Today, Microsoft has released Update 1 for Office Developer Tools Preview for Visual Studio 2015. With this update, Microsoft has worked to resolve several bugs in Visual Studio, including one in which Office/SharePoint nodes were not appearing under Visual C#. In addition to this update, Microsoft has also released Microsoft Office Developer Tools Preview for Visual Studio 1015 as well.
Office Developer Tools Preview for Visual Studio 2015 includes two major new features, the first being Add-in support for Outlook 2016. This feature allows programmers to add buttons to Outlook’s ribbon which will launch add-ins, menus, or execute specific functions via JavaScript. These add-ins will allow user to perform tasks from adding custom messages to emails to interacting with services from third party applications like Yelp or Evernote.
In addition to Outlook add-ins, Microsoft has included a SharePoint 2016 Beta 2 in the latest update. Users currently running SharePoint 2013 will be prompted to upgrade to the latest version when opening a SharePoint solution. Through SharePoint Beta 2, developers have access to templates for developing SharePoint farms and sandboxed solutions. Microsoft also promises add-in support for SharePoint in an upcoming update.
It is nice to see Microsoft release preview tools for Microsoft Office apps as well. Let us know what kind of features you would like to see made available for programmers in the comments below.
