Wictor Wilén

Top 10 learnings from vibe coding with GitHub Copilot

Thu, 04 Dec 2025 07:00:00 +0200

Top 10 learnings from vibe coding with GitHub Copilot

Over the last months I’ve been “vibe coding” my way through a real product using GitHub Copilot and a handful of other models. Not just toy samples, but an actual codebase with an API, web app, VS Code extension, tests, and deployments.

This post is a brain dump of what actually worked for me – the things that made AI feel like a multiplier instead of a distraction!

Shipping Local npm Packages with Azure Static Web Apps and Oryx

Thu, 27 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I recently spent an embarrassing amount of time chasing a “green” Azure Static Web Apps (SWA) deployment that still left me with a dead API—and even GitHub Copilot kept looping on red herrings, unable to spot what was really wrong. The culprit was a private workspace package - @acme/shared-core - that the Functions runtime could not see once Oryx built the managed API. This post walks through what happened, why the failure was completely silent from SWA’s point of view, and how I now bundle local packages (including their transitive npm dependencies) before handing anything to Oryx.

Announcing the retirement of yo teams

Thu, 21 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

(Cross posted, with some delay, from the Microsoft 365 Community blog)

A farewell to the Microsoft Teams apps generator that kicked off the Microsoft Teams custom app development movement.

Why we are retiring yo teams?

Yo teams is a Yeoman generator that helps developers to create Microsoft Teams apps open source frameworks using TypeScript, based on a similar pattern as the widely successful SharePoint Framework stack. It was first created in 2016 by Wictor Wilén, a Microsoft MVP and Teams developer, as a way to simplify and streamline the development process for Teams apps. Since then, yo teams has grown to become one of the most popular and widely used tools for Teams app development, with over 100,000 downloads and hundreds of GitHub stars.

Building apps for Teams, Outlook and Office with yo teams

Tue, 24 May 2022 06:00:00 +0000

Today at //Build we at Microsoft announced that the long awaited support for Collaborative apps in Teams Personal Tabs and Messaging Extensions now is available for usage in Office.com, Outlook and Outlook on the web. This update to Teams apps is based on the new Promise based Teams JS SDK version 2.0 and the just published Teams Manifest 1.13.

Announcing Yo Teams version 4

Through the Microsoft 365 Platform Community (PnP) we have also released a brand new (preview) version of yo teams that supports both this new Teams JS SDK as well as the updated schema. All so you can build Teams applications, on your terms, that also works in Outlook, Office.com and Outlook on the web.

Happy 5th anniversary Yo Teams!

Thu, 03 Mar 2022 06:00:00 +0000

Five years! It’s been five years seen I first published the Microsoft Teams apps generator - yo teams, and in a few days we also have the 5th anniversary for the official Microsoft Teams launch. It’s been five very interesting years that has changed how we collaborate and communicate.

It all started long before March of 2017. I had the opportunity to work for an organization that was one of the early adopters of Microsoft Teams, and driven by my curiosity I immediately saw that with this new tool had some amazing opportunities to create even better experiences for my customers. Without essentially any documentation, and without no tooling whatsoever I handed responded to a couple of call for papers for conferences during 2017 on the topic on how to extend Microsoft Teams (at that time only with Tabs, Connectors and Bots). And that’s where my struggles started - I had to build everything from scratch all the time, working on plumbing, packaging, deployment and it took ages before I could create the real solution. With the experience from the beta and the version 1 release of SharePoint Framework in February that same year - I decided that why don’t I use the same tech stack as SPFx and create a generator to scaffold out all that plumbing for my Teams tabs. That would be a great challenge, and something that would allow me to create demos for conferences and customers faster as well as something I could share with the broader community. And that’s how the Yeoman generator for Teams Tabs was birthed.

