Yesterday I was lucky enough to join THE Waldek Mastycarz in a webinar hosted by Rencore, the guys behind SPCAF! Did you miss the webinar? You can watch a recording of it from their site here: Rencore Webinar: Building Client-Side Web Parts with the SharePoint Framework.
We had a great turnout and collected some fantastic questions from the attendees. While we tried to answer as many of the questions during the webinar, we ran out of time because you guys had such great questions! Waldek and I collected the questions afterward and re-answered some with additional responses (as some were quick in the webinar in an effort to get through as many as possible in the allotted time) and address the ones we missed. You can see these combined responses on their associated blog post here: Webinar Recap: Building Client-Side Web Parts with the SharePoint Framework;
During the webinar not only did Waldek talk about managing dependencies, but I mentioned a recent thing I ran into when one of the hundreds of dependencies within the SharePoint Framework (SPFx) dependency tree blew up on me last weekend. Prior to the webinar, I published a blog post Troubleshooting and Fixing the “Out of the Blue, My SharePoint Framework Projects Won’t Build!”, that talks about how to identify these problems and fix them. In the post I mentioned how the npm shrinkwrap command would have made this avoidable… when I saw Waldek mention it in the webinar it put a smile on my face… great timing!
Confused By the New Development Toolchain? Gulp? Webpack? Node.js?
One thing I noticed is that we saw a lot of questions related to the development / build toolchain. If you are confused by all these new terms and tools, I’ve put together a 10-day email course that methodically walks you through these tools. You can learn more about it here and signup: Voitanos’ Understanding the SharePoint Framework Development Toolchain Email Course.
Don’t Get Overwhelmed! Focus on what you NEED to Know
As I said in the webinar, I’m working on a SharePoint Framework course for developers: Mastering the SharePoint Framework. The first bundle will be out soon… very very soon… wink wink. In my research as I started building the course, I saw an overwhelming response from people jumping into the SharePoint Framework: the toolchain was tripping them up! That’s why I decided to build the email course.
Within that course there’s one thing I focus on: focus on what you NEED to know, not everything you COULD know.
