Office 365 API Tools Summer Update in Preview -- Visual Studio Magazine

Office 365 API Tools Summer Update in Preview

"Summer update" comes with improved URL support, message logging, and authentication.

By Michael Domingo
08/07/2014

Microsoft's Office 365 Team earlier this week released a preview of its Office 365 API Tools, a version that it calls a "summer update." The last update release preview was back in May. Chakkaradeep Chandran, a program manager with the Visual Studio team that is working on it, blogged the details here.

Office 365 API Tools is an extension library that give developers direct hooks for integrating calendar, e-mail and all manner of Office 365 apps with custom apps created in Visual Studio. This preview adds a few new features since the May update, including improved URL support, message logging, and authentication.

Chandran writes that developers will find one big improvement right from the start of working with this preview. When opening Office 365 API Tool to add to a project, you'll be prompted to register a new application in AAD, which will then show what services you're able to add to it.

Other improvements:

Support for redirect URIs within a web application project (still requires separate AAD entry when app is to be put into actual production)
Messages logged to Visual Studio output window
Improved interoperability of the Office 365 API authentication library with the Active Directory Authentication Library so that it can hook into other Azure services.
Support for Windows 8.1 projects (althought client libraries are only supported via ADAL)

This version also takes care of bug fixes up to the time of this release.

Visual Studio Senior Program Manager Beth Massi blogs an example of an Office 365 app takes advantage of the new features in preview. In a video on that blog, Chandran shows a sample Visual Studio project using Xamarin to build an Android app that connects to Office 365 contacts.

The Office 365 API Tools preview is in the Visual Studio Gallery here.

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