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Developer Tools for Office 2016

A number of developer tools have been in the works and released in recent weeks leading up to the release of Office 2016 today.

A number of developer tools have been in the works and released in recent weeks leading up to the release of Office 2016 today.

Back in August, the Visual Studio Team released a version of the Office Developer Tools for Visual Studio that included support for Connected Services from Office 365 APIs. as well as allowed for targeting of apps and add-ins natively to Office 2015 and SharePoint Online. It also "[enabled] v1.1 manifests for Office Add-ins (formerly Apps for Office) to support the new capabilities in Office web apps, desktop clients and mobile/tablets."

Office UI Fabric and support for custom file handlers, released August 31, is described as a "a responsive, mobile-first, front-end framework for developers, designed to make it simple to quickly create web experiences using the Office Design Language." Essentially, it allows the creation of new apps or customizing of existing ones so that they're more Office-like in look and feel.

"The framework is used internally on products within Office 365 -- such as our suite branding, OneDrive.com, Outlook.com, Delve and the Video Portal.," wrote Jeremy Thake, the Office 365 team's technical product manager. He said that the framework has also been shared with Preview Program members.

File Handler add-ins is an add-in type that developers can use to create file viewers and editors for non-Microsoft file types that can accessed from within SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business, and Outlook Web App.

Office 365 JavaScript Controls, released Sept. 8, includes three controls: AppChrome, People Picker, and Persona Cards -- that add an Office 365-looking navigation bar to single-page applications. The nature of the controls allows for users to access data on people when using those controls via Azure Active Directory.

Office 365 Support for OneNote, added Sept. 1, allows for creation of pages and named sections in the default OneNote notebook, which can be moved later as needed. It's in preview, and there's currently no method for creating pages from a SharePoint site-hosted OneNote notebook.

New tools and developments are often announced first on the Office Developer blogs here.

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