Building a smart video light using ESP8266 and ESPHome

Wed, 02 Feb 2022 10:28:14 +0000

Today I thought that I should step out of my normal blogging content and share some of my personal pet project and hobbies. I always been keen of tinkering, testing and building things - being software, hardware, or our house or garden. Over the last few years I’ve been trying to make as much things as possible “smart” in our houses, and particularly in my home office. This home automation project consists of tons of different third party options, but also quite a few devices and gadgets that I built myself. A couple of examples; I’ve built quite a few temperature and humidity sensors that are placed around the houses, door sensors, I have a few old refurbished computer fans that are controlled by these sensors to force air in or out of the rooms, I have a custom built “meeting traffic light”, a purpose built screen with sensor details and notifications. Most of these custom devices has one thing in common - they are based around the ESP8266/ESP32 chip, programmed with ESPHome and orchestrated by Home Assistant.

Create a Collaborative App for Microsoft 365, that runs across Teams, Outlook and Office.com

Fri, 17 Dec 2021 07:05:15 +0000

We’re getting closer to the holidays and we all like to both give and receive gifts at this time of the year. Here is an early Christmas gift from me, and the amazing Microsoft teams that’s been building out these new features, to all of you fantastic people out there.

A few months ago Microsoft announced the capabilities where we can deploy Microsoft Teams apps and use them across other high-usage areas of Microsoft 365 and now those areas has been extended even further and covers Office.com, Outlook web and the old fat Outlook client. This great feature allows us to create a personal tab, that when deployed can be used inside Microsoft Teams just as normal, but also in the Office.com portal (if you haven’t visited that portal in a while - do it, there’s some great new features in there) and Outlook (both web and desktop).

Simple Teams Tab Single-Sign-On with Microsoft Graph

Tue, 19 Oct 2021 13:17:50 +0000

When building applications for Microsoft Teams, the very first hurdle essentially all developers will try to jump over is the one with getting an access token to be able to communicate with Microsoft Graph. This is something that can be done fairly easy, if you know what to do, but requires you as a developer to connect a few dots. Over the last year this has become way easier, and there are a few great examples out there - you can find some great ones in the PnP Teams Samples.

Exit Orange, Enter Blue

Fri, 14 May 2021 05:08:42 +0000

Today I handed in my Orange badge to Avanade and signed out of my Avanade account. It’s been a six and a half year long adventure where I had the opportunity work with amazing colleagues and exciting clients. I’ve been given the opportunity to grow my career and skills in directions I did not think about, and I’m very proud of what we achieved and what we delivered to clients.

It has been so much fun representing Avanade in client meetings, and at conferences. And I’ve been working with some great teams that delivered solutions that literally changed peoples lives. I’ve also had a blast for the last two years taking a crazy idea about a revolutionary service into something real, a new service for Avanades client that will impact their workplace experience for the next few years.

Announcing Ring Timelapse, and integration with Home Assistant

Tue, 04 May 2021 08:00:00 +0000

I’ve been using Ring cameras for several years now and a while back they introduced the option to have the cameras take snapshots periodically. This is awesome as you can fire up the Ring app and see a timelapse of your cameras. However, this only works in the app, you can’t export a timelapse! But, as a proud geek this should not be a problem to me and can be solved!

Inside the Viva Connections desktop app, or BYO Viva app

Wed, 31 Mar 2021 08:00:00 +0000

Yesterday Microsoft released the anticipated set of scripts required for you to add the Microsoft Viva Connections app to your Microsoft Teams environment. It’s a very simple approach that only requires you to download a PowerShell script, install the latest Microsoft SharePoint Online PowerShell module and then answer a set of questions, and voila you have the Viva Connections Desktop app ready for installation in Microsoft Teams.

Note: as the time of writing this and testing the PowerShell script, I was not able to download the required SharePoint Online PowerShell module and received an error while running the script. The latest module I could install/find did not have the Get-SPOIsCommSite cmdlet. However, it’s only required for validation that the site you specify is a Communications Site, and if you’re sure about this you can safely just comment out those lines in the beginning of the script.

Team development for Microsoft Teams apps

Tue, 08 Dec 2020 14:00:00 +0000

When building software the most common scenario is that you have a team building the solution, application and/or service. You typically have front-end, back-end and full-stack developers, you have testers and designers, and more. However, working in a team is not always easy. Back in the days we could all have our software running locally and we just grabbed the latest version/commit and hacked away. For web applications the use of localhost worked just fine for almost everyone. But with cloud based solutions where you have a strong connection to one or more cloud services, it becomes a little bit more complex - you might have connections to cloud services such as storage, databases, web service and more. In most cases these resources can be spun up by each developer or shared and then managed by a configuration/environment file.

