Microsoft 365

Learn how to test public preview release of SPFx and get some tips on managing your SPFx dev environment (USE NVM!).

I’m excited to announce what’s in the latest refresh of my MS-600 exam prep course! New content, over 300 practice test questions and more!

Back in October 2020, when I announced and launched my latest course Microsoft 365 Certified Developer Associate MS-600 Exam Prep, I committed to reaching the content complete milestone in February 2021. After two releases in December & January, I’m excited to share with you that the final two chapters will be published, true to my commitment, by the end of February 2021!

In my second update for 2021 we continue taking a look at the State of SharePoint Client-Side Development. In this post, I’ll give you an update on where we are with popular frameworks and tools developers use in the client-side SharePoint development world.

Let’s kick off my first update for 2021 by taking a look at the State of SharePoint Client-Side Development. In this post, I’ll give you an update on where we are with popular frameworks and tools developers use in the client-side SharePoint development world.

As we near the end of 2020, I wanted to take a look at where we are with respect to the State of SharePoint Client-Side Development. In this post, I’ll give you an update on where we are with popular frameworks and tools developers use in the client-side SharePoint development world.

In early September 2017, I announced Voitanos’ first course to be published. A little over three years later, I’m excited to share with you today the news on my next course that’s currently in the works!

Join me for a half-day virtual workshop at the Microsoft 365 Collaboration Conference to get up to speed on the SharePoint Framework.

Have you ever wanted to know how the SharePoint Framework works? How do your components get added to the page? What’s with that extra manifest file? In this post, I’ll answer all those questions!

When evaluating the SharePoint Framework, you need to determine not just what you can do, but if your SharePoint environment supports specific customizations and where you can apply those customizations.

How long has the SharePoint Framework been around? When was it first released? What were some of the major milestones in the history of the SPFx? It’s all here!

As SharePoint evolved over time into the product we have today, Microsoft iterated over development models until they found one that worked for both developers & Microsoft alike.

Ever wondered what the SharePoint Framework is? Ever asked yourself “what can I build with the SharePoint Framework?” You’re in luck because that’s what this comprehensive article answers! This article assumes you don’t have to have any prior knowledge or experience with the SharePoint Framework.

This post introduces our post series “SharePoint Framework Five Ws Answered”. In this series, Andrew Connell answers the classic “five-W” questions developers have for the SharePoint Framework: what, why, when, who, where and how.

I’ve been working with the great folks at SharePoint Fest to put together a virtual workshop solution! Are you a SharePoint Framework developer? If you’re looking to level-up your SharePoint Framework skills for the enterprise, this workshop is for you!

It’s that time again! Time for another installment of our SharePoint Framework summer 2020 wish list! What’s on your list?

Today marks a big milestone. Sprint 19 is complete and published - it contains the final two chapters published in my Mastering the SharePoint Framework Ultimate bundle! The first of these chapters, Sharing Code between SharePoint Framework Solutions, explains and demonstrates how to use either SPFx library components or npm packages to share code across SPFx projects. The other chapter, Property Panes for Client-Side Web Parts: Create Property Controls, demonstrates how to create custom property pane controls for web part projects.

Today I published a new chapter to the Ultimate bundle of my Mastering the SharePoint Framework course. This new chapter, DevOps: Monitoring & Telemetry with Azure Application Insights, is immediately available to all existing Ultimate bundle subscribers! DevOps: Monitoring & Telemetry With Azure Application Insights Development teams and organizations are always looking for ways to automate, streamline, and improve processes related to building software. SharePoint Framework development teams are no different. This process usually brings together development and operations, commonly called DevOps, to continually provide value to customers. DevOps is comprised of multiple practices and components. One aspect of DevOps is continuous monitoring.

Delve deeper into Microsoft Build 2020 with my extended reflections, following up on discussions from Episode 361 of the Microsoft Cloud Show podcast.

Yesterday I published a new chapter to the Ultimate bundle of my Mastering the SharePoint Framework course. This new chapter, DevOps: CI/CD with GitHub Actions & Azure Pipelines, is immediately available to all existing Ultimate bundle subscribers! DevOps: CI/CD With GitHub Actions & Azure Pipelines Development teams and organizations are always looking for ways to automate, streamline, and improve processes related to building software. SharePoint Framework development teams are no different. This process usually brings together development and operations, commonly called DevOps, to continually provide value to customers. DevOps is comprised of multiple practices and components. One aspect of DevOps is continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD).

On Wednesday, April 22, I presented the webinar Get Certified! Overview of the MS-600 exam & Microsoft 365 Developer Associate Certification with Rencore & Waldek Mastykarz. Rencore has posted the recording of the webinar as well as a link to the slides if you weren’t able to join us live or you want to re-watch it. Click here to access the recording. In that webinar I hinted there was more coming - I’m excited to share with you a new webinar series I hosted in May 2020, and all the recordings are available now!

After years of galactic chaos, SharePoint developers have finally realized the importance of building their SharePoint solutions with SPFx. With the Force awakened, the SharePoint community seeks solace with their PnP masters! Join me on May 4th with Elio Struyf, Waldek Mastykarz, and Vesa Juvonen, for a 3.5 hour SharePoint Framework mini-summit and May the 4th be with you!

In this article, I summarize the state of the union for the SharePoint Framework (SPFx) & include what we leared at the recent Microsoft Ignite conference.

