Garage Interns add a summer's worth of new features to release Web TS 2.0

Following the initial release of Web Template Studio in May earlier this year, Web Template Studio 2.0 is now available with additional services, inspired by community feedback and built by a second team of Garage interns. The VS Code extension helps hackers create full stack web apps quickly, now with a broader range of front and back end service options. Try Web TS 2.0 and share feedback for new feature requests on GitHub and check out the full story on the Windows Developer Blog or the walk-through video on YouTube.

Tag teaming development

This team of Garage interns, based out of the Vancouver, BC, pioneered a new approach for the unique internship program, picking up where a first team of interns left off to build on a product and refine its direction. Unlike in a traditional internship, Garage interns hear pitches from sponsoring teams who outline challenging engineering projects interns will tackle with a team. Typically, interns create new projects from the ground up to be released by Microsoft or partners, or add new capabilities to scaled Microsoft products. In this case, the Web Template Studio team from the Summer 2019 cohort accepted the baton from the Winter Cohort and continued iterating on the product features and direction.

In addition to managing the opensource feedback provided following the launch at Build 2019, the interns spoke to current users, student developers, hackers, and more to understand where Web TS could be enhanced. In addition to requests to deepen the bench of supported frameworks, the team also honed in on the value the solution could provide to the novice developer with a foundation of experience creating web apps.

Web Template Studio was created with hackers in mind; it’s ideal for rapid prototyping and spinning web apps up quickly at hackathons. In fact, the team made early versions of Web TS 2.0 available to hackers across Microsoft’s global, annual hackathon in July. The intern teams confirmed that Web TS is most useful for developers who have some background in creating web apps with specific frameworks–in their research, about 20 hours of coding time–enough to select their preferred front and back end without the tedium of wading through endless forums to identify how to stitch them together quickly in a time crunch setting. Web TS continues to be a great solution to get started with Azure with its simple wizard.

Adding new services to Web Template Studio

The team listened closely to developer feedback on GitHub and expanded the front and back end frameworks supported from React.js and Node.js available at the initial launch to also include Angular, Vue, and Flask. In an update this morning, the team also added App Service support to make it even easier to create web apps powered by Azure for storage and cloud hosting.

Throughout the summer, the team added a number of new features, namely adding additional frameworks.