Microsoft Teams Bot Framework: Mention a user in an Adaptive Card

Microsoft Teams announced support for Adaptive Cards 1.2 recently. With that, a nifty feature to allow mentioning users in Adaptive Cards posted in Teams was also introduced. This allows us the ability to send a notification to the user and can draw their attention towards the card.

User gets a notification of the mention:

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Other users are able to contact the user directly from the mention in the card:

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Checkout the announcement if you haven't already: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/platform/task-modules-and-cards/cards/cards-format?tabs=adaptive-md%2Cconnector-html#mention-support-within-adaptive-cards-v12

In the docs, there is a great example of the JSON we need to send to Teams to post the card containing the mention. So in this post, lets see how we can do this when using the Bot Framework .NET Core SDK:

For this code to work, we will need the following Nuget packages:

Microsoft.Bot.Builder

AdaptiveCards

Quick note: I noticed that the user mentioned is only notified when the Adaptive card is first created. If you update the same adaptive card later and mention the same user again, they are not notified. This is probably for the best as the Adaptive card might be updated several times and if you got a notification every time, it might be really annoying to the user.

Hope you found this post useful!

Using .NET Standard CSOM and MSAL.NET for App-Only auth in SharePoint Online

So after long last, the .NET Standard version of SharePoint Online CSOM was released yesterday! The official announcement can be found here: https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blogs/net-standard-version-of-sharepoint-online-csom-apis/

One of the key differences compared to the .NET Framework CSOM was that the authentication is completely independent of CSOM library now. Previously, there were native classes like SharePointOnlineCredentials which were used for auth, but they have been removed now.

Since .NET Standard CSOM now uses OAuth for authentication, it's up to the developer to get an access token and pass it along with the call to SharePoint Online. The CSOM library does not care how the access token was fetched. 

So in this post, let's have a look at getting an Application authentication (aka App-Only) access token using MSAL.NET and use it with the new .NET Standard CSOM to get data from SharePoint Online.

When making app-only calls to SharePoint Online, we can either use an Azure AD app registration (with the Client Certificate) or we can use SharePoint App-Only authentication created via the AppRegNew.aspx and AppInv.aspx pages. (There are other workarounds available but that would be out of scope for this post) I go into more details about this in my previous post: Working with Application Permissions (App-Only Auth) in SharePoint Online and the Microsoft Graph

The recommended approach is to go with an Azure AD App Registration and the Client Certificate approach so that is what we will be using. To do that, first we will need to create an App Registration in the Azure AD portal and configure it with the Certificate, SPO API permissions etc. Here is a detailed walk-through on this in the Microsoft docs: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/dev/solution-guidance/security-apponly-azuread 

Let's have a look at a few important bits of my Azure AD app registration:

The certificate:

The consented SharePoint permissions:

Once the Azure AD App Registration is configured correctly, we can start looking at the code. 

We will be using a .NET Core 3.1 Console app project for this along with the following nuget packages:

1) Microsoft.SharePointOnline.CSOM v16.1.20211.12000

2) Microsoft.Identity.Client v4.15.0

And finally, here is the code which uses MSAL.NET to get the access token and attaches it to the .NET Standard CSOM requests going to SharePoint:

Note: Make sure that you are using the right way to access the certificate as per your scenario. Here, for demo purposes, I have installed the certificate to my local machine and I am accessing it from there. In production scenarios, it's recommended to store the certificate in Azure Key Vault. More details here

And when I run the code, I am able to get the title of my SharePoint site back:

 

Hope you found this post useful! I am very glad .NET CSOM Standard is finally available and we are able to use it .NET Core projects going forward. This is going to make things so much easier!

Using the Microsoft Search API (preview) to query SharePoint content

The new Microsoft Search API (preview) has been available in the Graph beta endpoint for a while now. If you haven't had a chance to look at the API yet, the docs explain it quite nicely:

"The Microsoft Search API provides one unified search endpoint that you can use to query data in the Microsoft cloud - messages and events in Outlook mailboxes, and files on OneDrive and SharePoint - that Microsoft Search already indexes."

