April 9th, 2018

SharePoint Patterns & Practices – April 2018 update

Vesa Juvonen
Vesa Juvonen
Principal Program Manager

SharePoint Dev Ecosystem / SharePoint Patterns and Practices (PnP) April 2018 update is out with a summary of the latest guidance, samples, and solutions from SharePoint engineering or from the community for the community. This article is a summary of all the different areas and topics around SharePoint Dev ecosystem during the past month.

What is SharePoint Patterns & Practices (PnP)?

SharePoint / Office Dev Patterns and Practices

SharePoint PnP is a nick-name for SharePoint Dev Ecosystem activities coordinated by SharePoint engineering. SharePoint 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 in GitHub by providing contributions to the samples, reusable components, and documentation.

PnP is owned and coordinated by SharePoint engineering, but this is work done by the community for the community. The initiative is currently 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 initiative, there’s no SLAs for the support for the samples provided through GitHub. Obviously, all officially released components and libraries are under official support from Microsoft. You can use SharePoint Developer group in the Microsoft Tech Community for providing input and to ask any questions about the existing materials.

Some key statistics around SharePoint Dev topics from March 2018

  • GitHub repository forks at most popular repositories in SharePoint GitHub organization
  • Unique visitors during past 2 weeks in SharePoint organization repositories – 37,556
  • Merged pull requests across SharePoint repositories (cumulative) – 4,827
  • Closed issues and enhancements ideas cross SharePoint repositories (cumulative) – 3,258
  • SharePoint Online CSOM NuGet package downloads (cumulative) – 443,304
  • PnP Core component NuGet package downloads (cumulative) – 180,163
  • Page views in SharePoint Dev pages at docs.microsoft.com – 831,580
  • Unique tenants using PnP components – 11,013
  • Http requests towards SharePoint Online from PnP components (CSOM Core, PowerShell, PnP JS Core) – 9,766,170,484
  • SharePoint Dev YouTube channel had 26,296 views with 162,910 minutes watch time

Main resources around SharePoint PnP and SharePoint development

April 2018 monthly community call

Agenda for the Tuesday 10th of April 2018 SharePoint Dev Ecosystem / Patterns and Practices community call at 8 AM PST / 5 PM CEST:

  • Monthly summary of SharePoint Development topics – Engineering update and community news – Vesa Juvonen (Microsoft) ~20 min
  • New actions coming to Site Designs and Site Scripts with live demo – Sean Squires (Microsoft) ~15 min
  • Site Design Studio client-side web part for creating Site Designs and Site Scripts – Yannick Plenevaux ~15 min
  • Q&A ~10 min

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.

SharePoint Dev Blog posts

Here are the latest blog posts and announcements around SharePoint development topics from officedevblogs.wpengine.com.

PnP Webcasts

We started new PnP Webcasts are typically 15-30 min long conversational webcasts around a specific topic. This series was started in October 2015 and have continued releasing new videos since. All new webcasts are released on PnP YouTube Channel. Here are the new webcasts released after the last monthly release. We are looking into continuing the releases of the webcast in the future using weekly or bi-weekly schedule depending on the topics to be covered.

General Dev, CSOM, PnP Core, PnP PowerShell SIG Bi-Weekly Call Special Interest Group (SIG)

General SP Dev, CSOM PnP Sites Core, PowerShell and Provisioning Special Interest Group (SIG) have bi-weekly meetings to cover the general SharePoint topics, CSOM and latest in the PnP CSOM core component, PnP PowerShell and in the PnP remote provisioning engine. These calls have also free Q&A section if you have any questions about SharePoint development in on-premises or in the cloud. Need to get a recommendation for your design or having a 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 the following location.

