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New Office REST APIs and Developer Tools for Visual Studio Update

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Today, along with the Office team, we are a releasing a number of significant updates for developers building apps that interact with the Office ecosystem.

Whether you are building a mobile app that wants to connect to high-value data and services in Office 365, developing rich integration into Office experiences with a custom app for Office, or developing Cloud Business App projects that integrate with SharePoint, today's releases enable developers to connect to the Office ecosystem in new and exciting ways.

Applications are increasingly being built by composing high-value data and services together to deliver unique mobile, desktop and web experiences.  Today's Office 365 API releases let developers consume Office data and service from any application, and today's Office Developer Tools for Visual Studio and "Napa" releases let developers build new kinds of application experiences within Office apps.

Here's a few of the exciting features in today's releases – for full details check out:

Office 365 REST APIs Preview

Office 365 provides a wealth of high-value data and services for business applications.  Today, Office is exposing these data and services via a new, simple and consistent set of Office 365 REST APIs.  This release includes APIs for working with Files, Calendar, People and Mail, exposing data spanning Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business and Azure Active Directory.  

These APIs use standard OAuth and OData, making them easy to use in any development environment and from any platform.  For example, to get the email of an authenticated user via Exchange Online:

 GET https://outlook.office365.com/ews/odata/Me/Inbox/Messages HTTP/1.1 
Authorization: Bearer eyJ0eX...
Accept: application/json

This HTTP request will return the user's Inbox email messages:

 {
 "@odata.context": "https://outlook.office365.com/EWS/OData/$metadata#Me/Inbox/Messages",
 "value": [
  {
   "@odata.id": "https://outlook.office365.com/EWS/OData/Users('s@contoso.com')/Messages('...')",
   "@odata.editLink": "https://outlook.office365.com/EWS/OData/Users('s@contoso.com')/Messages('...')",
   "Id": "...",
   "ChangeKey": "...",
   "ClassName": "IPM.Note",
   "Subject": "Sent with REST",
   "BodyPreview": "This message was created and sent with the Mail REST API!",
   "Body": {
    "ContentType": "HTML",
    "Content": "This message was created and sent with the Mail REST API!"
   },
   "Importance": "Low",
   <..snip..>
  }
 ]
}

Check out the API docs and samples for details about how to use these APIs in your applications and sites.  Also check out the preview Office 365 API Tools for Visual Studio.

Apps for Office

Developers can embed custom experiences inside Office with apps for Office.  Today, several new options are being made available including PowerPoint content apps and Outlook mail apps in compose forms.  Developers can build these apps both in Visual Studio and in the updated “Napa” tools.

For example, with an Outlook compose app, you can extend the end-user's email authoring experience with a custom pane, in this case a "My Templates" pane.  

Check out the Office 365 Platform blog for more examples of the new capabilities for apps for Office, and the Visual Studio blog for details about the updated Visual Studio tools available with the Office Developer Tools for Visual Studio 2013 – March 2014 Update.

Cloud Business Apps

In Visual Studio 2013 we introduced the Cloud Business Application template for quickly building modern business applications.  Today’s release of the Office Developer Tools for Visual Studio 2013 - March 2014 Update includes features which make it easier to integrate Documents, further streamline development and support connecting to valuable enterprise data sources.  For example, you can now connect directly to enterprise data in SAP:

 

Check out the Visual Studio Blog for more details on the new features for Cloud Business Apps.

Integrating Office into your application experiences has never been easier.   Check out https://dev.office.com to get started today!

Namaste!

Comments

  • Anonymous
    March 04, 2014
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    March 04, 2014
    @Useless – You mentioned that you would like to be able to use C# to build iOS and Android applications using Visual Studio.  As you may be aware, we announced a collaboration last November with Xamarin to offer exactly this capability for Visual Studio developers.  I shared some details about this here: blogs.msdn.com/.../visual-studio-2013-launch-announcing-visual-studio-online.aspx.  I should also mention that the Office 365 REST APIs highlighted in this post are available from any platform and device, enabling a broad base of apps leveraging the Office ecosystem.

  • Anonymous
    March 05, 2014
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    March 07, 2014
    @Useless - Why don't you code using the tools designed for the platforms that your clients asks for. I create apps for Windows and Windows Phone using Visual Studio, apps for iOS using XCODE on a MAC and apps for Android using Eclipse. If you are such a great developer as you claim to be this should not be a problem. Visual Studio is an IDE mainly focusing on the Windows Ecosystem. I don't see XCODE having any features for me to create Windows Phone apps so why do you expect it the other way around?! Put you energy and anger into learning more tools instead...

  • Anonymous
    March 08, 2014
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    March 09, 2014
    @Raymond our clients are large corporations with enterprise level applications, it would requires years to develop 3 sets of source code and an army of programmers and testers to write these by hand.  We had to develop tool sets that function on top of visual studio and sql server along with a condensed version of .NET to decrease development time and streamline costs along with providing a vast array of other benefits.  All of which should have been provided by Microsoft  had they cared even a bit about developer productivity in Visual Studio WHICH THEY DO NOT :( ... The other benefit In taking this approach the code is very standardize and stable since the bulk of it is auto-generated (OC, C# and Java) programmers mainly just focus on business logic classes where they should be spending their time.  Given the output is native code we can go into esclipse and tweek the code as required for example to implement a business requirement outside our tools.  A Jr level programming who understands the case tools can be very productive.  Which is easier; teach someone to code or use an application ?  We are normally 40-60% less then competitors quotes with respect to hours and the blended average programmer rates are much lower as well.   Yeah consultants love VISUAL STUDIO more hours + more code = more CASH, I get it. Or the newbies and techno-GEEKS when they say just learn all this technology it is cool and fun but doesn't makes you any money (those are hobbyists) ... whatever it is what it is ....

  • Anonymous
    March 14, 2014
    Ambitious.