And it's also currently planned that Microsoft Teams search will also be transitioned to use Microsoft Search in the future: https://twitter.com/williambaer/status/1273644094904872960

Considering everything, it looks like Microsoft Search will play an important role in Microsoft 365 solutions going forward. Given this, I decided to check out the Graph API .NET SDK late last year to try and search SharePoint files. But quickly stumbled on a roadblock which did not allow the API to work with the SDK: https://github.com/microsoftgraph/msgraph-beta-sdk-dotnet/issues/43 

Fortunately, the issue was fixed recently and we are able to use the .NET Graph SDK for testing. 

The code:

Let's see how can we search SharePoint Online content using the new Microsoft Search API:

For this code to work, you will need the Microsoft.Graph.Beta nuget package:

https://www.nuget.org/packages/Microsoft.Graph.Beta/0.19.0-preview

We are going to use the KQL sytax with the Microsoft Graph Search API to query SharePoint Modern pages in a tenant. Once the query completes, we will display the page name and page url in the console:

Considerations:

Although it works great, there are a few considerations currently:

• The API only works with delegated access for now i.e. with a user context. Application permissions are not supported.
• When searching SharePoint Online content, we are not able to specify fields to return in the result. Only a default set of fields can be returned.
• There is no custom sorting available as of now when it comes to SharePoint content. The content is sorted by default by relevance.

Hope you found this post useful and helps you get started with the Microsoft Search API. To read up more on the Microsoft Search API in Graph, have a look here:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/api/resources/search-api-overview?view=graph-rest-beta

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/search-concept-files

Create a custom React hook to mimic class component's setState behaviour

I have been playing around with react hooks recently, and slowly wrapping my head around how they work. Hooks are a great way to create reusable functionality, but there are some instances where I think class components fared better. Let's talk about one such scenario, and also how to get around it when using hooks.

When working with react state in a class component, if we wanted to update a specific property on the state object, all we had to do was call the setState method and pass in an object containing only the updated property and value. The resultant state would be the previous state merged with the new property value.

It works a bit differently with hooks. When using the default useState hook, the new object passed in entirely replaces the previous state. So all the properties in the previous state are overwritten. So every time you want to update a state object, the onus is on the developer to keep track of the previous state and update the new state based on that. Here is how this behaviour manifests in code:

As you can see in the code the value of the FirstName property is lost when we update the LastName property. 

There is a way to set the state based on previous state by using the functional update pattern: https://reactjs.org/docs/hooks-reference.html#functional-updates

But that means that every time we used to just use this.setState in class components, we now have to use

setState(prevState => {

  return {...prevState, ...updatedValues};

});

This would be additional overhead for us devs which I wanted to check if we could avoid.

Fortunately with the reusable nature of hooks, we can simply create a custom hook which mimics the class components setState behaviour and merges the new state with the previous state. And we can use this custom hook any time we want to merge the state.

Here is how the previous code would look when using our custom hook:

The only change in code is that we have replaced react's useState with our custom useCustomState. This gives us back the ability to merge state objects instead of replacing them. (I have also changed the variable names from state and setState to customState and setCustomState respectively to make it explicit that we are using the custom hook. But you can just as well keep using the state and setState names)

So how does our custom hook work? It's built as a wrapper on top of the useState hook's functional update pattern. Any time a state object is passed to the setCustomState function, it internally uses the functional update pattern and merges the new state with the previous state. Let's have a look at the code:

This automates the overhead of using the functional pattern. It is no longer the the developers responsibility, and instead, is done by the custom hook.

But wait, what if there is a scenario where a new state depends on the previous state? Our custom hook does not yet expose a way for the developer to update the state based on the previous state. Let's fix that. We can update our hook to add a method which accepts a function. This function will receive the previous state from react.  

And consuming the new hook can be done by passing in a function updater: 

Hope that helps! For the sake of completeness here is the full code for our custom hook:

Full solution including the custom hook and the consuming code can be found here: https://github.com/vman/spfx-react-hooks-customstate

This post generated some good discussion on twitter with Yannick Plenevaux regarding the ideal cases when to use this approach as opposed to other approaches of state management like using the useState or useReducer hooks. Have a look here: https://twitter.com/yp_code/status/1265244244077416448 

SPFx Teams tab: Use react hooks to dynamically handle theme changes

When developing a custom Teams tab with the SharePoint Framework, we want to make sure that the SPFx custom tab (web part) is styled according to the current selected theme.

