Latest SharePoint topics

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!

Microsoft released a new certification in November 2019 for Microsoft 365 developers. The Microsoft 365 Certified: Teams Application Developer Associate certification measures developers across five (5) primary workloads in Microsoft 365. Developers must pass a single exam, the MS-600: Building Applications & Solutions with Microsoft 365 Core Services, to achieve this certification.

Andrew Connell, a Microsoft 365 Development MVP, was deeply involved in working with Microsoft as they created the certification, exam, and associated materials. In this webinar, Andrew walks you through behind the Scenes: Making of the MS-600 exam & Microsoft 365 Developer Associate Certification (webinar recording), one of the five workloads the MS-600 exam will test you on. You’ll learn what topics are covered, what you need to focus on, what resources are available to you, and have an opportunity to ask questions. This isn’t an exam prep or some shortcut to pass the exam.

Microsoft released a new certification in November 2019 for Microsoft 365 developers. The Microsoft 365 Certified: Teams Application Developer Associate certification measures developers across five (5) primary workloads in Microsoft 365. Developers must pass a single exam, the MS-600: Building Applications & Solutions with Microsoft 365 Core Services, to achieve this certification.

Andrew Connell, a Microsoft 365 Development MVP, was deeply involved in working with Microsoft as they created the certification, exam, and associated materials. In this webinar, Andrew walks you through Microsoft SharePoint, one of the five workloads the MS-600 exam will test you on. You’ll learn what topics are covered, what you need to focus on, what resources are available to you, and have an opportunity to ask questions. This isn’t an exam prep or some shortcut to pass the exam.

Late last year, Microsoft introduced a new certification for developers working in the Microsoft 365 space. The Microsoft 365 Certified: Teams Application Developer Associate is intended to measure & certify someone can “design, build, test, and maintain applications and solutions that are optimized for the productivity and collaboration needs of organizations using the Microsoft 365 platform”.

In order to achieve this certification, you must pass a single exam: Exam MS-600: Building Applications and Solutions with Microsoft 365 Core Services.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

This month’s update on my Mastering the SharePoint Framework course features the transition from one sprint to the next.

Sprint 12 Complete

I published the final pieces of Sprint 12 this week. This includes a new chapter in the Ultimate Bundle, new lessons in two Fundamentals Bundle chapters and a bunch of fixes! Want to get the details? Join me on Facebook Live for a sprint release party tomorrow, Thursday, November 1 at 1pm ET to see what’s in sprint 12 & get a sneak peek to what is planned for sprint 13, Black Friday/Cyber Monday deals & more!

This month’s update on my Mastering the SharePoint Framework course features the transition from one sprint to the next.

Sprint 11 Complete

Earlier this week, I published the final pieces of Sprint 11. Two new chapters, the first chapters in the Ultimate Bundle! I also hosted the first Facebook Live sprint release party this week… if you missed it, you can get access to the recording here: Voitanos @ Facebook Live

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.

Vincent Biret

Hi, my name is Vincent. I’m based in Montreal, Canada. I work for 2toLead as an Office 365 and Azure developer. And I’m also an Office Service and Services MVP for three years now. I’ve been working on SharePoint for a couple of years now.

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.

Paolo Pialorsi

I’m Paolo Pialorsi, I live in Italy. I’m a senior consultant. I work in a company of my own called PiaSys.com and I’m mainly focused on SharePoint and Office 365, all day long.

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.

Elio Struyf

Hi, I am Elio Struyf. I’m from Belgium. I am working as a trainer for U2U and I’m also an Office Server and Services MVP.

In the past, I’ve written how I prefer Yarn over npm not just for SharePoint Framework (SPFx) projects, but also for all my Node.js based projects that leverage the npm package registry: https://www.npmjs.org. I wrote that post in December 2016 and things have changed quite a bit since then. Last week Microsoft released SPFx v1.5.0 & the associated Yeoman generator that added support for changing the package manager the generator ran after creating the project scaffolding. Even without this new --package-manager switch introduced in v1.5.0, the SPFx generator had the command line switch --skip-install that we could add, telling it to not run the package install step, thus allowing us to run our own package manager.

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 Overfield

My name is Eric Overfield, President/Founder of PixelMill as well as Office Servers and Services MVP.

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.

Marc Anderson

I’m Marc Anderson. I’m a SharePoint consultant and I do other stuff but pretty much everything I do is SharePoint so, I say it that way. I have my own little company outside Boston with Julie Turner called Sympraxis Consulting.

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.

Corey Roth

Hi. My name is Corey Roth and I am an independent consultant specializing in Office 365 and mobile.

Over the last month of May, we’ve seen quite a few announcements from Microsoft with respect to what’s new and coming related to the SharePoint Framework (SPFx). This news has come out in part at the Microsoft Build 2018 conference in Seattle, WA and the SharePoint Conference North America 2018 in Las Vegas. Some of these things are available today while others are coming soon or in the next few months.

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.

Bob German

What’s your background as a SharePoint developer?

So my name is Bob German, and I’ve been a SharePoint fan since it was called SiteServer.

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.

Stefan Bauer

What’s your background as a SharePoint developer?

Actually, my background is web development, I start with web development 20 years ago with PHP and mySQL, and then I think twelve years ago I switched over to SharePoint and try to apply the things I already knew from the web development perspective to 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.

Rob Windsor

What’s your background as a SharePoint developer?

I’ve been doing dot net development since dot net first came out and I started doing SharePoint development in about 2006, when SharePoint 2007 was released.

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.

Mikael Svenson

What’s your background as a SharePoint developer?

So I started SharePoint development against SharePoint 2003 against WSS actually, using the web services because I was creating a search crawler and I knew nothing about SharePoint but I was crawling SharePoint. And after that, I’ve been doing just about any part of SharePoint development except add-in model, which I tried during one vacation but add-in model doesn’t really work but it’s all good, yeah.