The Microsoft Teams Apps Generator, Yo Teams, combines open source technologies and modern development practices for cross platform development targeting the Microsoft Teams platform. Yo Teams allows you to scaffold out a project for simple proof of concepts and focus on your business requirements to full-scale applications with end-to-end application lifecycle management support. Yo Teams is used by developers from all corners of the world and over 1.000 new Teams Applications are created monthly to create unique and innovative solutions for Microsoft Teams.

This release is focused on bringing Yo Teams up to date with the latest Microsoft Teams manifest schemas (1.7 and 1.8) including support in the wizard for some of the new features. – including full screen personal apps. At the same time we’ve dropped support for schema 1.5 and below – new projects can only be scaffolded with version 1.6, 1.7, 1.8 or the developer preview version. However any existing projects running earlier versions are not affected.

Also included in this release is some long awaited optimizations for bundle size, upgrades to newer versions of TypeScript and webpack and more. This is a work that we will continue to improve in upcoming releases. Last but not least – a new default icon for the created apps, it’s Microsoft 365 PnP Parker the porcupine!

The full change log is available in the Github repository and upgrade instructions for existing projects is available in the Yo Teams Wiki.

Earlier this year a great extension to Visual Studio and Visual Studio code was released – the Microsoft Teams Toolkit. Although some overlapping functionality they share the same idea of creating great applications for Microsoft Teams, but using alternative approaches. Yo Teams is a command line based generator, similar to SharePoint Framework (SPFx) and Teams Toolkit is an in-application wizard that integrates directly to the Microsoft Teams App Studio. These two options allows you as a developer to choose how you want to generate your project.

We’re having a continuous dialog on how to make these two tools work great together, so you as a developer can focus on building your app. Keep the feedback coming!

Thanks to all amazing contributors for this release: Brendan Andrade, Oleksandr Fediashov ( Microsoft), Jason Merino (Ferguson Enterprises), Felipe Plets (Zensurance), Orta Therox (Microsoft) and Wictor Wilén (Avanade). The open source community is truly fabulous.

For the upcoming releases we are planning on continuing adding support in the scaffolding wizard for the new features in schema 1.8 around the meeting extensibility, as well. Another area we would like to improve is the documentation around build, deployment and releasing – including support for multiple manifests and environments.

There’s lot of feature requests in our Github issues list – feel free to drop in and help or suggest a new idea!

“Sharing is caring!”

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Microsoft 365 Patterns and Practices Team – 30th of October 2020