Latest SharePoint Framework (SPFx) topics

Well, I am just about a week away from the pre-release launch of my Mastering the SharePoint Framework developer course. Last week I wrote about the September 19th release & how the special 1-day only 50% sale will work. If you missed that, not to worry, watch the following video that explains the pre-release as well as the special 1-day sale (exclusive to you, my email subscribers):

Full details on the pre-release launch, special 1-day 50% sale, terms & conditions as well as frequently asked questions, can be found on the Voitanos website.

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!

This is one installment in our series “In Own Words” by Voitanos asking experienced SharePoint developers to share their thoughts on the new development model for SharePoint - the SharePoint Framework. In this series, we ask each person a series of questions and let them share their thoughts.

Wictor Wilen

My name is Wictor Wilen. I work for Avanade out of Sweden as SharePoint MVP. I’ve been working with SharePoint for quite some time, both on the developer side and the infrastructure side.

This is one installment in our series “In Own Words” by Voitanos asking experienced SharePoint developers to share their thoughts on the new development model for SharePoint - the SharePoint Framework. In this series, we ask each person a series of questions and let them share their thoughts.

Eric Shupps

I’m Eric Shupps, SharePoint Server MVP, President of Binary Wave.

This is one installment in our series “In Own Words” by Voitanos asking experienced SharePoint developers to share their thoughts on the new development model for SharePoint - the SharePoint Framework. In this series, we ask each person a series of questions and let them share their thoughts.

Julie Turner

Hi, my name is Julie Turner. I am a Principle Architect with Sympraxis Consulting. Part of that, I work for Blue Metal Architects as an architect.

This is one installment in our series “In Own Words” by Voitanos asking experienced SharePoint developers to share their thoughts on the new development model for SharePoint - the SharePoint Framework. In this series, we ask each person a series of questions and let them share their thoughts.

Mark Rackley

What’s your background as a SharePoint developer?

My name is Mark Rackley and I am the Chief Strategy Officer for Pait Group, that SharePoint consulting firm out of Cincinnati, Ohio. My background as a SharePoint developer goes back to the early days in 2007, so not quite the 2003 days like the old fossils, but in 2007. From there I did a lot of web part development, the feature development that you would do in Visual Studio. Then from there I slowly moved into client-side development, actually back in SharePoint 2007 because of some limitations we had with a client doing development in SharePoint.

This is one installment in our series “In Own Words” by Voitanos asking experienced SharePoint developers to share their thoughts on the new development model for SharePoint - the SharePoint Framework. In this series, we ask each person a series of questions and let them share their thoughts.

Wes Hackett

I’m Wes Hacket. I’m the CTO at Addin365, productivity and Office 365 product company in the UK. I’m also an Office Sever and Services MVP for the last four years.

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.

So… what’s new you ask? Some of these things were teased up a bit in the last SharePoint JavaScript/SPFx PnP SIG meeting that I covered in a previous blog post.

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.

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.

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;

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. While we were supposed to return home Saturday night, we missed our international connection and got stuck overnight, not making it home until about 12pm EDT 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. So what change from RC0 to GA?

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!