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

  • 5th of April – SP Dev news with engineering update. The column formatting end-to-end story with UI and dev capabilities.
  • 22nd of March – SP Dev news with engineering update. Modern team site creation with a bot, flow and Azure Function. Associating hub site in Site Design, Connecting to SPO using app-only with PnP PowerShell, PnP PowerShell vs SPO PowerShell.
  • 8th of March – SP Dev news with engineering update. Modern team site creation with a bot, flow and Azure Function. Preview on PnP PowerShell Core – update on CSOM Core plans.

Interested in doing a community demo in these community calls? – Please let us know!

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 the engineering perspective and to cover also latest development related to 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 in showing your code, just let us know.

All SharePoint Framework 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 are the latest recordings.

  • 29th of March – SharePoint Framework engineering update, PnP JS Core update, Office 365 CLI update, SPFx controls update – SPFx deployment options, SPFx build automation in VS Online.
  • 15th of March – SharePoint Framework engineering update, PnP JS Core update, Office 365 CLI update, SPFx controls update – Docker with SPFx, Calling Azure AD secured Azure funcitons from SPFx. Testing SP REST from VS Code.
  • 1st of March – SharePoint Framework engineering update, PnP JS Core update, Office 365 CLI update, SPFx controls update – Live demos on React File Upload, Q&A Chatbot with SPFx application customizer and Offline First React.

Interested in doing a community demo in these community calls? – Please let us know!

SharePoint Dev Ecosystem in GitHub

There are quite a few different GitHub repositories under the SharePoint brand since we wanted to ensure that you can easily find and reuse what’s relevant to 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.

  • PnP – Main repository for SP add-in, Microsoft Graph etc. samples
  • PnP-Guidance – Guidance, presentations, and articles which are partly synced 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 – 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-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

What’s supportability story around PnP material?

Following statements apply across 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 initiative for the benefit of others, have their normal day job as well
  • PnP is NOT a product and therefore it’s not supported by 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 being 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 or from the SharePoint Framework Extensions repository at https://github.com/SharePoint/sp-dev-fx-extensions.

Reusable open source controls for SharePoint Framework

New reusable controls initiative was announced in Ignite 2017 during September. There are two npm packages and source code repositories for the reusable controls which you can use in your SharePoint Framework solutions. We do welcome community contributions to these initiatives as well. There are two different repositories: sp-dev-fx-property-controls and sp-dev-fx-controls-react. Here are the changes on these repositories.

Enhancements

Fixes

Community column formatting definitions

SharePoint Columns Formatting capability was released for First Release customers during October 2017. As part of the availability, we also announced the availability of open source repository for sharing different column formatting definitions. Following lists the changes in the column formatting area.

  • New sample person-currentuser-format demonstrating how to use the @me keyword to check if person field is the current user viewing the list
  • New sample picture-roundimage-format demonstrating how to apply styles to a parent div element and a child img element to show a picture column in a circle
  • New sample person-roundimage-format demonstrating how to display a person’s profile picture in a circle
  • New sample generic-staticmap showing how to display Google map image for given location
  • New samples generic-twitterpic showing how to render Twitter profile pics using Twitter handles

Community Site Designs and Site Scripts

SharePoint Site Designs and Site Scripts has been released for production usage during March 2018. As part of the availability, we also announced the availability of open source repository for sharing different Site Designs and Site Scripts. Following lists the changes in the Site Design and Site Script area.

  • No new Site Designs or Site Scripts during March

Office 365 CLI

Office 365 CLI was released in November 2017. This is an open source tool which enables you to controls tenant level properties in SharePoint Online or in Office 365. This is an alternative options for setting management on top of existing PowerShell cmdlets.

v1.1.0 release available with following changes

changes

  • graph o365group list – added support for listing deleted Office 365 Groups #347
  • fixed bug in retrieving Office 365 groups in immersive mode solving #351 

PnP CSOM Core and Provisioning Engine

PnP CSOM Core component is a wrapper on top of native SharePoint CSOM and REST API, 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. This list contains the main updates in this release:

Added

  • Added async external sharing extension methods [baywet]
  • Added ProvisionFieldsToSubWebs option to ProvisioningTemplateApplyingInformation class [jensotto]
  • Addition of PnPCore.Tests project for testing of the PnP Core .NET Standard 2.0 library
  • Added Scope parameter to ALM Manager methods allowing you to perform application lifecycle management tasks to the site collection scoped app catalog.