Also, if the user switches the theme (e.g. from default to dark), we want to make sure that the styling of our SPFx web part also changes without the user having to reload the tab.

Let's see how we can do this. In this post, depending on the Teams theme, we will dynamically add a CSS class to our top level react component. And when the theme changes, we will change this class as well. That will be the scope of this post without going into further details of Styling/CSS.

Also, since I have been exploring React hooks recently, we will be using them in the demo code.

The very first thing we need to do is to make sure that our SPFx tab loads with the currently selected theme when the tab loads for the first time.. This can be achieved with the teamsJS sdk bundled with SPFx:

The theme property will either have the values "default", "dark" or "contrast" (at the time of writing this post). Depending on this property, we can add a CSS class to the top level container of our web part.

Now the important part. When the user updates the theme, we want to fire an event which can be used to set the new theme in our tab. Luckily the teamsJS sdk provides us with a function which can be used to register this event handler:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/platform/tabs/how-to/access-teams-context#theme-change-handling

With this, we are able to capture the theme update dynamically and update our component state. Next, we also want to change the CSS class of the top container when the theme changes. We will do this by using the useEffect hook again and setting the class depending on the selected theme.

This hook takes in the themeState as a dependency which means that it will run anytime themeState changes. We will use it to update the styleState.

I could have been a bit more clever here and simply updated the class in the registerOnThemeChangeHandler function itself. But I wanted to keep the themeState and styleState separate to have them loosely coupled and also to play around with hooks a bit more ;)

Here is the complete code for the React Functional component:

Hope you found the post useful! As always, the code for this post is available on GitHub: https://github.com/vman/spfx-teams-theme-hooks

Office 365 CLI: Grant admin consent to specific scopes using Microsoft identity platform (AAD v2)

The Office 365 CLI is great tool for a variety of scenarios. Specifically, I find it super useful for CI/CD and automation. Since there is no official Microsoft Graph Azure DevOps task yet, the Office 365 CLI comes to the rescue when we want to make a call to the Graph from an Azure DevOps pipeline. Most recently, I was using it to deploy a Teams app when I noticed something interesting.

As I was calling the Office CLI from an automated script, I could not use the default deviceCode flow to login as there was no user interaction possible. So the other options were to use the username/password flow or use a custom certificate. I chose the former as it was very convenient and I could store the password securely in a Azure DevOps secret variable.

Now before using the Office CLI on a tenant, we need to consent to the AAD multi-tenant app used internally for authenticating to Office 356 services. This app is called "PnP Office 365 Management Shell" and the consent process is also described in the docs here: https://pnp.github.io/office365-cli/user-guide/connecting-office-365/

If this consent hasn't happened yet, we get the following error:

Error: AADSTS65001: The user or administrator has not consented to use the application with ID '31359c7f-bd7e-475c-86db-fdb8c937548e' named 'PnP Office 365 Management Shell'. Send an interactive authorization request for this user and resource.

If we go ahead with the default consent experience, we are presented with this screen where the CLI AAD app requests a large number of permissions on the tenant:

Now in my case, I did not need all the scopes the CLI was requesting. I only needed AppCatalog.ReadWrite.All to deploy my Teams app.

So that got me thinking, one of the benefits of using the Microsoft identity platform (also called AAD v2) is that apps can request consent to specific scopes:

With the Microsoft identity platform endpoint, you can ignore the static permissions defined in the app registration information in the Azure portal and request permissions incrementally instead, which means asking for a bare minimum set of permissions upfront and growing more over time as the customer uses additional app features. To do so, you can specify the scopes your app needs at any time by including the new scopes in the scope parameter when requesting an access token - without the need to pre-define them in the application registration information.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/azuread-dev/azure-ad-endpoint-comparison#incremental-and-dynamic-consent

So armed with this knowledge, I tested whether I could request (and grant) only AppCatalog.ReadWrite.All to the PnP Office 365 Management Shell app.

Turns out it is indeed possible by going to this URL in a browser as an admin:

You will notice that in the client_id param, we are specifying the client id of the PnP Office 365 Management Shell app and in the scope param, we are only requesting the needed scope i.e. AppCatalog.ReadWrite.All

This time, we are presented with a significantly reduced scopes for consent. Notice only the "Read and write to all app catalogs" permission is present along with the couple of default permissions.

