News

Teams Dev Kit Advances in Visual Studio 2022 v17.3 Preview 3

• By David Ramel
• 07/15/2022

Visual Studio 2022 v17.3 Preview 3 shipped this week with a bunch of improvements to the Microsoft Teams Development Tools (Teams Toolkit), along with IEnumerable debugger visualizer enhancements, a C++ LLVM tools update and more.

The Teams Toolkit comes with project templates that provide all the code, files and configuration needed to help developers get started with a Teams app project. In fact, it's a template tweak that leads the release notes for the new preview.

"The Microsoft Teams App project template has been improved and now creates various types of Teams app, including notification bot, command bot, tab app and message extensions," Microsoft said in the notes. "You can now create and debug various Microsoft Teams App using Teams Toolkit for Visual Studio."

Microsoft recommends creating a new project using the updated template for any existing Teams Apps that have been created with previous versions of the Teams Toolkit.

Microsoft Teams was obviously a focus point for the dev team in this release, as remaining related notes include:

• You can now choose when to sign-in with your M365 identity and register Teams app resources using the Project > Teams Toolkit > Prepare Teams App Dependencies menu option.
• Prepare Teams App Dependencies will register the Teams app and Bot for your Teams project.
• Updates to the manifest.template.json files can be synchronized with Teams Developer Portal for local debug by selecting the "Prepare Teams App Dependencies" menu option again at any time.
• Updates to the manifest.template.json files can be synchronized with Teams Developer Portal for remote preview by selecting the Project > Teams Toolkit > Update Manifest
• You can preview manifest file before synchronization by right-clicking the manifest.template.json file and using the Preview Manifest File menu option.
• Use the Project > Teams Toolkit > Provision in the Cloud menu to create resources in an Azure subscription.
• Use the Project > Teams Toolkit > Deploy to the Cloud menu to publish code to those resources.
• You can open the Teams app remotely in a browser from the Provision menu using the Preview Teams app menu.
• You can zip the Teams app and generate app package by selecting the Project > Teams Toolkit > Zip App Package menu option for sharing and uploading purposes.

IEnumerable Debugger Visualizer Improvements
The dev team added a few highly requested improvements in the IEnumerable visualizer, including filtering, theming and CSV export.

"The .NET IEnumerable debugger visualizer is one of our most loved debugging features in recent times," said Harshada Hole, program manager for the debuggr, in a July 14 blog post. "This was a highly requested feature by developers like you. We released the first version in Visual Studio 17.2. and received an incredibly positive response. You can learn everything about it here IEnumerable visualizer (microsoft.com)."

Pertinent notes for this include:

• You can now export the data from IEnumerable visualizers in CSV format. Just use the dropdown on the top-right corner and select CSV.
• The IEnumerable Visualizer will also allow you to filter data based on a desired filter string. The Visualizer will return all the rows that contain a value that matches the filter string. You can also export the filtered and sorted results in CSV/Excel format.
• Starting the 17.3 preview 3 debugger will automatically reload pervious decompiled artifacts like symbols and PDB files. If you choose to de-compile at any previous session the artifacts will automatically be reloaded for all the next sessions and will get you to the de-compiled sources faster in External Sources node. This will still honor your JMC settings.
• Debugger now provides a new option to disable the load of NGEN or ready to load (RDR) images for managed code. You can change the settings under Tools > Options> Debugging > General > Prevent using precompiled images on module load or you can also easily search the settings using any of the keyword in the Visual Studio search bar.

Hole explained how the team came to address the top user requests such as filtering, theming and CSV export in the preview release by soliciting developer feedback.

"One of the best things about IEnumerable visualizer is that we are entirely following our customer leads and suggestions to make further enhancements to this feature," she said. "After the first release, we asked developers to rank and prioritize a list of improvements via an in-product satisfaction survey. We received some great responses to the survey, also through blog comments and other social media updates."

C++ LLVM Tools
The team upgraded the versions of LLVM tools shipped with Visual Studio to v14. To see what's now available, go to the "LLVM 14.0.0 Release Notes" and "Clang 14.0.0 Release Notes."