Teams Toolkit 17.9 version for Visual Studio comes with new exciting features

In a blog post, Microsoft announced that Teams Toolkit for Visual Studio 2022’s new version, 17.9, is out. The version has new features, including an AI Bot template, Adaptive Card previewer, and Teams Bot Test tool that can help .NET developers. It also has bug fixes and improvements to enhance the development experience.

AI bot template

• Helps developers build intelligent chat bots that can process information and provide responses to queries, leveraging the power of OpenAI.
• Uses the Teams AI library and AI components, which makes creating bots that use Azure OpenAI or Azure OpenAI easy to offer an AI-driven conversational experience.

Teams Bot Test Tool

• Allows developers to debug, preview, and test the Teams Bots app in a simulated Teams chat environment, even without logging in to the Teams web client.
• To use it, you can choose your debug profile as Teams App Test Tool and start debugging.

CodeLens support for the lifecycle steps

• Allows developers to configure and view lifecycle actions and settings directly within the teamsapp.yml file.
• Enables developers to easily access and execute the lifecycle actions already defined in the YAML configuration file, ensuring a streamlined development process.

Adaptive Card Previewer

• Helps developers preview and edit Adaptive Cards in a more user-friendly way.
• To use the feature, select the Preview button at the top left corner of the Adaptive Card’s definition file. The preview will appear on the right.

Access to the Teams Toolkit documentation

With this version, you can now access Teams Toolkit documentation by navigating to Project>Teams Toolkit> Teams Toolkit Documentation

So, these are the generally available features of Teams Toolkit, but these are not all. You can get various others in the preview, including the new Microsoft Copilot template and AI Assistant bot template.

If you want to test these preview features, navigate to Tools> Options, then click Preview Features from the left panel, then from the list, choose the ones you want to try out.

Another exciting feature for developers in the preview is Custom Search Results, which empowers them to extend Copilot for Microsoft 365, providing a customized search experience. To check out the feature, select Teams Toolkit: Develop Copilot Plugin from the Preview Features option.

Once enabled it, restart Visual Studio, and while you are creating a new project, choose Microsoft Teams App > Custom Search Results.

Microsoft has also asked developers to share feedback and issues related to this version on GitHub or send an email to the product team at [email protected].

Do you think these new features of Teams Toolkit 17.9 could help you? Share your thoughts in the comments section below.