Microsoft Brings AI Capabilities to Teams App Developers
- Paul Thurrott
- Mar 07, 2024
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Developers who create apps for Microsoft Teams can now take advantage of new AI capabilities in Teams Toolkit for Visual Studio.
“Teams Toolkit for Visual Studio helps .NET developers build, debug, and publish apps for Microsoft Teams,” Microsoft’s Ayca Bas writes. “We are thrilled to share that the 17.9 version of Teams Toolkit for Visual Studio 2022 is packed with exciting capabilities for .NET developers such as the new AI Bot template, Teams Bot Test tool, Adaptive Card previewer, and more enhancements [and] bug fixes to improve your development experience.”
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Teams Toolkit for Visual Studio is an optional free add-on for Visual Studio 2022 Community, Professional, and Enterprise. It provides C#/Blazor templates for tabs, bots, and message extensions, sample apps, app preview and deployment capabilities, and Azure Functions integration. The latest version of this toolkit provides developers with the following capabilities:
AI bot template. This new Teams application type helps you create a basic AI bot using OpenAI technologies.
Teams Bot test tool. This new tool makes it easier to debug, preview, and test a Teams Bot app in a simulated Teams chat environment without needing to log in to the Team web client like before.
Adaptive card previewer. This tool helps developers preview and edit adaptive cards in a more straightforward manner, directly in Visual Studio.
CodeLens support in lifecycle steps. Now, Teams Toolkit configures lifecycle actions and settings in a YAML configuration file.
Direct access to documentation. You can now access the Teams Toolkit documentation directly in Visual Studio by navigating to Project > Teams Toolkit > Teams Toolkit Documentation.
Microsoft has also released preview versions of several new Teams Toolkit features that you can access by navigating to Tools > Options > Preview Features. These include a Develop Copilot Plugin template for extending the capabilities of Copilot for Microsoft 365, a Custom Search Results template, and an AI Assistant Bot that lets you connect a Teams bot to the OpenAI Assistants API.