How to deploy a Yo Teams generated project to Azure through Azure DevOps

Fri, 20 Nov 2020 10:30:00 +0000

The growth of using Yo Teams - the Microsoft Teams Apps generator - has been tremendous over the last year, and I can really tell that it’s not just being used for development and testing by the number of questions and requests I get on how to make a proper deployment of the solution to Azure. In this post I will share how I most often do it.

The initial version of Yo Teams shipped with simple instructions on how to do Git deploy of your application to Azure. A method that worked most often, but was very error prone and very slow. This is still in the documentation of any generated project (yes, will change in 2.17 and later). That method was never intended for any production scenarios, but more as a quick start for developers to get going. But now, with Azure DevOps pipelines being available to almost everyone, and with Github Actions, I think it is about time to document this down so I have something to share when this question comes up.

Setting up NGINX in Azure as an ngrok alternative

Mon, 02 Nov 2020 17:16:52 +0000

ngrok is a fantastic tool, that I use on an everyday basis when building solutions cloud. It allows me to host and debug an application locally and at the same time host the website or API’s with a publicly accessible https endpoint. As I work quite a bit with Microsoft Teams development this is essential when building bots (Azure Bot Service cannot talk to localhost) or building out Teams Tabs with SSO. However, how good this tool might be, there are several firewalls, security clients and companies that actively block ngrok. Ngrok does establish a tunnel from the public internet to your machine, and you should be aware of that - it is a security risk. Most notably ngrok has been used as tools for malicious attacks.

Introducing an easy way to work with Azure App Configuration in node projects

Wed, 26 Aug 2020 05:38:56 +0000

When you’re working with building applications or services there’s always a need to store configuration. For Azure there’s a great service called Azure App Configuration that allows you to securely store, manage and retrieve configuration settings. It’s a perfect service for both smaller and larger projects and it keeps your configuration in control, and of course secured and audited.

When I’m building solutions using node I typically start with storing my configuration in a local .env file and then use the dotenv package to import those settings into process.env properties. That makes it super easy to work with configurations, settings and change them as needed without fiddling through all the code and replace. Since I always add the .env file to my .gitignore I also reduce the risk of sharing secrets and passwords. When moving this from my local dev machine into Azure I have historically just used the Web App application settings. That works really great and is a simple solution to have these settings being read runtime, the web app only needs to be restarted to pick the new changes up.

Renewed as Most Valuable Professional (MVP) for 2020

Wed, 01 Jul 2020 18:08:33 +0000

Such a great week this is, after being accepted into the Microsoft Regional Director community earlier this week, today marks the 11th time I’m awarded with the Microsoft MVP for Office Apps & Services.

Dear Wictor Wilen, We’re once again pleased to present you with the 2020-2021 Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) award in recognition of your exceptional technical community leadership. We appreciate your outstanding contributions in the following technical communities during the past year:

Acknowledged as a Microsoft Regional Director

Wed, 24 Jun 2020 07:30:18 +0000

I’m incredibly proud to announce that I’ve been accepted into the Microsoft Regional Director program.

The Microsoft Regional Director (RD) program is a global community of passionate technology thought leaders, where Microsoft once a year appoints a small set of leaders as Regional Directors, to serve on a two years basis.

It’s a fantastic opportunity for me to play a small role in this group of people - that I look up to as leaders, superstars, humans..and friends.

How to add a React scripts to Hugo

Sun, 31 May 2020 20:11:24 +0000

While migrating my site from Orchard to Hugo I wanted to add some JavaScripts. Specifically I wanted that to power the search experience using some simple JavaScripts. However, I’ve grown quite fond over using React (and TSX/JSX) to any kind of user experiences for the web and I did not want to go back to pure JavaScript or use some DOM manipulation scripts such as jQuery.

