14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft's Office team announced at the end of August the free availability of Office UI Fabric, a frontend UI framework for building Web applications that follow the company's Office Design Language, an internal visual style guide used for creating Office-related Web, mobile, and desktop applications.
Microsoft has been slowly adopting the open-source mentality in recent years, releasing many useful products in the past, such as TypeScript, ClearScript, Vorlon.JS, and WinJS.
Now you can add one more entry to that list, Office UI Fabric, a frontend UI framework, something in the same category as Bootstrap and ZURB's Foundation.
Office UI Fabric features Microsoft's iconic design style
Microsoft's Fabric is very similar in scope to the two aforementioned frameworks, but it is important to remember that Fabric was specifically created to help Windows developers to create add-ins for the company's Office and Office 365 products.
The framework allows them to create Office-like interfaces using HTML, JavaScript, and CSS, which will fit right in with Microsoft's products.
The good news is that you can use it for other projects, regardless, like your own personal websites, third-party themes, or backend dashboards.
Office UI Fabric was used to create the websites for Office, Outlook, and OneDrive
Even Microsoft's staff have acknowledged they used the Office UI Fabric framework to build the websites for Office.com, OneDrive.com, Outlook.com, and Delve, meaning you're not entirely limited to building only Office add-ins.
You can download Office UI Fabric from Softpedia or from its official GitHub repository. The framework's code can be built with Node.js and Gulp, and comes with examples and documentation.
Some of the framework's features include LTR support, localization support, a mobile-first design approach, a responsive grid, and lots of built-in, ready-made UI components.
As a side note, now almost all major Web companies have a CSS framework launched. Twitter created Bootstrap, Google launched Material Design Lite, and now Microsoft has put out Office UI Fabric. The only one missing from the party is Facebook. Personally, we don't mind since Facebook is focused on revolutionizing PHP with its HHVM project.
