One of my most read blogposts are the one about sideloading apps in Microsoft Teams, so when I heard about the developer portal and how it makes it easier to test Teams apps I thought I should write about that too. The developer portal was made general available for all Teams developers in october this year (2021). I really like that you get both resources and tools presented in the same place. And of course that they have made it very easy too test Teams apps.
Note! Since I have allready been testing Teams apps before, I have enabled both sideloading and the ‘allow interaction with cusom apps’ setting (external link)on my dev-tenant. I have not tried to test an app from the developer portal without these settings – so its possible you still have to enable them to use the developer portal for testing.
How to test teams apps through the developer portal
Start by navigating to the developer portal, you can find it here: https://dev.teams.microsoft.com/home . If you are not allready logged in – do so.
In the navigation on the left side, select Apps. This will show you the apps that you have allready added. There are also shortcuts to create a new app (I havn’t tested this yet) or import an existing app. In this blogpost I will assume you allready have an app you want to test, so either import it, or select it from the list.
When you select an app you will get a landing page for that specific app. Here you can find a lot of usefull information about the app, and you can also change some configurations from here.
In the upper right corner you will see a button that sais “Preview in Teams”.
When clickling the button you will first get promted to open Teams, and inside Teams you’ll get a dialog to add the app to a teams tab. Click the “Add to a team” button and select the team where you would like the app to be installed.
And thats it, now you can test your app inside teams. š
Pro tip: Add the developer portal as an app in Teams
The developer portal is actually available as a Teams app itself. Install it and you can manage and test your Teams applications directly from teams.
Resources:
- Manage your Microsoft Teams apps with the Developer Portal – Microsoft 365 Developer Blog
- Manage your apps with the Developer Portal – Teams | Microsoft Docs
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Thank you for reading, and happy coding!
/Eli