Hugo, that I use for my static site, does not directly have support for transpiling React. But with a few small steps you can make React transpiling as a part of your Hugo build and use React for your user experiences. Yes, this might not be new to everyone, but I did not find a direct guide on how to set this up - specifically for Hugo noobs such as me. So here’s a quick guide on how to get started with Hugo and React.

Announcing the Application Insights Annotation Github Action

Mon, 25 May 2020 22:00:00 +0000

When refurbishing my site and setting up Github workflows and actions I wanted to have a way to correlate any of my deployments of code to the statistics I have on the site and any telemetry/data in Application Insights.

Application Insights has an API to add Annotations in your timeline. It adds an entry into your Application Insights instance at a specific time with a set of comments. This annotation is visible throughout many reports such as Sessions, Failures, Events and more, see below.

The big isolation makeover

Mon, 25 May 2020 21:12:27 +0000

Eventually time caught up with me, and with the help of some isolation, boring weather and some recent announcements from Microsoft Build, I had to go and update my/this web site. It was way overdue and it’s been on my to-do list for far to long - for a number of reasons. First of all this site has been hosted on Orchard on Azure since 2012 - without any hiccups. The setup was a dynamic web site, using Orchard, which was a state-of-the-art web and blogging CMS at that point in time. I loved the architecture and how they built it on .NET! However this setup required me to do upgrades once in a while, and eventually I stopped doing that due to some big changes, that I did not have time to mess with. So I let it be. Secondly this was running on Azure Web Site and using Azure SQL Server for backend - although fairly cheap, not optimal for my blogging cadence and the content. The interwebs has moved on and there are also more or less requirements to have your site on HTTPS, which I did not have previously. And last but not least I suck at design so I cringed to do an update.

Microsoft Teams Tabs SSO and Microsoft Graph - the 'on-behalf-of' blog post

Tue, 21 Apr 2020 14:58:09 +0200

Hey, I’m back. Long time since I did some writing on this blog. But I needed to get this one out. As you all know I’m a huge fan of the Microsoft Teams extensibility model and now with the SSO support for Tabs, it’s even easier to create integrated experiences for your end users where they can consume data and information from the Microsoft Graph or LOB systems.

I recently did a small appearance at the Microsoft 365 PnP webcast showcasing how to configure and scaffold a Microsoft Teams project that uses this new SSO Tab feature. You can watch the recording here:

Version 2.7.0 of the Microsoft Teams Apps generator is now available

Thu, 18 Apr 2019 00:07:14 +0200

Happy Easter everyone, I have fantastic news. After seven preview versions (and even a skipped version - 2.6) the Microsoft Teams Apps Yeoman generator 2.7.0 is now available for you to use! Just like tons of others do; there’s been over 6.000 downloads of the generator, it’s generating a handful of new Teams projects every day and it’s done from all parts of the world! Join the movement!

Returning to Vegas for SharePoint Conference 2019

Thu, 13 Dec 2018 11:24:32 +0100

I’m excited to be returning to Las Vegas in May of 2019 to speak at the SharePoint Conference 2019 in May 21st to 21rd, at the MGM Grand.

This event is one of the two major events, second one being Microsoft Ignite, that the SharePoint, OneDrive and Yammer product groups are announcing their greatest and latest features and also where you will meet some of the finest speakers and community members of our great SharePoint family.

Creating a Bot for Microsoft Teams using Microsoft Flow

Fri, 02 Nov 2018 18:38:35 +0100

Imagine you want to create a chat bot for Microsoft Teams in order to automate tasks, enhance the discussion or just feeling lonely and want someone to talk to. There’s many ways of doing this; you can start from scratch building a bot, using the Microsoft Bot framework and/or using the Microsoft Teams Yeoman generator, you can use the Azure Bot Service, you can use the FAQ bots to essentially create a no code solution.

Announcing Microsoft Teams Apps Yeoman generator 2.5.0

Fri, 17 Aug 2018 14:40:51 +0200

A long overdue update of the Microsoft Teams Apps Yeoman generator – we’re now up to version 2.5.0! It’s a fairly substantial update both in the generator and in the generated code – this update will make future updates a lot smoother and will allow for enabling more features going forward. Thanks to all who provided feedback and input and has tested the generator over the last few months.

You can get the latest generator by running