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 v1.0.2.
New Content Guidance Published
The SharePoint team also published some new documentation guidance to their site. Not all docs are updated on the dev.office.com site as of this writing, so I included some links to the docs in the associated GitHub repo.
- Debug SharePoint Framework solutions in Visual Studio Code
- Localize SharePoint Framework client-side web parts - updated for the GA release of SPFx
- Validate web part property values - updated for the GA release of SPFx
New SharePoint PnP Webcasts
The SharePoint PnP team also published a few webcasts recently that are more about project planning from an organizational and management point of view. These include the following:
- What should SharePoint Admins know about SPFx? - this webcast covered topics such as approval processes, responsibilities, security considerations, the deployment process and impacts of hosting locations.
- SPFx & Organization Considerations - this webcast covered topics such as organizational considerations (new toolchain, hosting location, governance plan), considerations for customers (standardizing client-side libraries, external scripts policies, hosting location, agreements with ISVs) and considerations for developers / architects (development practices, testing processes, production deployments and updates).
Current Engineering Investments
So what is the SharePoint Framework engineering team working on? We’re likely to see quite a few bits of news from Microsoft’s Build conference next week… in fact, you might want to tune into my podcast next week, the Microsoft Cloud Show, specifically episode 193, for some special coverage… wink wink….
In the webcast last week, Vesa teased out the following things:
- Modern UI extensions - this includes bringing things like JSLink (customizing list & library field rendering) and custom actions (extending the ECB & toolbar menu in lists and libraries) to the SharePoint Framework… with new Yeoman templates!
- Client-side Web Part connections - the ability for two web parts to be connected to talk to each other. This brings a capability we have with server-side web parts to the SPFx client-side web parts.
- SharePoint Workbench improvements - no more details shared on this… curious…