Changed

  • Added support for CDN Elements in Provisioning Engine
  • Support for FullBleed configuration for adding web parts in “Full-Width column” section [OliverZeiser]
  • Improvements to ExecuteQueryRetryAsync [OliverZeiser, biste5]
  • Improvements to support provisioning engine to be called from non-console applications
  • Better support for async methods, avoiding deadlocks
  • Updated spelling across various files [fowl2]
  • Refactored ObjectListHandler [stevebeauge]

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

PnP JavaScript Core Library

Latest update is version 1.0.4 on the PnPJs library. Here’s are the latest changes since the previous monthly release.

Added

  • @pnp/common: AdalClient for in-browser adal auth support. [PR]
  • @pnp/sp: Support for $expand in items.getAll (@eirikb) [PR]
  • @pnp/odata: configureFrom method to queryable [PR]
  • @pnp/graph: Added basic support for onenote notebooks (@olemp) [PR]
  • @pnp/graph: Added basic support for users (@olemp) [PR]
  • @pnp/sp: Added support for ClientPeoplePickerWebServiceInterface (@phawrylak) [PR]
  • @pnp/sp: Added remove method to client side section, column, and part [PR]
  • @pnp/sp: Added setStorageEntity and removeStorageEntity & docs page [PR]

Changed/Fixed

  • @pnp/sp: Change search result properties to be enumerable [PR]
  • @pnp/nodejs: Updated docs for SPFetchClient
  • @pnp/odata: Created a Queryable base class to serve as a generic base to ODataQueryable [PR]
  • all: Internally replaced import of Util with import of individual methods [PR]
  • all: Documentation updates
  • @pnp/sp: Changed getStorageEntity return type to correct interface from string [PR]
  • all: update package.json dependencies
  • all: Documentation fixes for typos [PR]
  • @pnp/graph: Typo in groups.calendar property name (@olemp) [PR]
  • @pnp/graph: Issue with graph.setup and fetchClientFactory [PR]
  • @pnp/sp: Issue where configuration options not passed to child calls in getPaged and getAll [PR]
  • @pnp/sp: Issue with matching last closing div when loading ClientText part (@estruyf) [PR]
  • @pnp/nodejs: Issue with types.d.ts local dep [PR]
  • buildsystem: Issue where the $$Version$$ placeholder was not being replaced on build [PR]

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

PnP PowerShell

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

Here are the latest changes in the PnP PowerShell

Added

  • Added -Tree parameter to Get-PnPNavigationNode which will return a tree representation of the selected navigation structure
  • Added -Parent parameter which takes an ID to Add-PnPNavigationNode instead of using the -Header parameter
  • Added -Scope parameter to Add-PnPApp, Get-PnPApp, Install-PnPApp, Publish-PnPApp, Remove-PnPApp, Uninstall-PnPApp, Unpublish-PnPApp, Update-PnPApp to support site collection app catalog
  • Added -Wait parameter to Install-PnPApp which will wait for the installation to finish
  • Added Get-PnPHideDefaultThemes cmdlet
  • Added Set-PnPHideDefaultThemes cmdlet
  • Added Get-PnPListRecordDeclaration cmdlet
  • Added Set-PnPListRecordDeclaration cmdlet
  • Added Get-PnPInPlaceRecordsManagement cmdlet
  • Added Get-PnPInformationRightsManagement cmdlet
  • Added Set-PnPInformationRightsManagement cmdlet
  • Added New-PnPUPABulkImportJob cmdlet
  • Added Get-PnPUPABulkImportStatus cmdlet

