Getting Started with the Office 365 API

Editor's Notes

• #4: I assume you basic knowledge with Visual Studio, Office 365, and that you have been working with
• #5: The Office 365 APIs are REST services that provide access to high-value data types from Office 365 services: mail, calendars, and contacts from Exchange Online; files and folders from SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business; users and groups from Azure AD. And with the simplicity of REST, you don't need any specialized Exchange, SharePoint, or Azure AD knowledge to access these services. The Office 365 APIs follow REST and OData 2.0 standards for data transport, and use the OAuth 2.0 standard for authentications and authorization.
• #6: Select the language, development platform, and hosting environment you want. Build using any web language, including JavaScript, HTML5, Python, Ruby, PHP, and ASP.NET. Use Visual Studio, Eclipse, Android Studio, XCode, or the IDE of your choice. Host your apps in Microsoft Azure or any cloud platform you choose. Then, use single sign-on with Azure AD to authenticate your users, and let them access email, files, calendar, and user information, and the petabytes of data that are stored in Office 365.
• #7: Before you can create applications that use the Office 365 APIs, it's important to set up your Visual Studio environment. If you're using Visual Studio 2013, you can take advantage of the Office 365 API tools to access Office 365 right away. To set up your development environment, perform the steps described in the slide above.
• #10: To register and authenticate your applications, you need to use Microsoft Azure Active Directory. This is where application and user account information is stored. To get access to Microsoft Azure Active Directory, you need a Microsoft Azure tenant. A Microsoft Azure tenant gives you access to the management portal in Microsoft Azure, where you can add users, roles, and apps. Fortunately, when you sign up for an Office 365 subscription, such as your Developer Site, an Microsoft Azure tenant is automatically created and associated with that Office 365 subscription. So, if you can have an existing Microsoft Azure tenant, you can associate your Office 365 Developer Site with it. If not, you'll need to create a new subscription to the Azure tenant that was created when you sign up for your Office 365 subscription. If you have an Azure tenant If you have an existing Azure tenant, you can associate that with your Office 365 subscription. To associate an existing Azure tenant with your Office 365 subscription Log on to the Microsoft Azure Management portal with your existing Azure credentials (for example, your Microsoft ID such as user@live.com), and navigate to the Active Directory node. Choose the Active Directory node, then choose the Directory tab and, at the bottom of the screen, choose Add. On the dialog box, choose Use existing directory, select the check box, and choose the check mark in the lower right hand corner. This brings you back to the Azure Management Portal. Log on with your Office 365 subscription information. You will be prompted whether to use your directory with Azure. Choose continue and a screen comes up that confirms your action. Now, choose Sign out now. Close the browser and reopen the portal. Otherwise, you will get an access denied error. Log on again to your Azure subscription (for example, your Microsoft ID). Navigate to the Active Directory node and, under Directory, you should now see your Office 365 subscription. If you don't have an Azure tenant You can use the Azure tenant that was created when you created your Office 365 subscription to register and authenticate your apps. To access this underlying tenant from your Office 365 Admin Center, you'll need to create a subscription to your Azure tenant. To create the Azure subscription to your Office 365 subscription Log on to your Office 365 tenant and go to the Office 365 admin center. In the same browser, open a new tab and sign in to Microsoft Azure by navigating to https://account.windowsazure.com/SignUp. You should log on with your Office 365 credentials. Create a new subscription. After you create your subscription, choose Portal. The Azure Tour appears. You can view it, or choose X to close it. You should now see all items in the Azure tenant. It lists a single directory with the name of your Office 365 tenant.
