April 10th, 2017

SharePoint Patterns & Practices – April 2017 release

Vesa Juvonen
Vesa Juvonen
Principal Program Manager

SharePoint / Office 365 Dev Patterns and Practices (PnP) April 2017 release is out with new contributions from community for the community. This post contains all the details related on what was included with the release and what else has been happening in the PnP world during the past month.

 

What is SharePoint Patterns & Practices (PnP)?

SharePoint / Office Dev Patterns and Practices PnP is community driven open source initiative where Microsoft and external community members are sharing their learning’s around implementation practices for SharePoint and Office 365. Active development and contributions happen our GitHub projects under ‘dev’ branch and each month there will be a master merge (monthly release) with more comprehensive testing and communications.

PnP is owned and coordinated by SharePoint engineering, but this is work done by the community for the community. It’s been great to find both internal and external people who are willing to assist and share their learning’s for the benefit of others. This way we can build on the common knowledge of us all. Currently program is facilitated by Microsoft, but already at this point we have multiple community members as part of the PnP Core team and we are looking to extend the Core team with more community members.

Notice that since this is open source community program, there’s no SLAs for the support what we provide from program. You can use SharePoint Developer group in the Microsoft Tech Community for providing input and to ask any questions around the existing materials. If you are interested on getting more closely involved, please check the following guidance from our GitHub wiki or a referenced PnP Webcast.

Some key statistics around PnP program from March 2017

  • GitHub repository forks at different repositories 
  • Unique visitors during past 2 weeks’ cross PnP repositories – 17345
  • Unique visitors during past 2 weeks in SharePoint organization repositories – 7290
  • Merged pull requests cross PnP repositories (cumulative) – 3194
  • Closed issues and enhancements ideas cross PnP repositories (cumulative) – 1702
  • PnP Core component NuGet package downloads (cumulative) – 86931
  • Unique visitors in PnP MSDN pages during March 2017 – 49262
  • Unique tenants using PnP CSOM Core component during March 2017 – 4647
  • Http requests towards SharePoint Online from PnP CSOM Core Component during March2017 – 1803500597
  • PnP YouTube channel had 17921 views with 123802 minutes watch time during March 2017

Main resources around PnP program

April 2017 monthly community call

Agenda for the Tuesday 11th of April community call at 8 AM PST / 5 PM CET:

  • Summary on the April 2017 release and other program updates – Paolo Pialorsi ~20 min
  • Demo on new ECM.MVCTaxonomy sample, which shows how to build taxonomy picker for provider hosted add-in without a need of add-in web – Alexander von Malachowski (Nilson Group AB) 
  • Demo on new react-taxonomypicker sample, which shows how to build taxonomy picker control for web part property setting – José Quinto (Content and Code)
  • Demos on react-modern-charts and js-modern-calendar client-side web part samples – Jeremy Coleman (PC Professional Inc)
  • Q&A

Monthly community call will get recorded and release to PnP YouTube channel typically within 24 hours after the recording is ended. If you have any questions, comments or feedback, please participate in our discussions in the Microsoft Tech Community under SharePoint developer group. Notice that there’s one hour change for the PST time due different schedules around the daylight savings between Europe and US. 

PnP Sites Core, PnP PowerShell and provisioning engine Special Interest Group (SIG)

PnP Sites Core, PowerShell and Provisioning Special Interest Group (SIG) has bi-weekly meetings to cover latest development in the PnP CSOM core component, PnP PowerShell and in the PnP remote provisioning engine. We do touch also generic SharePoint development practices around remote APIs in these calls. These calls have also free Q&A section, if you have any questions around SharePoint development in on-premises or in cloud. Need to get recommendation to your design or having hard time with some APIs? – Drop by, ask a question and we’ll help you.

You can download invite for the bi-weekly meeting from following location.

All SIG meetings are being recorded and are available for view from PnP YouTube Channel. Here’s the latest recordings from the SIG calls.

