Teams Toolkit became generally available last year. Since the release, we’ve continued to receive valuable feedback from you. While we’ve heard feedback that you appreciate Teams Toolkit automating much of the development process, we’ve also taken note of your needs for greater transparency into what Teams Toolkit is doing and the ability to customize it according to your requirements. Now, we’re excited to share a pre-release of the next version of Teams Toolkit for Visual Studio Code that addresses your concerns.  

Customize the development process

This pre-release version includes new features that make it easier to fit the toolkit into your existing development process. With the ability to define your own debug, provision, deploy, and publish processes, you can customize the toolkit to meet your unique needs. Some of the new features include: 

• Use existing infrastructure, resource groups, and more when provisioning. 
• Use an existing Teams app ID. 
• Use an existing Azure AD app registration ID. 
• Customizable tunneling solution. 
• Add custom steps to debugging, provisioning, deploying, publishing, etc. 

All of these are made possible through the introduction of the teamsapp.yml project file. This file hooks into the lifecycles of your Teams Toolkit project and defines what happens at each stage. When you create a new Teams Toolkit project, the teamsapp.yml file is generated with default definitions. You can modify it to add or remove steps to meet your specific requirements. For example, the below screenshot demonstrates how you can select your own Azure bicep file for provisioning or add steps to validate your Teams app’s manifest.json file for publishing. 

https://gist.github.com/jidddddd/36883c004a08459fc6b4148a50eb5a37

Try the Teams Toolkit pre-release

Are you excited to try out these new features? Follow the steps in “Install a pre-release version” and head over to the Teams Toolkit pre-release guide to learn more. We encourage you to provide feedback in TeamsFx Github issues to help us make Teams Toolkit better. We can’t wait to see what you build. Get started today and take part in shaping the future of Teams Toolkit! 

This prerelease version is at sufficient quality level for general use. And it is easy to integrate with your existing project using the auto-upgrade feature. However, it is not intended for production use since features can and will likely change. We recommend you start a new project or make a backup of your existing project before upgrading. 

For more information, please visit Microsoft Teams Dev Center | APIs and app development. Follow us on @Microsoft365Dev)/Twitter to stay up to date on news and announcements.