Changed

  • Added additional properties to Set-PnPList: Description, EnableFolderCreation, ForceCheckout, ListExperience
  • ALM Cmdlets (Add-PnPApp, etc.) now allow for specifying the app title instead of only an id.
  • Updated Set-PnPInPlaceRecordsManagement cmdlet to use a -Enabled parameter instead of -On and -Off
  • Add-PnPClientSideWebPart and Add-PnPClientSideText now return the client side component added
  • Fixed issue with Set-PnPTenantTheme not recognizing a parameter value accordingly
  • Added -HideDefaultThemes parameter to Set-PnPTenant
  • Get-PnPTenant now returns if default themes are hidden or not
  • Added ability to cancel Device Login requests with CTRL+C
  • Renamed Connect-PnPHubSite to Add-PnPHubSiteAssociation and added an alias for Connect-PnPHubSite
  • Renamed Disconnect-PnPHubSite to Remove-PnPHubSiteAssociation and added an alias for Disconnect-PnPHubSite
  • Fixed output of File/Folder objects which caused the creation of an error message that was not thrown to the output but was available in the $error built-in variable
  • Fixed Set-PnPUserProfileProperty cmdlet to accept $null values to clear properties
  • Fixed Invoke-PnPSiteDesign where you connected to the -admin URL, and it ignored the WebUrl parameter when applying the site design
  • Added WebUrl parameter to Set-PnPWebTheme to support connection via -admin URL needed by app-only connections

Deprecated

  • Deprecated -Header parameter on Add-PnPNavigationNode in favor or -Parent [Id]
  • Deprecated Disable-PnPInPlaceRecordsManagementForSite in favor of Set-PnPInPlaceRecordsManagement -Enabled $true
  • Deprecated Enabled-PnPInPlaceRecordsManagementForSite in favor of Set-PnPInPlaceRecordsManagement -Disabled $true
  • Deprecated Connect-PnPHubSite. Use Add-PnPHubSiteAssociation
  • Deprecated Disconnect-PnPHubSite. Use Remove-PnPHubSiteAssociation

Other

  • Updated automatically generated PnP PowerShell cmdlet documentation at docs.microsoft.com 

PnP sample library

Here are updates across the PnP code sample library by the community on the code and documentation, which is a great way to contribute as well.

SharePoint Dev articles

SharePoint Dev articles are surfaced currently in docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/dev. ´Since the last release, we have now merged also SharePoint PnP Solution guidance to docs.microsoft.com platform, so you’ll only have one location to follow all relevant SharePoint Dev documentation and guidance. You can provide contributions to these documents by submitting documentation improvements using GitHub tooling. All of the SharePoint Dev docs are stored and surfaced from the sp-dev-docs repository.

Here are new/updated articles on the SharePoint Development.

PnP Guidance videos

You can find all SharePoint Dev videos on our YouTube Channel at http://aka.ms/sppnp-videos. This location contains already a significant amount of detailed training material, demo videos, and community call recordings.

Key contributors to the April 2018 update

Here’s the list of active contributors (in alphabetical order) since last release details in SharePoint Dev 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 across the Office 365 customers, partners and obviously also at Microsoft.

Thank you for your assistance and contributions on 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 in 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.

2toLead
aequos
Arvo Systems
ClearPeople
Content and Code
CPS
DMI
piasys
 Puzzlepart
 onebit software
 Rapid Circle
 rencore
 SharePointalist
 Sii Technologies
 Solvion
 SoSP
 Stefan Bauer
 Voitanos
Wortell

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

Next steps

  • April 2018 monthly community call is on Tuesday 10th of February at 8 AM PST / 5 PM CEST / 4 PM GMT for latest release details with demos – Download recurrent invite to monthly community call with a detailed schedule for your time zone from http://aka.ms/sppnp-call.

Learn, Reuse, Share - aka.ms/sppnp

“Sharing is caring”

Vesa Juvonen, Senior Program Manager, SharePoint, Microsoft – 9th of April 2018

Category
Microsoft 365 Developer

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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