  • 5th of April – Quick look on March 2017 stats, planned improvements in provisioning schema. Demos on provisioning engine refactoring and how to build simple self-service site collection creation process in 10 minutes without code
  • 22nd of March – Demos on PnP PowerShell usage with Azure functions to automate business process and on modern UI user interface scanner
  • 8th of March – Quick look on Feb 2017 statistics. Demos on “modern” SP site creation using SharePoint REST APIs and programmatically detect list rendering style in SharePoint Online (classic or modern)

Notice. Next SIG for PnP Component / PowerShell will be on Wednesday 22nd of February – If you have questions around these topics, please join this call and use the opportunity to ask questions from SP engineering and PnP Core team.

SharePoint Framework (SPFX) and JavaScript Special Interest Group (SIG)

SharePoint Framework and JavaScript Special Interest Group (SIG) has bi-weekly meetings to cover latest changes in the SharePoint Framework side, from engineering perspective and to cover also latest development related on the PnP JS Core library. These calls are designed to have 50%/50% of content and demos and there has been already great community demos on the new SharePoint Framework Client-side web parts. If you’re interested on showing your code, just let us know.

All SPFx and JS SIG meetings are recorded, so that you can check the demos and discussions, if you can’t make the actual call. You can find the latest recordings from the PnP YouTube Channel. Here’s the latest recordings.

  • 30th of April – Latest on SPFx and PnP JS Core. Demo on checking permissions with sp-pnp-js 
  • 16th of March – Latest on SPFx and PnP JS Core. Demo on SharePoint Editor Chrome Extension to increase productivity of developers
  • 2nd of March – Latest on SPFx and PnP JS Core. Demos on TravisCI integration in SP JS Core project and JS Link cusotmization automation for classic sites

Notice. Next SIG for SharePoint Framework and JavaScript development will be on Thursday 16th of February – If you have questions around these topics, please join this call and use the opportunity to ask questions from SP engineering and PnP Core team.

PnP Weekly Webcasts

We started new PnP Weekly Webcast series on October 2015 and have continued releasing new videos since that. All new webcasts are released in PnP YouTube Channel. Old webcasts and other demo videos are also found from the PnP Channel 9 section. Here’s the new web casts released after the last monthly release.

PnP repositories in GitHub

There are quite a few different GitHub repositories under the PnP brand since we wanted to ensure that you can easily find and reuse what’s relevant for you. We do also combine multiple solutions to one repository, so that you can more easily sync and get latest changes of our released guidance and samples. In general we do recommend you to use the PnP sample search tool at dev.office.com for locating relevant material for you. This should be easier and faster than trying to locate relevant material from GitHub.

During November, majority of the PnP repositories were moved to SharePoint GitHub organization. 

Here’s the current repository structure, including short description for each of them.

  • PnP – Main repository for SP add-in, Microsoft Graph etc. samples
  • PnP-Guidance – Guidance, presentations and articles which are partly sync’d to MSDN
  • PnP-Sites-Core – Office Dev PnP Core component
  • PnP-JS-Core – Office Dev PnP Core component for JavaScript
  • PnP-PowerShell – Office Dev PnP PowerShell Cmdlets
  • PnP-Tools – New repository for tools and scripts targeted more for IT Pro’s and for on-premises for SP2013 and SP2016
  • PnP-Partner-Pack – Packaged guidance with detailed instructions on setting things up in Office 365 and in Azure.
  • PnP-Transformation – Material specifically for the transformation process. Currently includes samples around InfoPath replacement and transformation tooling from farm solutions to add-in model.
  • PnP-OfficeAddins – Samples for the Office Add-ins development
  • PnP-Provisioning-Templates – Source for templates available from PnP Template Gallery at http://templates-gallery.sharepointpnp.com
  • PnP-Provisioning-Schema – PnP Provisioning engine schema repository
  • PnP-IdentityModel – Open source replacement of Microsoft.IdentityModel.Extensions.dll

On top of the specific PnP repositories, PnP initiative also controls the new repositories under the SharePoint organization. PnP is owned nowadays by SharePoint engineering and we will be using PnP as the channel and forum to facilitate community work.

