Latest Development topics

In the past, I’ve written how I prefer Yarn over NPM not just for SharePoint Framework (SPFx) projects, but also for all my Node.js based projects that leverage the NPM package registry: https://www.npmjs.org . I wrote that post in December 2016 and things have changed quite a bit since then. Last week Microsoft released SPFx v1.5.0 & the associated Yeoman generator that added support for changing the package manager the generator ran after creating the project scaffolding.

Yesterday Microsoft released a new version of the SharePoint Framework (SPFx) generator to version 1.5. I took some time picking apart the update and in this post, I will show you what these changes have in store for you.

Over the last month of May, we’ve seen quite a few announcements from Microsoft with respect to what’s new and coming related to the SharePoint Framework (SPFx). This news has come out in part at the Microsoft Build 2018 conference in Seattle, WA and the SharePoint Conference North America 2018 in Las Vegas. Some of these things are available today while others are coming soon or in the next few months.

A few months ago, we partnered up with Rencore on their third annual State of SharePoint and Office 365 customizations survey. The point of this survey was to learn and share how customers were customizing SharePoint & Office 365. Today, continuing our partnership, I’m launching the first annual comprehensive State of SharePoint Development survey. This survey is for developers with the goal of obtaining and sharing the technical state of SharePoint developers around the world.

Ever wonder how your organization compares with other organizations in the same space? Have you sat at your desk and thought “I wonder if the challenges we are facing are the same as what others in the industry are facing?” Now is your chance to find out! I’m teaming up with Rencore this year to co-host two surveys. State of SharePoint & Office 365 Customizations 2018 Survey In this first survey by Rencore, you can share some information about your organization (anonymously of course) and learn how your organization compares to others in the industry on topics such as:

Learn what’s new in the January 2018 update of our flagship course, Mastering the SharePoint Framework, including two new chapters!

This post is long, LONG overdue. I’ve explained this multiple times over email & in person to SharePoint Framework developers. It’s about time I have something to point to… so here’s my take on the SharePoint Framework + Angular [v2.0 / v4.0 / v+] state of things. Have you tried to build a client-side web part using the SharePoint Framework using something other than ReactJS? Maybe you prefer using Angular over React… I know I do!

In the most recent SharePoint Patterns & Practices - JavaScript Special Interest Group meeting, Microsoft shared some news on the SharePoint Framework. The news fell into three buckets: Recent Updates Update on SPFx Modern UI Extensions SharePoint Framework Engineering Backlog Recent Updates The big news that in the last few weeks Microsoft introduced a new, and often requested, feature for SPFx: **tenant-scoped deployment for SPFx client-side web parts and extensions. This means addins or extensions can be deployed to all sites within your tenant just a single time!

Today Microsoft announced new updates coming to the SharePoint Framework ahead of their sessions at the Build Conference. In a blog post, Build integrated user experiences with new capabilities of SharePoint and OneDrive , they talked about four big additions that engineering is working on and will make it into a new developer preview of the SharePoint Framework by the end of May 2017. This week in the Microsoft Cloud Show podcast episode’s special coverage for the Build conference, CJ & AC sat down with Microsoft’s Vesa Juvonen about these new features and more.

In last week’s SharePoint Framework & JavaScript Special Interest Group meeting, Microsoft’s Vesa Juvonen shared what’s the engineering team at Microsoft is working on and more! Updated SharePoint Framework Yeoman Generator In early April, Microsoft quietly shipped two updates to the Yeoman generator for the SharePoint Framework, @microsoft/generator-sharepoint . The latest version is v1.0.2. The updates were fairly minor… I recently blogged about what you will find in the updates and how I figured out what the updates were as they aren’t well documented: SharePoint Framework Generator Updated to v1.

Did you know the SharePoint team at Microsoft updated the Yeoman generator, @microsoft/generator-sharepoint , twice in the last month? Yeah… I didn’t either until yesterday. The final version was released on February 23, 2017, as version 1.0.0. They then slipped two more updates in early April in quick succession as versions 1.0.1 & 1.0.2. Unfortunately, Microsoft still hasn’t published the repo for the generator or made the homepage for it in the NPMJS registry of any use… just some boilerplate copy… so it’s not easy to figure out what’s changed.

In this post, Andrew Connell shares why he things NVM is a fantastic tool for developers who rely on Node.js… including SharePoint Framework developers!

Earlier this week I presented a session at the Atlanta SharePoint User Group on Building Client Side Web Parts with the SharePoint Framework. I had my session planned well in advance, out but wanted to build the demos while they were fresh in my head. Last week I was out of work mode with my family relaxing on a beach in Mexico for Spring Break, so I planned to do build my demos yesterday morning, on Sunday.

Yesterday Microsoft announced that the SharePoint Framework has reached the Generally Available milestone. That means we’re at v1! The development tools have been updated to v1 and the v1 bits are rolling out to Office 365 SharePoint Online tenants now. Microsoft said it will take about a week or so for it to reach all Office 365 tenancies. You can get the details of this update from their wiki page in the main sp-dev-docs repo.

Last week I was in New Orleans presenting at the Nintex InspireX conference on building apps using the microservice approach with containers and Docker. During that week I sat down with Jeremy Thake of Hyperfish to talk about the SharePoint Framework and what it means for end users of SharePoint. During this discussion we discussed: what is the new SharePoint Framework how the SharePoint Framework will effect the SharePoint user experience some tips on how to keep up with the SharePoint Framework You can listen to the whole discussion on the Hypefish podcast .

If you are a SharePoint developer doing any work in SharePoint Online and you have held out on taking a look at the SharePoint Framework, now is a good time to start taking a look. We are currently at the release candidate 0 (RC0) and in the coming weeks, we can expect to see the generally available (GA) release. This release will support client-side web parts as Microsoft wanted to make sure they got that capability perfected… but they won’t stop there!