Welcome to day 1 of A Lap around Microsoft Graph Toolkit!

Microsoft Graph Toolkit is a collection of reusable and framework-agnostic web components and helpers for accessing and working with Microsoft Graph. Wow, that is a long sentence. Let’s break it down. 

Customer needs are our top priority when it comes to creating Microsoft Graph Toolkit. We talked with our developer community, took the most commonly built experiences powered by Microsoft Graph APIs, and developed this collection of web components. Using these web components is as simple as adding two lines of code to your HTML to enable a login button on the page. No fuss. 

But “Why Web Components?”, you may ask. One major advantage is that they are a defined standard included in the official W3C HTML spec. This means they have native support, and hence are compatible with all the big web frameworks – React, Angular, Vue… you name it!  

We want to save developers as much time as possible. Microsoft Graph Toolkit includes various authentication providers out of the box. This means you can quickly add these toolkit controls in web applications, Microsoft Teams tabs, and SharePoint web parts.  

One question our community asks quite often is, “What is the difference between Microsoft Graph Toolkit and Office UI Fabric?” Just like Office UI Fabric, Microsoft Graph Toolkit components are designed to look and feel like Microsoft 365 experiences because we built them on top of UI Fabric core. We also took them another step forward and connected them to Microsoft Graph APIs. You can easily render the data in a UI without having to write your own code. This is because Microsoft Graph Toolkit components encapsulate Microsoft Graph API logic to provide complete experiences. However, we designed the toolkit so that it’s easily extensible and customizable with templating and CSS custom properties. 

To recap, Microsoft Graph Toolkit is great for developers of all experience levels looking to develop a web application, Microsoft Teams tab, or SharePoint webpart that connects to the Microsoft Graph. It helps cut development time and works everywhere! We will go into further details of these topics in future posts. There are also many helpful Try It Out samples for you to play with if you keep following our blog series. 

Stay tuned with the series! Next up: Zero to Hero with Microsoft Graph Toolkit (April 16th, 2020)