SharePoint Server 2019 Preview was announced on 24th of July in Microsoft Tech Community. Announcement blog post covered the key platform capabilities from the end user and administrative perspective, but as it did not cover key changes from the development perspective, we wanted to provide this blog post around covering some additional details, which would be relevant for architects and developers.
Supported capabilities in the SharePoint Server 2019 Preview
SharePoint Server 2019 is based on the SharePoint Online and supports many new exciting capabilities which customers and partners can take advantage of their deployments. Most importantly SharePoint Server 2019 supports modernized experiences and site templates, which have been previously introduced in the SharePoint Online (Office 365).
What is supported in the SharePoint Server 2019 Preview from development platform perspective?
- Modern pages
- Modern team and communication sites – modern subsite in RTM
- Column formatting
- SharePoint Framework client-side web parts and extensions (1.4.1, except the Microsoft Graph capabilities)
- Webhooks
- Asset packaging – hosting your solution assets automatically from app catalog site collection
- Tenant scoped deployment – deploy your web parts cross the farm just by installing them to the app catalog
- ALM APIs for add-in and SharePoint Framework solution management
What is NOT supported in the SharePoint Server 2019 Preview from development platform perspective?
- Site Designs and Site Scripts
- Hub sites
- Custom modern themes – Out-of-the-box modern themes are available for team sites and communication sites
- Site collection app catalog (potentially supported by RTM)
It’s also important to notice that you classic on-premises scenarios are still also supported with SharePoint Server 2019, like farm solutions, sandbox solutions, and classic site templates. We do however recommend on evaluating the new capabilities to align your on-premises deployment with the Office 365 experiences.
There are also many other great improvements for the end users and administrators, which you can find more details from the SharePoint Server 2019 Preview announcement blog post.
How to get started with SharePoint Server 2019 Preview
SharePoint Server 2019 Preview announcement blog post contains the basic details on how to get started with the Preview. If you, however, want to get started on the development topics, here’s a short list of steps to follow.
- Ensure that you have needed Windows Server platform in your usage – Windows Server 2016 or 2019
- Typically you’d be using Azure Virtual Machines or any other virtualization platform
- Download SharePoint 2019 preview – details from http://aka.ms/sp2019preview
- Perform basic installation
- Enable the add-in model in your deployment as add-in model infrastructure is also used for SharePoint Framework solution deployment
- Ensure that you have App service application and Subscription Settings service application created
- Configure app-domain for the farm – currently required even though you’d only use SharePoint Framework
- Install NodeJs, Yeoman, Gulp based on official documentation
- You can also install these on the Virtual Machine which is hosting SharePoint 2019
- Install SharePoint Framework version 1.4.1
- SharePoint Server 2019 support using the 1.4.1 version, except the Microsoft Graph capabilities and since SharePoint Framework Yeoman package does not yet support natively 2019 version, you will need to install the right version from npm.
- You can install 1.4.1 version by using the following command: “npm install -g @microsoft/generator-sharepoint@1.4.1“
- When you create SharePoint Framework solutions to SharePoint Server 2019 with SharePoint Framework yeoman templates v1.4.1, you should be selecting “SharePoint Online only (latest)” in the environment selection. This will be changed when native Yeoman package support for 2019 will be out.
Introduction to SharePoint 2019 Development platform video
This video is a cut from the SharePoint Community call held on 9th of August. It covers supported capabilities and also has a live demo on using Sharepoint Framework extensions in SharePoint 2019 deployment. Video also includes the information covered in this blog post.
This video and other related SharePoint Development videos from SharePoint engineering are available from the Official SharePoint Development YouTube channel. If you are also curious on joining on the community calls, please see more details on the SharePoint development community from http://aka.ms/sppnp.
Client Side Object Model (CSOM) for SharePoint Server 2019
Client Side Object Model APIs are remote APIs, which can be used to perform operations remotely towards SharePoint Server. We will NOT release these assemblies as separate SDK (msi setup), rather only as a NuGet package, which makes them more easily available for you in Visual Studio. You can find the SharePoint Server 2019 Preview Client Side Object Model from the NuGet Gallery with the following identity.
Notice that the API documentation for this CSOM API package is not yet available.
Next steps for SharePoint Server 2019 development
Here are the high-level next steps around the SharePoint Server 2019 development topics. These are still subject to change.
- SharePoint Server 2019 option to SharePoint Framework Yeoman packages in SharePoint Framework version 1.6 – ETA end of August 2018
- Server Side and Client Side API documentation updates – ETA mid-September 2018
- Other documentation implements – Gradually
Please do give us feedback on the needed documentation. Key guidance from SharePoint 2013 for on-premises is still 100% valid so we will be only concentrating on the specific differences on the 2019 platform. Thank you for your input advance.
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SharePoint Team, Microsoft – 13th of August 2018