What’s supportability story around PnP material?

Following statements apply cross all of the PnP samples and solutions, including samples, core component(s) and solutions, like PnP Partner Pack.

  • PnP guidance and samples are created by Microsoft & by the Community
  • PnP guidance and samples are maintained by Microsoft & community
  • PnP uses supported and recommended techniques
  • PnP implementations are reviewed and approved by Microsoft engineering
  • PnP is open source initiative by the community – people who work on the initiate for the benefit of others, have their normal day job as well
  • PnP is NOT a product and therefore it’s not supported through Premier Support or other official support channels
  • PnP is supported in similar ways as other open source projects done by Microsoft with support from the community by the community
  • There are numerous partners that utilize PnP within their solutions for customers. Support for this is provided by the Partner. When PnP material is used in deployments, we recommend to be clear with your customer / deployment owner on the support model

Latest changes

SharePoint Framework samples

These are samples which are available from the SharePoint client-side web part sample repository at https://github.com/SharePoint/sp-dev-fx-webparts. We are working on getting samples on the RC0 level and many of them have been already properly updated. You can find supported version always from the readme file of each sample. 

  • New sample react-taxonomypicker demonstrating how to build taxonomy picker control for web part property setting
  • New sample js-modern-calendar demonstrating how to build calendar presentation web part
  • New sample angular-yammer demonstrating how to build simple Yammer embed client-side web part
  • New sample react-modern-charts demonstrating how to use charts in client-side web part
  • New sample react-script-editor demonstrating custom script editor web part build with React
  • Updated sample angular-todo to demonstrate simple todo tracking web part build with Angular
  • Upgrades to numerous other samples to use SPFx GA version

PnP CSOM Core and Provisioning Engine

PnP CSOM Core component is a wrapper on top of native CSOM and REST, which simplifies complex scenarios with remote APIs, one of the example is the PnP Provisioning Engine for remote templates. The first version of the PnP remote provisioning engine was released with the May 2015 release. For the April 2017 release we have continued to add new supported capabilities and made significant improvements from stability perspective for both SharePoint Online and SharePoint on-premises (2013 and 2016). This list contains the main updates that have been added in the April 2017 release:

  • General overall quality and performance improvements for on-premises and online
  • Update on generic PnP Responsive UI solution for classic sites
  • Support for async methods for sending emails in MailUtility
  • Option to excluded drive on GetUnifiedGroup calls to enhance performance
  • Improvements to taxonomy field update handling
  • Improvements on “modern” team site / group provisioning
  • Preparations on formatter refactoring updates, which will be released in May 2017 release
  • Updated to use latest SPO CSOM NuGet package
  • Unit/integration test improvements
  • Updated base templates for the SPO, 2013 and 2016 – used in delta handling

See also https://testautomation.sharepointpnp.com for day-to-day results and executed tests.

PnP JavaScript Core library v2.0.3

The latest release, 2.0.3, of the Patterns and Practices JavaScript Core Library represents an incremental update for the library with additional capabilities and bug fixes on existing functionalities.

This is similar effort as what PnP initiative previously has done with the PnP CSOM Core Component together with community. 

PnP PowerShell 

PnP PowerShell providers more than two hundred additional PowerShell cmdlets, which can be used to manipulate content in SharePoint Online and in on-premises (SP2013, SP2016). These cmdlet’s are addative for SharePoint Online management shell, which concentrate more on the administrative tasks with SharePoint Online. 

Here’s the latest changes in the PnP PowerShell

  • Improvements on the Submit-PnPSearchQuery cmdlets
  • New Sample on building site provisioning solution with PnP PowerShell and Azure WebJobs
  • Updated documentation at MSDN
  • Overall quality improvements and bug fixes
  • Moved automatically generated PnP PowerShell cmdlet documentation to MSDN

PnP sample library

Here’s updates cross the PnP code sample library by the community on the code and documentation, which is great way to contribute as well.

