Office 365 API Tools for Visual Studio Announced

During the SharePoint Conference in Las Vegas last month, attendees were introduced to the new Office 365 APIs. Today, some of those API were released into preview for Visual Studio, as was announced on the Apps for Office and SharePoint Blog. Only some of the APIs were made available such as the mail, calendar and contact REST APIs and then only for C# and VB.net apps.

There are some good sessions on the APIs from the March 2nd - 6th SharePoint Conference in Las Vegas, NV. If you are thinking of trying out the new APIs then you should definitely go over to Channel 9 and check them out. Also below is the link for the preliminary/preview documentation for the APIs over on MSDN.

Link for the MSDN API info:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/dn605892(v=office.15).aspx

As a Windows 8 Store App developer who primarily writes those types of apps in HTML/JavaScript, the release of the APIs for VB, but not for JavaScript is a bit of a rub. Though most developers I know don't do both, I do write in C#, just not typically for Windows 8 Store Apps. But it's been this way with the SharePoint / Office team for awhile now. None of the SharePoint App or Office Task  Pane Visual Studio App templates use JavaScript, only C# even though there are new JSOM libraries that a developer can use. Sometimes I think the product team can only program in C#. But I guess there's always VB. I used to write in VB... in the 90s.