SharePoint / Office 365 Dev Patterns and Practices (PnP) March 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)?

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.

• How to get started and contribute to Office 365 Dev PnP program? – Wiki
• Office Dev PnP Webcast – How to get started with Office Dev PnP? – Webcast
• Office Dev PnP Webcast – How to contribute to Office Dev PnP initiative? – Webcast

Some key statistics around PnP program from February 2017

• GitHub repository forks at different repositories 
  • PnP main repository – 2129
  • PnP Sites Core – 335
  • PnP PowerShell – 267
  • PnP JS Core – 120
  • SP Dev Docs – 111
  • SP Dev FX Web Parts – 123
• Unique visitors during past 2 weeks’ cross PnP repositories – 16098
• Unique visitors during past 2 weeks in SharePoint organization repositories – 4791
• Merged pull requests cross PnP repositories (cumulative) – 3645
• Closed issues and enhancements ideas cross PnP repositories (cumulative) – 1602
• PnP Core component NuGet package downloads (cumulative) – 79463
• Unique visitors in PnP MSDN pages during February 2017 – 43929
• Unique tenants using PnP CSOM Core component during February 2017 – 3998
• Http requests towards SharePoint Online from PnP CSOM Core Component during January 2017 – 1522948035
• PnP YouTube channel had 13560 views with 100030 minutes watch time during February 2017

Main resources around PnP program

• PnP under dev.office.com – http://aka.ms/SPPnP– One location for all the resources and news around PnP
• PnP GitHub – http://aka.ms/SPPnP-GitHub – main repository
• PnP MSDN pages – http://aka.ms/SPPnP-MSDN
• PnP Community Discussions – http://aka.ms/SPPnP-Community
• PnP Videos at YouTube – http://aka.ms/SPPnP-Videos
• PnP training package (videos in Channel 9) – http://aka.ms/OfficeDevPnPTraining
• Presentations at docs.com – http://aka.ms/SPPnP-Docs 

March 2017 monthly community call

Agenda for the Tuesday 14th of March community call at 9 AM PST / 5 PM CET:

• Summary on the March 2017 release and other program updates – Vesa Juvonen ~20 min
• Building custom script editor web part (React-Script-Editor) with SharePoint Framework – Mikael Svenson ~15 min
• Provisioning options for “modern” SharePoint sites (using new SP REST APIs or Microsoft Graph) – Vesa Juvonen ~15 min
• 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.

• https://aka.ms/sppnp-core-sig-call

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

• 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)
• 22nd of February – PnP PowerShell documentation in MSDN. Demos on managing modern SP pages programmatically and on automation wizard for PnP Partner Pack deployment (Office 365 and Azure configuration)
• 8th of February – PnP usage in SPO with conclusions on metrics. Demos on latest changes in PnP PowerShell and on PnP Provisioning Engine refactoring (500 level) 

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.

• Invite to bi-weekly call – https://aka.ms/sppnp-js-sig-call
• Gitter (Around the PnP JS Core) – https://gitter.im/OfficeDev/PnP-JS-Core

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.

• 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
• 16th of February – Latest on SPFx and PnP JS Core. Concentration on what SP engineering has in the backlog around SPFx and what are we planning to delivery in future
• 2nd of February – Latest on SPFx and PnP JS Core. Demos on Vue.js with SPFx and Movie Carosel implementation with SPFx

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.

• 13th of March – Accessing data in SharePoint from SharePoint Framework solution
• 6th of March – Provisioning SharePoint assets for your SharePoint Framework solution
• 27th of February – Automate custom solution deployment steps at Office 365 and Azure
• 20th of February – Business Value of PnP assets – Why to use reusable components?
• 13th of February – SharePoint Customizations – When to use which model?

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.

• SP-Dev-Docs – Source for new SharePoint dev center documentation exposed from http://dev.office.com/sharepoint
• SP-Dev-Fx-WebParts – Client-side web part samples from community and engineering
• SP-Dev-Samples – Samples for add-ins, webhooks and other APIs

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-feature-framework showing how to provision SP assets using feature framework as part of SPFx solution package
• New sample knockout-sp-pnp-js showing how to use PnP JS Core library in client-side web part
• New sample handlebarsjs-webpack-loader demonstrating how to setup SPFx to use Handlebars through webpack loader
• New sample react-script-editor showing how to build custom script editor web part for modern pages
• New sample react-modern-charts showing how to integrate chart.js to client-side web part
• New sample angular-yammer showing how to build custom Yammer discussion part which integrates to specific Yammer group
• New sample js-modern-calendar showing how to build a client-side web part which shows calendar items from SharePoint lists
• Updated SPFx tutorials to SharePoint Framework GA version
• Updated SharePoint CRUD sample to use SharePoint Framework GA version
• Upgrades to numerous other samples for using 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 February 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 March 2017 release:

• General overall quality and performance improvements for on-premises and online
• Modern SharePoint pages creation and modification APIs
• Improved support for group creation using Graph API
• Added support to get list of OneDrive sites from Tenant.GetSiteCollections() method
• Improved logic for server side version detection for better handling on different on-premises versions
• Refactoring of Responsive UI (removed dependency on jQuery, better support for SharePoint 2013, and improved performances)
• 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 v2.0.2

The latest release, 2.0.2, of the Patterns and Practices JavaScript Core Library represents an incremental update serving two main purposes. Firstly to align our releases to other releases across the SharePoint PnP program and secondly to include an update described below when working in SharePoint Framework. Thanks to everyone who has provided valuable feedback and helped the library grow. Exact details on the 2.0.2 can be found from following blog post.

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

• Revert to es5 in lib Folder
• Optimization for contextinfo calls
• Support for Ambient Typings
• Updated to Webpack 2
• General fixes and updates
• Improved developer guidance documentation

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

• Support for setting default column values for people fields added to Set-DefaultColumnValues
• Support for setting owners, memebers and visibility for existing group using Set-UnifiedGroup
• Support to use app-only connectivity with Connect-PnPMicrosoftGraph cmdlet
• Sample on using Connect-PnPMicrosoftGraph cmdlet with app-only permissions
• 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 Provisioning.Modern.Console.RESTAPI showing how to use SharePoint REST APIs to provision “modern” SharePoint sites in seconds
• Updated Business.StarterIntranet with small bug fixes and improvements
• Updates to the PnP Partner Pack
  • Introducing PnP Partner Pack installation wizard for easy deployment of PnP Partner Pack
  • 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

• Contributing to Office Dev PnP and SharePoint PnP documentation just got easier

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

• Updates on existing SharePoint modern experiences customization guidance

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.

• Updated SharePoint Framework tutorial articles to GA level
• Provision SharePoint assets from your SharePoint client-side web part tutorial added
• Provision SharePoint assets with your solution package
• Optimize SharePoint Framework Builds for production
• Sharing data between web parts using glolba variable
• Connect to SharePoint using the JavaScript Object Model (JSOM)
• Use sp-pnp-js with SharePoint Framework web parts
• Updates on the older articles related on the GA change

PnP Guidance videos

You can find all PnP videos from our YouTube Channel at http://aka.ms/sppnp-vidoes. 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 March 2017 release

Here’s the list of active contributors (in alphabetical order) during past month in PnP repositories. PnP is really about building tooling 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!

• Bart Donninger – bartdonninger
• Bernd Rickenberg (Pointwork) – @berndrickenberg
• Bhargav Burramukku – bburramukku
• Bruce Albany (Kloud Solutions) – @BruceAlbany
• Daniel Laskewitz (Sogeti) – @laskewitz
• Erwin van Hunen (Rencore) – @erwinvanhunen 
• Elio Struyf – @eliostruyf 
• Franck Cornu – @FranckCornu
• Ivan Vagunin (Digia) – ivagunin
• Jeremy Coleman (PC Professional, Inc) – jcoleman-pcprofessional
• José Quinto (Content and Code) – @jquintozamora
• Joseph Velliah (CA Technologies) – sprider
• Laurent Sittler (Exakis) – @laul0_68
• Luis Mañez (ClearPeople) – @luismanez
• Massimo Prota (Rapid Circle) – @massimoprota
• Michael Schau (WorkPoint A/S) – @SchauDK
• Mikael Svenson (Puzzlepart) – @mikaelsvenson
• Mårten af Sandeberg (Knowit) – afsandeberg
• Paolo Pialorsi (PiaSys.com) – @PaoloPia
• Paul Keijzers (Wortell) – @KbWorks
• Pieter Veenstra (Triad) – @PieterVeenstra
• Radi Atanassov (OneBit Software) – @RadiAtanassov
• Raul Garita Ch – rgarita
• Russell Gove – russgove
• Sahil Malik – @sahilmalik
• Stefan Feenstra – @stefanfeenstra_
• Stefan Bauer – @StfBauer
• SuleymanA – SuleymanA
• Waldek Mastykarz (Rencore) – @waldekm
• Vardhaman Deshpande (Content and Code) – @vrdmn
• Wictor Wilen (Avanade) – @wictor

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.