Channel 9 Interview: Building an Outlook Mail App using the "Napa" Office 365 Development Tools

If you haven’t heard, the new Office & SharePoint 2013 Developer Preview has a brand new development model that should make it a lot easier and flexible to build consumer and enterprise applications running within Office & SharePoint. Based on web technologies like HTML5, XML, CSS3, JavaScript, and REST APIs, you can use your existing knowledge of these web technologies to quickly build your apps. What’s cool is these apps can not only run in the desktop versions of Office, they can also run in the web app versions.

Although I have done a lot of traditional Office development using VSTO in the past, I am definitely a newbie to this new app model. So I sat down with a co-worker of mine to get my head around this new model. Saurabh Bhatia is a Program Manager on the Office tools in Visual Studio team and in this interview he helps me understand the new Office and SharePoint Apps model as we build a fun mail app for Outlook. Saurabh walks through how easy it is to get started and shows us how we can build these apps using "Napa" development tools—a completely online in-browser experience. There's a lot of flexibility in this new architecture and it's exciting to see the appeal to web developers. He also shows the integration of these tools with Visual Studio 2012.

Watch: Building an Outlook Mail App using the "Napa" Office 365 Development Tools

You can try out the app Saurabh built here.

For more information and to get started building Apps for Office & SharePoint see: https://dev.office.com. And for a more detailed overview of the new Apps model see: Building Office and SharePoint Apps with "Napa" and Visual Studio

Enjoy!

Comments

• Anonymous
  September 27, 2012
  it means we can automate office documents using web apps.? Till now, i think , it is possible through VSTO/VBA i.e. through "Add-in" only. thanks shashank shashank03jan@gmail.com

• Anonymous
  October 01, 2012
  Hi shashank, You'll still use VSTO/VBA to do automation. The new app model is more for interacting with the data and other web sites and services to provide visualizations and web-based experiences to the user. For more information on the types of apps you can build see: msdn.microsoft.com/.../jj220082(v=office.15) HTH, -Beth

• Anonymous
  October 04, 2012
  thanks Massi. The link helped me lot. Is there any way to support app on office 2007/2010? I have few more questions but its better to ask you after playing with new office app. thanks shashank