Latest Development topics

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.

Microsoft regularly hosts three different community calls under the SharePoint PnP program on various topics. You can learn all about these from the community page in the SharePoint docs at SharePoint Development > Community > Community Calls.

These calls are always recorded and published to the SharePoint PnP YouTube channel. However, during the month of July 2019 schedules are getting a bit out of control with various vacations where no one from the Microsoft side can host the calls and start the recordings. So, they are taking the month of July 2019 off.

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.md) 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

First, Explaining a little Snafu in v1.8.0 & v1.8.1

Before I get going, let me explain a snafu that happened in the last few versions. SPFx provides a way to use GA features & features only available under developer preview. The way they do this is by using different packages that include --plusbeta in the name of the npm package & modifying what objects exposed in the TypeScript type declaration files.

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.

You know what I don’t like about automated tests? Most of the time, we don’t automate them, we just instrument them. We write our tests and then open a console window to run them periodically. Maybe we set up a watcher to automatically rerun them when either a test or the code file changes, and maybe we use an integrated console window in our editor to monitor when things change.

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.

On November 8, 2018 (last Thursday), Microsoft released v1.7.0 of the SharePoint Framework (SPFx). This release is filled with a lot of new things Microsoft has been talking about for a few months. In this post, I’ll summarize some of what you can find, but also share some disappointments I had after spending some time picking apart v1.7.0.

What’s in this update?

• Generally available (GA) things in v1.7.0
  • SharePoint 2019 Support
  • Dynamic data (ie: connected components)
• Developer Preview things in v1.7.0
  • Teams tabs & apps in SharePoint
  • Full page apps
  • Domain Isolated web parts
  • Client-side list subscriptions (socket.io)

Getting the latest SharePoint Framework

There are two things to do to get your developer environment updated for v1.7.0. The first one is to upgrade the version of the SPFx Yeoman generator.

I’ve seen more and more questions since the folks at npm added an automatic scan for vulnerabilities after every npm install. What’s going on? The npm registry runs a security audit on npm packages. With the release of npm v6, this command is run automatically when you execute an npm install on your project. You can manually run one of these audits by executing the command npm audit (ref: npm-audit docs).

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

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.

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.

A few months ago, we partnered up with Rencore on their third annual State of SharePoint and Office 365 customizations survey. The point of this survey was to learn and share how customers were customizing SharePoint & Office 365.

Today, continuing our partnership, I’m launching the first annual comprehensive State of SharePoint Development survey. This survey is for developers with the goal of obtaining and sharing the technical state of SharePoint developers around the world. The findings of this survey will then be summarized into a report that provides valuable insights.

Ever wonder how your organization compares with other organizations in the same space? Have you sat at your desk and thought “I wonder if the challenges we are facing are the same as what others in the industry are facing?”

Now is your chance to find out!

I’m teaming up with Rencore this year to co-host two surveys.

State of SharePoint & Office 365 Customizations 2018 Survey

In this first survey by Rencore, you can share some information about your organization (anonymously of course) and learn how your organization compares to others in the industry on topics such as:

Many developers picking up the SharePoint Framework are coming from a traditional SharePoint development background. Some of these people server-side developers primarily who may have some client-side development experience while others may have been customizing SharePoint using client-side development techniques for a while.

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!