Napa is the fastest way to get started with Office and SharePoint development. Whether you’re just taking a tour of this lightweight companion to Visual Studio, or would like to start building apps right away – go ahead – Napa is a free app for SharePoint and browser-based. It is available as part of the Office 365 SharePoint Developer site. So you won’t have to install a thing! Your apps can run in the O365 Developer Site, in Office Web Apps, or in the traditional Office rich client applications. Try Napa at http://dev.office.com/.
As your app matures and requires more advanced tools, just click “Open in Visual Studio”, to get the latest Office Developer Tools, and continue developing in Visual Studio 2012.
New in this release:
More information: Create apps for Office and SharePoint by using "Napa" Office 365 Development Tools
Whether you are a novice or expert Office/SharePoint developer, this release is packed with features that will help you focus on solutions, while saving time and reducing errors. Get the latest Office Developer Tools and checkout the new features for yourself!
An app for Office provides new user experiences right from Office by surfacing web technologies and cloud services within Office documents, email messages, meeting requests, and appointments. For more information, see Create apps for Office by using Visual Studio.
New in this release, Visual Studio Tools for Office (a.k.a. VSTO add-ins) now have design time and runtime support that target Office 2013 and .NET Framework 4.5. This has been a much-requested feature. We also fixed the top customer reported issues in the VSTO runtime for Office 2013. We’re looking forward to hearing your feedback!
With this release of Visual Studio Tools for Applications (VSTA), you can now create custom InfoPath forms for Office 2013.
The last preview release added many SharePoint tooling features that help make the SharePoint developer’s job easier and more efficient. Remote SharePoint development and Publishing – no need to install SharePoint locally for app development! Site column template, and Content Type and List Designers transformed a demanding process of developing SharePoint site taxonomy into a walk in park! But we didn’t just stop there. Check out the new features added in this release, and let us know what you think!
The new SharePoint app model and its alignment with web standards afforded us opportunities to streamline the web and app development experience for the new Office and SharePoint.
Bring your existing (or legacy) web project to bring it into SharePoint with just a few clicks. Your project will be hooked up with SharePoint app goodness – a.k.a. integrated SharePoint app development capabilities:
LightSwitch is the easiest way to create modern line of business applications for the enterprise. With this release of Office Developer Tools, LightSwitch offers HTML5 support for building touch-oriented business applications that run well on modern mobile devices. This preview introduces the ability to create and deploy apps for the new SharePoint app model using LightSwitch, providing unparalleled developer productivity for creating data-driven applications. Publishing business applications to SharePoint gives users a central place to manage application administration and access within the enterprise, as well as the ability to build rich applications that can interact with SharePoint content and participate in business processes.
Get started with LightSwitch:
Developers can build workflows for the new SharePoint that target Windows Workflow Foundation (WF45) on .NET Framework 4.5, and Workflow Manager 1.0. In this release of Office Developer Tools, you will have additional workflow capabilities available for SharePoint apps and solutions. We fixed the top issues heard from our users, so you should notice a simplified experience. We look forward to hearing more of your feedback!
That’s enough for now. We’ll follow up with more articles on Office and SharePoint development using Office Developer Tools.
Enjoy!