We’re excited to announce Teams Toolkit for Visual Studio Code v5.14 and the latest stable release update. This version brings impactful new features, enhancements, and critical bug fixes to improve your development experience.
New features
Switch tenant
Teams Toolkit now supports switching target tenant for users with multiple tenants in their Microsoft 365 or Azure account. A “Switch Tenant” button is located next to the account information, and the currently logged-in tenant is displayed alongside the account details.
Add capabilities for declarative agents
With Teams Toolkit, you can now enhance your declarative agent by integrating Web Search capabilities. This allows your agent to access and utilize information from the web, providing more accurate and relevant responses to your customers’ queries.
Add agent debugging experience
To provide a better debugging experience for agent developers, we have integrated the debugging experience in Microsoft 365 Copilot in-chat debugger (available in developer mode only). You can get a clear picture of what capability and action that your agent is set up with. You can easily view how your agent is executing actions and gain deeper insights into execution details, including success or failure hints for both capabilities and actions.
Manage authentication for declarative agents
When adding actions to your declarative agent, you might encounter OpenAPI specifications that lack authentication configurations, even though the actual API calls require OAuth. To address this, we introduce commands that assist users to add and manage authentication for their agents. This enhancement would streamline the process and ensure that your API calls are properly authenticated, making it easier to work with your declarative agent.
Enable Adaptive Card Previewer for declarative agents
We understand that designing an adaptive card for the Declarative Agent has been challenging due to compatibility issues with the Adaptive Card Previewer extension. We’re excited to announce that we’ve now added support to preview Adaptive Card, making the process much smoother and more efficient for you. This enhancement ensures that you can seamlessly design adaptive cards without any hassle.
GitHub Copilot Extension walkthrough
To make it easier for users to get started with the GitHub Copilot Extension “@teamsapp,” Teams Toolkit has added a walkthrough UI experience. This guide helps users understand how to install and use this helpful AI assistant to build Teams apps.
Enhancement
Use an existing Entra ID instead of creating a new one
Teams Toolkit creates Entra ID during debugging. While users are easily blocked by no permission to create Entra ID in their tenant. Now we will improve this process to allow users to use an existing Entra ID which can be created by tenant admin. You will need to input the ID and password to continue.
Input OpenAI Key to debug
Custom Engine Agent projects require an OpenAI key for debugging. Teams Toolkit now allows users to create these projects without inputting the OpenAI key. However, missing this value will definitely cause a failure in preview and debugging. Therefore, an input box will pop up before preview/debug to remind users of the required value.
Declarative agent API Key Authentication
API Key Authentication in the DA project was implemented using Bearer Tokens in the past. Recently, the Teams platform has added support for developers to specify the key name in the API request header or query URL. As a result, we have updated the corresponding templates to reflect this change.
Microsoft Entra Manifest
Teams Toolkit has updated Microsoft Entra app manifest to apply MS Graph format for better integration with platform.
Troubleshooting with GitHub Copilot Extension
Teams Toolkit now improve the troubleshooting experience with GitHub Copilot extension by adding a “Resolve with @teamsapp” button, click this button will ask Teams Toolkit to open the output channel in the editor. Then the GitHub Copilot Chat will use the output log as a reference for troubleshooting requests. Consequently, @teamsapp can read the log and perform troubleshooting.
Publish Teams App
Refine the “Publish Teams App” UI in Teams Toolkit to reduce confusion. Now there are two buttons: one for publishing the Teams app to your organization and the other for publishing your app to the Teams store. The latter will require users to go to the Teams Developer Portal to complete the publishing process.
Upgrade to Node 22
All app templates in the Teams Toolkit have been upgraded to support Node 22, ensuring a smoother and more efficient development experience for our users
Add streaming experience in App Test Tool Enhance Teams App Test Tool by integrating a seamless streaming experience, allowing users to enjoy real-time and uninterrupted interaction with Bot application.
Security enhancement
Consolidate and standardize the Tab templates for quality and security. This involves ensuring consistency in the use of tools and dependencies, such as using npm packages instead of CDNs and updating the Teams JS version.
Upgrade python app templates to use MSI authentication when deploying to Azure.
Bug Fixes
– Fixed the missing environment variable error `M365_App_ID` when debug Declarative Agent with action. #12966
– Microsoft tenant users have issues to login Microsoft 365 account and create Entra ID app, we provide a workaround guidance to help them fix the issue. #13343
– Fixed the issue that Tab project shows blank page when remotely preview the app. #13212
– Resolve the issue where adding a plugin results in the error message ‘Cannot read properties of undefined (reading ‘replace’)’. #13422
– Ensure a seamless experience by addressing the error that occurs when the plugin manifest is located in a subfolder during the zip app package action. #13349
– Addressed the issue where the dev tunnel was not forwarding requests, causing the Bot project to be unresponsive during local debugging. This fix ensures a smoother and more reliable debugging experience. #12730
– Updated the Welcome page of Teams Toolkit. #12879
Wrap up
To start using these new features, make sure to update your Teams Toolkit for Visual Studio Code to version 5.14. We’re excited to see how you use these new features and improvements to create impactful apps.
As always, we welcome your feedback—let us know how we can further improve Teams Toolkit. If you have questions or suggestions, contact us via GitHub Discussions.
Follow us on X / @Microsoft365Dev, LinkedIn, and listen to the Microsoft 365 Developer Podcast to stay up to date on the latest developer news and announcements.
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