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

Download teams desktop app