• #12: You have several options for developing with Office 365 APIs, based on the developer environment you choose, and the type of solution you're building: Install Visual Studio and the Office 365 API tools to create .NET and hybrid (Xamarin and Apache Cordova) projects Use the Android SDK for Office 365 to create Android apps Call the Office 365 REST APIs directly using any REST-compatible development environment and language Install Visual Studio and the Office 365 API tools The quickest way to get started developing an app with the Ofiice 365 APIs is to use Visual Studio 2013 and the Office 365 API tools for Visual Studio, which enable you to access Office 365 services easily. The Office 365 API tools include client libraries and UI enhancements to Visual Studio. The client libraries make it easier for you to interact with the Office 365 REST APIs from the device or platform of your choice by using libraries available for .NET Framework and JavaScript. The Visual Studio UI enhancements make it easy to add Office 365 services to your app projects. For the Android you would typically need Android Studio or IDE’s like Eclipse in addition to Java Development Kits, and for iOS you would need an environment like XCode. Later on in this session I will show you some tools that enables you to use Visual Studio even for your
• #13: Add Office 365 APIs to your project You add and configure Office 365 APIs by using the Services Manager in Visual Studio. In the Solution Explorer, choose the project node to which you want to add an Office 365 service . Right-click or press and hold the project node and choose Add > Connected Service. At the top of the Services Manager dialog box, choose the Office 365 link, and then choose Register your app. Sign in with a tenant administrator account for your Office 365 developer organization. This starts the process of registering your app in Microsoft Azure Active Directory, which allows your app to authenticate via OAuth. After you've logged on to Office 365, a list of available Office 365 APIs services appears. You will see a list of Office 365 services. At this point, the Permissions column to the right of each service is empty. In the list: Select the Office 365 service you want to add Choose Permissions. In the [Office 365 service] Permissions dialog: Select the permissions your project requires Choose Apply. Choose App Properties in the Services Manager dialog. If you want to make this sample application available to Office 365 organizations other than your developer organization: Change the Make this app available to: setting to Multiple Organizations Choose Apply. Note It is not necessary to change this setting to test the application. However, users from your developer organization will bypass the user consent page after they sign in. The Services Manager dialog now lists: The service(s) you've selected to add to your project The permissions for each service. Choose OK. At this point, Visual Studio adds the required NuGet packages to the project. The NuGet packages added vary based on the Office 365 services you added. The tool also registers your web app in Microsoft Azure Active Directory behind the scenes, so you don't have to.
• #15: After you've added an Office 365 service to your project, you'll need to authenticate the app with Office 365 in order to gain access to your user's data. Authenticating your app includes three steps: creating the Office 365 discovery context, getting an access token, and then creating the appropriate client object for the Office 365 service you want to access. Create the Office 365 discovery client Getting an access token for Office 365 Creating the appropriate client object Creating the Office 365 discovery client Many of the endpoints that your application may need to call vary by user, such as the endpoints for the user's mailbox, calendar, and OneDrive site. To obtain the URLs of these endpoints, your application calls the Office 365 Discovery Service. Typically, this will be the first Office 365 service that your solution calls. For more details about calling this service, see Discover service endpoints for your Office 365 app and Discovery Service APIs. Getting an access token for Office 365 Your code can use the refresh token that it gets from Azure AD when it authorizes to the Discovery Service to get access tokens from Azure AD with a single round-trip. Creating the client object to access the Office 365 services Lastly, to actually access your user's Office 365 data, you'll need to create the appropriate client object in your code. The type of client object you create depends on the Office 365 API service you access. For calendar, contacts, and email, create an Outlook Services client object For files and sites, create a SharePoint client object For user information, create an Azure AD client object
• #19: Xamarin is a set cross-platform development environment developed by the creators of Mono With a C# shared codebase, developers can use Xamarin to write native iOS, Android, and Windows apps with native user interfaces and share code across multiple platforms.
• #20: Cordova is an Open Source Framework under the Apache Foundation. It is a set of device API’s that enables software programmers to build applications for mobile devices using JavaScript, HTML5, and CSS3, instead of relying on platform-specific APIs like those in iOS Android. Or Windows Phone[5] It enables wrapping up of HTML, CSS and Javascript code depending upon the platform of the device. It extends the features of HTML and Javascript to work with the device. The resulting applications are hybrid, meaning that they are neither truly native mobile application (because all layout rendering is done via web views instead of the platform's native UI framework) nor purely web-based (because they are not just web apps, but are packaged as apps for distribution and have access to native device APIs) When using the Cordova APIs, an app can be built without any native code (Java, Objective-C, etc) from the app developer. Instead, web technologies are used, and they are hosted in the app itself locally (generally not on a remote http server). And because these JavaScript APIs are consistent across multiple device platforms and built on web standards, the app should be portable to other device platforms with minimal to no changes. Apps using Cordova are still packaged as apps using the platform SDKs, and can be made available for installation from each device's app store. Cordova provides a set of uniform JavaScript libraries that can be invoked, with device-specific native backing code for those JavaScript libraries. Cordova is available for the following platforms: iOS, Android, Blackberry, Windows Phone, Palm WebOS, Bada, and Symbian.