To be fair to the team, I don’t think this was an intentional hating of ClickOnce, Squirrel is built into Electron as the default auto-update mechanism so they likely just adopted it because it was easiest. Squirrel is open-source and maintained on GitHub. For instance the mechanism that Windows uses is Windows Update.ĭid the Microsoft Teams team use Windows Update as their update mechanism, similar to Skype for Business and the rest of the Office Suite? Er, no.ĬlickOnce (by the way) is the Microsoft implementation of this approach that’s been around for years. However, to do this you need a mechanism to update your application. That’s meant that software can be updated almost continuously, many times a day in order to fix bugs and add features. Now of course we have the Internet so we don’t have the disks. Back in the old days (the ’90s) when software came on disks, the update strategy was to send them some more disks, so you would release a new version of your software maybe once a year because updating was hard and expensive. Plus, by packaging all the assets (all the images, the JS etc etc) that the application needs during install, running and using the application will be fast and won’t require those things to be downloaded each time.Įvery time you distribute an application you need to think about how users will update that application when things change. There is functionality to the application and buttons that don’t exist on the webpage. It’s not quite as simple as just calling when the application starts however. Microsoft building their newest, hottest collaboration strategy around an open-source, web-based GitHub project, not a Win32 app? Welcome to 2017. As I mentioned before Visual Studio Code was built this way but the primary application for development experiences is still the Visual Studio IDE (a big C++ Win32 app). However, I think (though I could be wrong) that this is the first time this approach has been used for the primary application of a core Microsoft product. And, one set of developer skills so you don’t need different teams for web and desktop. 1 codebase, 1 place to fix bugs, 1 place to add new features. Rather than try and maintain a Windows client, a Mac client, a Linux client and a web presence, instead there’s just a single set of HTML and JS files which are then wrapped separately depending on where you are using them. This is actually the same technology that is used to build the Visual Studio Code editor. Then, that desktop GUI can be distributed across many platforms without needing a separate application for each platform. It allows you to use (and re-use) web components (like HTML, CSS and JavaScript (JS)) in the creation of a desktop GUI. This is done using Electron.Įlectron is an open-source framework, developed and maintained on GitHub. The “application” is actually just a thin wrapper around the Microsoft Teams website. This is the biggest surprise, and probably the number 1 reason for the application feeling different. Here’s what I found: It’s just a webpage! Whether that’s strange behaviour with logging in or just something picked up in the look and feel whilst using it, it deserved some attention. The general consensus is that “something is different” with it. I’ve been asked a couple of times about the Microsoft Teams desktop application and been in a couple of discussions with people about it. Under the Hood of the Microsoft Teams Desktop Application
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