Fluid Framework is coming to Microsoft Teams – now in private preview

At Build 2021, Microsoft announced a private preview program of Fluid components in Microsoft Teams chat.

The Fluid Framework is a collection of libraries that make it easier for developers to maintain a shared state between clients. For instance, a single to-do list being built in real-time by a group of people. Its key tenants are low latency, no new or custom server-code requirements and distributed data structures.

Here’s what a Fluid-enabled app could look like. Of course, you can do this today with existing tools. Fluid isn’t about an entirely new concept: it’s a common abstraction that makes doing things like this simple and quick:

I like to think of it (and I don’t know if this is right, but it helps me) as a “rendering engine” which works both backwards and forwards, plus a signalling framework such as SignalR. When a client makes a change the rendering engine works “backwards” and turns it into change messages. Those are then broadcast by the signalling framework to all other clients. When those messages are received they are processed by the rendering engine working “forwards” to construct and replay the client changes.

This announcement brings Fluid to the Chat element of Teams. Specifically, then, we can expect highly collaborative ways of working together on messages, lists, tables and other chat-based concepts. Messages can also be copied and pasted across chats whilst remaining up to date with each other.

Fluid itself is still very much being written and isn’t get ready for developers to build into production systems. However, developers can get started today building with Fluid – with tutorials, code examples and a Playground environment.

Read more about the announcement, and don’t miss these Build sessions:

This is a new announcement, and it’s likely that more information will be available over the coming days, so be sure to keep up to date with my Build 2021 coverage. I’m writing blog posts, recording videos, and posting on Twitter.