  • New sample ECM.MVCTaxonomy, which shows implementation of a SharePoint Taxonomy Picker control that can be used on MVC provider hosted SharePoint add-in without need to add-in web.
  • New sample Provisioning.ModernPages, which shows how you can programatically create and update modern pages using supported extension methods from PnP Sites Code.
  • Updates to the PnP Partner Pack
    • Enable template updates to be applied only to specific site, not to all sites which had used the updated template
    • Fine tuning and polishing based on community input
    • Fixed issue when searching for Site Collection Admins

PnP Guidance articles

The PnP Guidance repository contains guidance articles which are published at MSDN. Starting from end of May 2016 this process was changed to be fully automated and there’s automatic contributors list in the MSDN side showing who have been providing updates to these documents. We are looking forward on your contributions around real life learnings in different areas. Read more details around this open publishing model from following blog post

Here’s the new guidance released since past monthly communications.

See MSDN articles from the PnP MSDN section at http://aka.ms/sppnp-msdn.

PnP initiative also controls the articles in the dev.office.com around SharePoint development. Here’s new/updated articles around the SharePoint Framework client-side web parts.

PnP Guidance videos

You can find all PnP videos from our YouTube Channel at http://aka.ms/sppnp-videos. This location contains already significant amount of detailed training material, demo videos and community call recordings. Since last release communications, we did not release any specific guidance videos on top of weekly web casts.

Notice that ome of the old PnP videos are also in the PnP Channel 9 video blog, which was previously used.

Key contributors for the April 2017 release

Here’s the list of active contributors (in alphabetical order) during past month in PnP repositories or community channels. PnP is really about building tooling and knowledge together with the community for the community, so your contributions are highly valued cross the Office 365 customers, partners and obviously also at Microsoft.

Thank you for your assistance and contributions from the behalf of the community. You are making a difference!

Companies: Here’s the companies, which provided support for PnP initiative for this month by allowing their employees working for the benefit of others in the PnP initiative. There were also people who contributed from other companies during last month, but we did not get their logos and approval to show them on time for these communications. If you still want your logo for this month’s release, please let us know and share the logo with us. Thx.

CA Technologies
ClearPeople
ContentAndCode
Digia
piasys
 Puzzlepart
 onebit software
 rencore
 Sii
Slalom
Triad
 Wortell


Microsoft people: Here’s the list of Microsoft people who have been closely involved on the PnP work during last month.

Latest traffic statistics

Here’s traffic statistics from the PnP, PnP PowerShell, PnP Sites Core (.NET), JavaScript Core component and SP Dev FX Web Parts repositories.

Traffic at PnP repository

  Traffic from PnP repo

Traffic from PnP CSOM Core repository

  Traffic from PnP CSOM Core       

Traffic from PnP PowerShell repository

  Traffic from PowerShell     

Traffic from PnP JavaScript Core Component repository

  Traffic from JS Core   

Traffic from SharePoint Framework Web Parts repository

  Traffic in SPFx web parts repo   

See About Repository Graphs for more details on above statistics.

Next steps

  • April 2017 monthly community call is on 11th of April at 8 AM PT / 5 PM CET for latest release details with demos – Download invite with detailed schedule for your time zone from http://aka.ms/sppnp-call.

PnP Resources in one picture - numerous links mentioned in this blog post

“Sharing is caring”

Vesa Juvonen, Senior Program Manager, SharePoint, Microsoft – 10th of April 2017

Category
SharePoint Framework

Author

Vesa Juvonen
Vesa Juvonen
Principal Program Manager

Vesa Juvonen works as a Principal Product Manager focusing on the community and ecosystem across Microsoft 365. He leads the Microsoft 365 Patterns and Practices initiative which is providing tooling, guidance and assistance on adopting recommended patterns for using Microsoft 365. He has worked in different roles at Microsoft engineering helping on building capabilities in Microsoft 365 and to help customers and partners to use the different capabilities across the platform. Prior moving to ...

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