Customers can leverage the SharePoint Framework (SPFx) in any of the modern or recent SharePoint versions. This includes SharePoint Online & SharePoint on-premises versions SharePoint Server 2016 & SharePoint Server 2019. To build a SPFx project, you use the Yeoman generator for the SharePoint Framework to create your project and get started. But there seems to be some confusion on which version you should install depending on your target SharePoint environment. Let’s clear this up, once and for all.

Late last year I published a few Jest presets to simplify adding automated testing to your SharePoint Framework (SPFx) projects. These are complete with example tests including testing the rendering of components, testing async functions using promises or callbacks and even simulating user events. You can learn more about the presets in the original post, Enable Jest testing of SharePoint Framework Projects in One Simple Step. In this post, I want to share some updates to the presets that have been published.

When I’m teaching React to developers, one thing that comes up often is dealing with a common error. But here’s the interesting thing: it’s not running into the error that comes up all the time, its how to deal with it that surprises them. I’ve always wanted to have something to point to that the scenario & why one option is better than others, even though there are plenty of ways to address the issue. That’s what this post is!

I originally intended to write this post mid-summer, but just never happened. Thankfully my wish list hasn’t changed for the SharePoint Framework (SPFx) since the spring of this year… wait, maybe that isn’t a good thing?

In this series, I showed you how to build custom elements, a native web technology supported natively by most browsers (except you Edge & IE…) and presented two options for how you can go about it. One option involves using one big project with the SharePoint Framework & Angular in it while the other utilizes two projects to mitigate the downsides of the one-project approach. So, you can now use Angular in SharePoint Framework projects and this is made possible by Angular Elements which was introduced in Angular v6 back in May 2017. Sweet! We’ve got the “can you do it” question answered! But, should you do it? There are always tradeoffs when picking a web framework for your next project and using one with the SharePoint Framework is no different. Let’s take a step back and look at the whole picture. Only then can you decide if it makes sense for you.

This has been a long time coming and many of you Angular developers who also work with the SharePoint Framework may have given up by now and switched to React, but for those of you who have been holding out, Angular is finally a viable option for SPFx development even with a few drawbacks.

Earlier this week, on Tuesday, May 7, 2019, Microsoft released v1.8.2 of the SharePoint Framework (SPFx). A little over a month ago, I wrote about the v1.8.0 release. Since then we had another minor release (v1.8.1) released on April 16, 2019. In this post, I’ll summarize what you can find, and share some additional details I found after spending some time picking apart the last two minor releases. » SharePoint Framework v1.8.2 official Release Notes

I’m excited to share this latest update to my course, Mastering the SharePoint Framework for developers. This update, packaged as sprint 16, includes one new chapter and a LOT of updates. When I originally planned out sprint 16, I intended to record a lot of new content. However when the SPFx v1.8.0 release came out there were enough changes to SPFx that I decided to go back and update the course, including adding some new lessons, completely re-recording existing lessons and updating quite a few lessons (both video & notes).

In this post, I’ll summarize what you can find, and share some additional details I found after spending some time picking apart this latest release of SPFx.

In my last post, Securing an Azure Function App with Entra ID - Works with SharePoint Framework!, I showed how you can secure a REST API deployed as an Azure Function App using Microsoft Entra ID. This comes in quite handy when you want to secure some custom server-side business logic that’’s called from a SharePoint Framework (SPFx) client-side solution. The SPFx docs show how to use APIs with permissions to the Microsoft Graph. This post will explain how to add custom permissions to the AzureAD application that is used to secure your Azure Function.

Developers can declare permissions in SharePoint Framework projects, but it isn’t a good idea. In this article I explain why and suggest a better approach.

I’m excited to share this latest update to my course, Mastering the SharePoint Framework for developers. Today’s update, packaged as sprint 13, includes two new chapters and a few updates… and it’s a huge release… the biggest yet adding over 3 hours of new content! Sprint 13 also marks a milestone: the Fundamentals Bundle of the course is now content complete! This means all planned chapters are now published. I will continue to make edits to existing chapters updating content when circumstances warrant, but at this time no new chapters or lessons are planned.

Setting up projects to use Jest, especially to test the rendering of your ReactJS SharePoint Framework projects & use the popular tool Enzyme for testing rendering, isn’t a trivial task, until now!

In this post, I’ll summarize what you can find, and share some additional details I found after spending some time picking apart this latest release of SPFx.

In my last post, I talked about using Angular Elements in SharePoint Framework projects. That post showed how to do this using a single SharePoint Framework Project. In this post, I show you a much better option that uses two projects.

In my last post, I talked about using Angular Elements in SharePoint Framework projects. When doing this, you have two options on how you will implement this and in this post, I will talk about doing it in one big project that includes everything. In tomorrow’s post, I’ll show you a much better option that uses two projects.

Citing issues with the Office UI Fabric JavaScript project, I advise against its use and recommend exploring alternative options.

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. The findings of this survey will then be summarized into a report that provides valuable insights.

Microsoft gives us a few options for managing our SharePoint Online environments. We can use the SharePoint Admin center, REST APIs, the CSOM and the SharePoint Online PowerShell. To fill the gaps, the SharePoint PnP group has created PowerShell cmdlets that cover additional tasks not covered by the Microsoft provided PowerShell. While these are good options, they aren’t very friendly to those who aren’t on the Windows platform. These two PowerShell options don’t leverage the cross-platform PowerShell, rather they are only available for the Windows platform.

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: