Adaptive Cards are set to gain Loop components, developers can create cards that will stay in sync

Announced at Microsoft Build 2022, Adaptive Cards will (in the future, but not now) be able to be created with Loop components – giving them a whole new lease of life and likely making them an easy way for developers to start using Loop.

We knew something like this was coming – in November 2021 at Microsoft Ignite Microsoft indicated that they were working on a way for developers to create their own Loop components. Read my blog post from that time: What is Microsoft Loop? | The thoughtstuff Blog

For a while, I’ve been wondering how things are going to work for developers building third-party applications. They could use the Azure Fluid Framework to create Loop-like functionality, but these would be different from the Loop components inside Microsoft Teams. That would be a confusing user experience if the expectation was that data stays up to date wherever you are.

It seems that Adaptive Cards will be the abstraction layer here. Adaptive Cards can be rendered in Microsoft Teams, Outlook as well as on the web and in desktop applications.

Users will also be able to copy and paste Adaptive Cards across platforms and have the data inside them stay synchronized. There are also plans to help users to “discover” Loop-enabled Adaptive Cards that may contain information they need based on the context of their Teams chats or Outlook messages – via Context IQ – a Microsoft 365 service announced at Microsoft Ignite 2021 that “integrates collaboration into the flow of work, surfacing the right information, people and insights in the moment, in context with the task at hand.”

Developers eager to sync-up their cards will have to wait a little longer though, as this new functionality is coming to private preview next month (June 2022), and so my guess would be to look for a preview (or possibly GA) launch at Microsoft Ignite 2022.