January 8th, 2018

SharePoint Patterns & Practices – January 2018 update

Vesa Juvonen
Vesa Juvonen
Principal Program Manager

SharePoint Dev Ecosystem / SharePoint Patterns and Practices (PnP) January 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 post contains all the details related to what was included with the release and what else has been happening in the 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 on 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 December 2017

  • GitHub repository forks at most popular repositories in SharePoint GitHub organization
  • Unique visitors during past 2 weeks in SharePoint organization repositories – 31,550
  • Merged pull requests across SharePoint repositories (cumulative) – 4,348
  • Closed issues and enhancements ideas cross SharePoint repositories (cumulative) – 2,682
  • SharePoint Online CSOM NuGet package downloads (cumulative) – 339,911
  • PnP Core component NuGet package downloads (cumulative) – 132,909
  • Page views in SharePoint Dev pages at docs.microsoft.com during December 2017 – 582,739
  • Unique tenants using PnP components during December 2017 – 7,943
  • Http requests towards SharePoint Online from PnP components during December 2017 – 7,209,042,319
  • SharePoint Dev YouTube channel had 19,514 views with 118,645 minutes watch time during December 2017

Main resources around SharePoint PnP and SharePoint development

January 2018 monthly community call

Agenda for the Tuesday 9th of January 2018 SharePoint Dev Ecosystem / Patterns and Practices community call at 8 AM PST / 5 PM CEST:

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 Webcast series in October 2015 and have continued releasing new videos since that. All new webcasts are released on PnP YouTube Channel. Old webcasts and other demo videos are also found in the PnP Channel 9 section. 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.

  • 28th of December – Cancelled due holiday season
  • 14th of December – Miscellaneous announcements. A detailed look at new provisioning schema capabilities in PnP provisioned engine. Scanner Framework for SharePoint Online.
  • 30th of November – Miscellaneous announcements. Preview of upcoming Site Designs and Site Scripts with PnP PowerShell. Manage modern pages with code. Building self-service site collection provisioning solution for modern sites.

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.

  • 4th of January – PnP JS Core library updates, SharePoint Framework update, Reusable controls for SPFx – Live demos on upcoming Graph capabilities with SPFx, reusable controls and async with JSOM.
  • 21st of December – PnP JS Core library updates, SharePoint Framework update, Q&A.
  • 7th of December – Latest news on SharePoint Framework and PnP JS Core. Security Grid sample web part for showing permission details from the site. SPFx property controls sample.

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. 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.

On top of the specific PnP repositories, PnP initiative also controls the new repositories under the SharePoint organization.

Here’s the current repository structure, including a 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 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 – 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-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.

  • New solution sample ColumnFormatter web part which has been designed to give the full power of VS Code editing while providing easy to use templates and wizards all within the browser! The goal is to make writing and applying Column Formatting easier and quicker for both developers and end users.
  • New List View Command Set sample js-command-lock-item illustrates the ability to lock/unlock selected item/document for the current user.
  • New Application Customizer sample react-msal-bot sample demonstrates how to integrate a bot within a SharePoint Online portal supporting authentication to access Azure AD protected APIs like Microsoft graph resources.
  • New Field Customizer Sample react-field-text-analytics-api which demonstrates how to use the Text Analytics API (Cognitive Services) to render a sentiment icon based on the text of a field in the List
  • Updates to numerous other samples to polish the code and documentation

Reusable open source controls for SharePoint Framework

New reusable controls initiative was announced in Ignite 2017 during September. There are two new 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.

  • Controls updated to use latest SharePoint Framework version
  • Added the option to the people picker to allow you to specify single or multi-selection
  • General improvements and adjustments

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.

SharePoint Site Script samples

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.

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 without the need of using PowerShell. SharePoint Online Management Shell is only available for Windows operating system. Changes since last monthly summary are following.

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:

  • Various small bug fixes and improvements
  • Updated to use latest SPO CSOM NuGet package
  • Completed support for 2018 01 schema – this will be the default schema as of the February 2018 release
  • Support for installing apps in synchronous mode
  • 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

No actual updates on the Patterns and Practices JavaScript Core Library, but there have been active discussions on the package in Gitter channel. Here are the changes since last monthly communications.

  • Preparations for the new library version from the @pnp scope
  • Improved docs for the new @pnp scope version
  • Various smaller improvements and fixes

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 two 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

  • Various small bug fixes, improvements and documentation updates
  • Updated signing certificate to use Microsoft organization certs
  • New cmdlet Get-PnPTenantAppCatalogUrl 
  • New cmdlet Start-PnPWorkflowInstance
  • New cmdlet Get-PnPWorkflowInstance
  • New cmdlet Get-PnPUnifiedGroupMembers
  • New cmdlet Get-PnPUnifiedGroupOwners
  • Numerous other updates cross existing commands
  • Overall quality improvements and bug fixes
  • Updated automatically generated PnP PowerShell cmdlet documentation at docs.microsoft.com

Notice. Due signing certificate change in December 2017 release, you cannot update PnP PowerShell cmdlet using the upgrade-module command. You’ll need to first uninstall and then re-install module.

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.

  • Updates to Business.StarterIntranet solution sample, which is a generic, enterprise intranet publishing solution, compatible with SharePoint 2013, 2016 and SharePoint Online.

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 January 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.

aequos
ClearPeople
CPS
DMI
piasys
 Puzzlepart
 onebit software
 rencore
 Storm Technology
 SharePointalist
 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

  • January 2018 monthly community call is on Tuesday 9th of January at 8 AM PT / 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.

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

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Vesa Juvonen, Senior Program Manager, SharePoint, Microsoft – 8th of January 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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