SharePoint

Today I’m excited to share a new regular show: CloudDev Clarity. In this show, Julie Turner & Andrew Connell discuss topics for Microsoft 365 & Azure developers.

Earlier today, I wrapped up refreshing the student code downloads for the Fundamentals & Ultimate bundles of my Mastering the SharePoint Framework course to SPFx v1.15.0, built from scratch.

It’s been a while since I checked in and shared an update on the latest with my course, Mastering the SharePoint Framework. But there’s no better time than now! Learn what’s new in this month’s refresh of the first two chapters in the Fundamentals bundle!

Microsoft introduced the tenant app catalog many years ago way for users to install, deploy, and acquire apps within their SharePoint Online environment. Unfortunately, it’s become quite dated and not kept up with the needs and demands of the product… until now! In this post, I’ll take a look at what Microsoft is rolling out to your SharePoint Online tenants with a new modern experience, a better story for acquiring, requesting, and approving apps from the app store and more. In fact, we’re getting an idea of what’s coming in the future.

Microsoft release the first beta of the SharePoint Framework v1.15 on March 8, 2022. In this post I’ll dig in to see what’s in it!

Join me, May 9-13 in Seattle for the 365 EduCon (SPFest) conference! I’m presenting a full day workshop & sessions for Microsoft 365 & Azure pro developers!

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 this post, learn how to set up a development development environment to create SPFx projects for all SharePoint deployments.

These days, all of Microsoft’s updates about the SPFx, or community content have one thing in common: they ignore SharePoint Server 2016. Not this post!

These days, all of Microsoft’s updates about the SPFx, or community content have one thing in common: they ignore SharePoint Server SE. Not this post!

These days, all of Microsoft’s updates about the SPFx, or community content have one thing in common: they ignore SharePoint Server 2019. Not this post!

Photo by Nathan Lemon on Unsplash In this post, I want to update you on some of the changes Microsoft has recently made related to the exam & offer guidance if you’re planning to take the exam soon. I’ll also answer a few common questions that keep coming up.

You’ve hit a roadblock on your SPFx project & have a question. What options do you have? In this post, I’ll share a few options available to you.

Earlier today, I updated our Azure Pipelines Templates for SharePoint Framework projects. This is mostly a modernization update to the templates for developers using our templates to implement a CI/CD process for their SharePoint Framework (SPFx) projects using Azure DevOps Pipelines.

Late last week, I wrapped up refreshing the student code downloads for the Fundamentals & Ultimate bundles of my Mastering the SharePoint Framework course to SPFx v1.12.1, built from scratch + bonus demo in the React chapter showing how to use React Hooks!

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!

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.

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!

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!

Have you noticed since installing the Yeoman generator for SharePoint, when you add a web part to a new or existing project and specify the “No JavaScript framework” option, you get a web part who’s render() method’s indentation is all messed up like this? // omitted for brevity... export default class HelloWorldWebPart extends BaseClientSideWebPart <IHelloWorldWebPartProps> { public render(): void { this.domElement.innerHTML = ` <div class="${ styles.helloWorld }"> <div class="${ styles.container }"> <div class="${ styles.row }"> <div class="${ styles.column }"> <span class="${ styles.title }">Welcome to SharePoint!</span> <p class="${ styles.subTitle }">Customize SharePoint experiences using Web Parts.</p> <p class="${ styles.description }">${escape(this.properties.description)}</p> <a href="https://aka.ms/spfx" class="${ styles.button }"> <span class="${ styles.label }">Learn more</span> </a> </div> </div> </div> </div>`; } protected get dataVersion(): Version { return Version.parse('1.0'); } // omitted for brevity... This is frustrating, but it’s very easy to fix.

I’ve updated our Azure Pipelines Templates for SharePoint Framework projects earlier today. This release, v1.3.0, includes a few improvements and updates. These updates are packed into two releases, v1.2 & v1.3. They are broken up so if you aren’t interested in v1.3, you can configure your pipeline to use just the 1.2 release which includes a specific fix / enhancement. What’s new The two releases include three updates & two minor changes to the project. If you want to use the latest version of the templates in your pipelines, just reference the repo as you’ve done in the past. This will default to the master branch.

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.

Like previous years, Microsoft delivered a session at the Microsoft Ignite 2019 conference that was essentially the “State of SharePoint Framework”. This session, BRK3071 - SharePoint Framework: What’s new and what’s next, started with a review of what the SharePoint Framework (SPFx) is and where it can be used. The second half of the session covered what’s coming next with SPFx, both in the short & long term. In this post, I’ll recap what was shared and share my thoughts.

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!

In just four simple steps, this post will show you how to automate the build, test & deployment to SharePoint Online of any SharePoint Framework project using Azure Pipelines. I guarantee you can have it done before your coffee is ready! Seriously… go get the pot going and come back to this post. DevOps is all the rage these days. Developers throw it in resumes left and right & the recruiters are always searching for someone who can check that box. But what’s funny is like every other hot term these days, people use the term for everything.

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.

Here’s a post that teaches you a technique that you can start leveraging in your SharePoint Framework (SPFx) projects right away! You know those projects where you have certain values you use in development or testing while others that you use in production? This would include things like different account or IDs used for telemetry services, different endpoints to sample or production data that you’re interacting with in your project.

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.

Earlier today I recorded an impromptu Facebook Live video for the recent release of sprints 14 & 15 of the SharePoint Framework. Usually, I let people know about these ahead of time but travel the last few weeks has been rough. Add up issues with production targets that were externally influenced by other people’s schedules, attending the Microsoft 2019 Global MVP Summit & a brief business conference in Las Vegas… I didn’t want to wait any longer.

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.

I recently published a new chapter in my Mastering the SharePoint Framework on-demand course for developers that included a section that showed how to call a REST API deployed using an Azure Function App and secured with Entra ID from the SharePoint Framework. When I was working on this chapter, it felt like the process of configuring an Azure Function App to be secured with Entra ID was harder and more complex than it should have been. Specifically, some of the things you do aren’t explained as well… so I decided to blog about it here!

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!

Learn what I use and how I configure my SharePoint Framework projects to continuously run my unit tests efficiently and minimize distractions so I can focus.

The latest version of the SharePoint Framework (SPFx) released a few weeks ago, v1.7.0, uncovered a few issues between how the various Node.js package managers work. These issues appear to be rooted in the package tslint and came about with a change in how Microsoft was using tslint under the covers from SPFx v1.6 to v1.7. A fix has been submitted to tslint, but they appear to be lagging on their release schedule so there’s no ETA on when it will get rolled out.