps and how to make it easier on yourself and gives insights on how other people are developing against the platform. In Part 2, we deep dive into tabs in Teams and see how this seemingly simple extension can get a lot of visibility for your already existing apps. Part 3 is all about Bots and more specific chatbots in Teams. We will discuss general best practices when building bots and then go all the way into calling and media bots in Teams. Part 4 covers webhooks in Teams and how we can get data in and out of Teams with them. In Part 5, we discuss the ins and outs of messaging extensions and how they can be used to build fully integrated applications in Teams. In Part 6, we stop building on top of the Teams platform but start coding against it. We see how we can leverage the power of the Microsoft Graph and the power of PowerShell to have our Teams environment behave in an automated fashion. Finally, in Appendix, we discuss things to consider when you are building on top of the Teams platform such as adding your app to the Teams app store or on how to advance your techniques even further.

Code samples accompany most chapters of this book. They are targeted against Node or C# developers and explain the various topics we cover. Throughout this book, I try to keep the same example application and to build further and further along with it, so that at the end of the book, you get an example solution that covers everything. In every chapter, there is a starting solution and a completed solution. You can follow along from the starting solution through the chapter to get to the same result as the completed solution, or you can open up the completed solution and work your way from there. Also, dont forget that these solutions are not production-ready. Most keys and secrets are hard coded inside of the solution so that you can easily swap them out with your own. This is, of course, not a best practice. Therefore, these solutions are prepared for you to cherry-pick the pieces out that you can use in your applications.

First, I would like to thank Apress and especially Joan Murray and Jill Balzano for allowing me to write this book and helping me accomplish this goal. In these uncertain times of COVID-19 and the world coming to a sudden stop with lockdowns, events canceled, schools and restaurants closed, writing in a structured fashion on this book has not been easy. But thanks to Jill and Joan and their continuous support and guidance, this was possible.

Additionally, I would like to thank my two technical reviewers Albert-Jan Schot and Thomy Glles. They not only reviewed my book but were excellent sparring partners together with Stephan Bisser. They helped me to bounce ideas off each other during our biweekly webinars for Selected Tech. This is the power of the community; not only did we meet and got to know each other at different tech events, but I consider them not only fellow MVPs but friends as well.