After granting the consent and then navigating to Azure AD -> Enterprise Applications -> All applications ->  PnP Office 365 Management Shell -> Permissions, you will see that only the requested scope was granted:

This way, you can only request the scopes you need and also include multiple scopes by separating them with a space

Automating the consent:

If you are like me and would like to automate the consent process as well, that is possible by using the Azure CLI:

00000003-0000-0000-c000-000000000000 is the Application ID of the Microsoft Graph resource in AAD. This will be the same for all tenants.

Hope you found the post useful!

Microsoft Bot Framework v4: Send proactive messages to Teams channels and users

What is a Bot Framework Proactive message?

Usually, for starting a conversation with a Microsoft Teams bot, the user has to initiate the conversation either by sending a personal message to the bot, or by mentioning the bot in a Teams channel or by invoking a messaging extension.

With proactive messaging, the bot can start a conversation with a user (or in a Teams channel) without anyone having to invoke the bot first. This conversation can be started based on any custom logic fit for your application e.g. The occurrence of  an external event, or a webhook getting triggered or even on a scheduled periodical basis.

More about Bot Framework proactive messages here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/bot-service/bot-builder-howto-proactive-message?view=azure-bot-service-4.0&tabs=csharp

I should mention that the bot will first need to be installed in the Team, if you want to send a proactive message to a Teams channel, or to the users who are part of that team.

How to send proactive messages?

So in this post, let's look at a few code samples which make it very easy for our Teams Bot to send proactive messages to users or channels in a Team.

These code samples are based on a standalone .NET Core console app. This is mainly to show that as long as you have the necessary information, your code doesn't need to be running under the Bot messaging endpoint. Once you have the information from the Bot messaging endpoint, the proactive messaging code can run from any platform e.g. from an Azure Function.

If you have a look at the Bot Framework code samples published by Microsoft, they all use code which is running under the messaging endpoint. This initially led me to believe that even for proactive messaging, the code should live under the same endpoint. But as we will see in this post, that is not the case.

What are the prerequisites?

As mentioned before, our bot will need to be installed in a Team first. This will allow the bot messaging endpoint to receive the required values from Teams and send it to our proactive messaging code. If the bot is not installed in the Team, you will get a "Forbidden: The bot is not part of the conversation roster" error.

Base URL (serviceUrl)

This is the Url to which our proactive messaging code should send all the requests. This Url is sent by Teams in the Bot payload in the turnContext.Activity.serviceUrl property. For all intents and purposes this url will remain constant but after having a discussion with Microsoft, they have recommended that this url might change (very rarely) and our bot should have the logic for updating the stored base url periodically from the payload sent to the bot. More about the Base Url here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/bot-service/rest-api/bot-framework-rest-connector-api-reference?view=azure-bot-service-4.0#base-uri

Internal Team Id

This is the internal team id which is not the same as the Office 365 Group Id. The internal team id is in the following format: 19:bf2b184e7cbb4f9f9ca1b47f755cd943@thread.skype

You can get the internal team id from the Bot payload in the channelData.team.id property. You can also get this id through the Microsoft Graph API: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/api/resources/team?view=graph-rest-1.0#properties

Channel Id

If we want our bot to post to a specific channel in a Team, then we will need the channel id as well. The format for the channel id is exactly the same as the internal team id. Also, you can get the channel id from the bot payload as well as the Microsoft Graph api: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/api/resources/channel?view=graph-rest-1.0#properties

Internal Teams User Id

This would only be needed if you want to send a proactive personal message to a specific user. For all users in a team, Teams maintains an encoded user id so that only bots installed in a team are able to message users. To get this user id, our bot needs to call the conversations/{conversationId}/members REST API endpoint. Fortunately for us the Bot Framework wraps this call in a handy SDK method as shown in the third code sample below.

So once we have all the required values from the Bot messaging endpoint, we are able to send proactive messages. For this sample code, I am using the Microsoft.Bot.Builder v4.7.2
https://www.nuget.org/packages/Microsoft.Bot.Builder/

1) Post a proactive message in a Teams channel

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2) Post a proactive message in a Teams channel and mention a user in it

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3) Post a proactive personal message to a user

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Hope you found the post useful!