October 9th, 2017

SharePoint Patterns & Practices – October 2017 release

Vesa Juvonen
Vesa Juvonen
Principal Program Manager

SharePoint Dev Ecosystem / SharePoint Patterns and Practices (PnP) October 2017 release is out with new contributions from the community to the community. This post contains all the details related on 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 around the existing materials.

Some key statistics around PnP program from September 2017

  • GitHub repository forks at most popular repositories in SharePoint GitHub organization 
  • Unique visitors during past 2 weeks in SharePoint organization repositories – 29908
  • Merged pull requests across SharePoint repositories (cumulative) – 3771
  • Closed issues and enhancements ideas cross SharePoint repositories (cumulative) – 2286
  • SharePoint Online CSOM NuGet package downloads (cumulative) – 256564
  • PnP Core component NuGet package downloads (cumulative) – 148641
  • Page views in SharePoint Dev pages at dev.office.com during September 2017 – 183344
  • Page views in PnP MSDN pages during September 2017 – 49983
  • Unique tenants using PnP components during September 2017 – 8764
  • Http requests towards SharePoint Online from PnP components during September 2017 – 4942462236
  • PnP YouTube channel had 22031 views with 136478 minutes watch time during September 2017

Main resources around SharePoint PnP and SharePoint development

October 2017 monthly community call

Agenda for the Tuesday 10th of October 2017 SharePoint Dev Ecosystem / Patterns and Practices community call at 8 AM PST / 5 PM CEST:

  • Summary on the October 2017 release and other program updates – Vesa Juvonen ~15 min
  • Integrating Cognitive Services to libraries using SPFx Extensions – Luis Mañez (ClearPeople) ~15 min
  • Provisioning modern sites using PnP PowerShell (New-PnPSite) – Erwin van Hunen (Rencore) ~15 min
  • Introduction to new PnP Reusable Controls for SharePoint Framework solutions – Vesa Juvonen ~15 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. 

PnP Webcasts

We started new PnP Webcast series in 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 on 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 around 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. Notice that invite has been updated August 2017 with updated connection information and meeting has been rescheduled for Thursday.

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

  • 5th of October – Miscellaneous announcements, Quick look on SharePoint Developer Roadmap, modern themes, a preview of Site Design capability with a live demo.
  • 21st of September – Miscellaneous announcements. Demo on new List Item version APIs which are now included with CSOM. Demo on how to use PnP Provisioning Engine to push SPFx customizations to SharePoint 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.

  • 14th of September – PnP JS Core general updates, SharePoint Framework on SP2016 Feature Pack 2. New @pnp scope in npm. Demo on web part to web part communications. Demo on field customizer to change Item Order in a list.

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 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.

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 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 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 web part sample pnp-controls demonstrating usage of new reusable controls for SharePoint Framework solutions
  • New web part sample react-image-magnifier allow magnifying an image, displaying a resolution more detailed through a lens
  • New web part sample react-youtube which allows to search and view YouTube videos
  • New solution sample ChangeRequests provides a simple tracking tool for change requests for your team
  • New solution sample ContactManagement provides simplified management of contacts and organizations
  • New solution sample InventoryCheckout lets you manage a simple list inventory item and build a “lending library” style check out infrastructure around them
  • New solution sample LinksandHandlebarsTemplate contains multiple web parts which can be used to dynamically aggregate content
  • New solution sample TimeAway provides a simple mechanism to track major away-times for team members.
  • New ListView Command Set sample js-command-vision-api which illustrates how to get metadata information from MS Cognitive Services Vision API for the selected Image.
     
  • Updates to numerous other samples to polish the code and documentation

Reusable 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. Our objective is to also publish some of the controls used in the out of the box web parts using these packages.

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 support to provision communication sites using CSOM extensions
  • General updates and improvements
  • 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

Here’s updates on the Patterns and Practices JavaScript Core Library

sp-pnp-js@3.0.1

  • Support for /_api/web/getsubwebsfilteredforcurrentuser [Issue] [PR]
  • Returned the exports to the root. [Issue] [PR]
  • Added missing dependency in package.json [Issue] [PR]

@pnp/pnp

  • Upcoming beta
  • Major refactor
  • Migration guide will be provided
  • Goals: more modular, smaller file sizes, easier to use pieces as building blocks, support greater range of packaging features

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

  • New New-PnPSite command, which supports also creation of modern team sites and communication sites
  • Numerous other updates cross existing commands
  • Overall quality improvements and bug fixes
  • Updated automatically generated PnP PowerShell cmdlet documentation at MSDN

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.

  • New Provisioning.Comm.Console.RESTAPI sample which shows how to use official REST API to provision communication sites.
    • Notice that this API had a bug and updates to fix the known issues will be gradually rolling to production by end of October 2017

SharePoint Dev articles

SharePoint Dev articles are surfaced currently either in docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/dev or in the PnP MSDN location. You can provide contributions for both of these locations by submitting documentation improvements using GitHub tooling. Majority of the SharePoint Dev docs are stored and surfaced from the sp-dev-docs repository and PnP MSDN articles are surfaced from the PnP-Guidance repository. 

PnP initiative also controls the articles in the dev.office.com around SharePoint development. Here are new/updated articles around the SharePoint Framework. All documentation from MSDN will be gradually moving to dev.office.com/sharepoint.

Here’s the new guidance released since past monthly communications in the PnP MSDN section at http://aka.ms/sppnp-msdn.

PnP Guidance videos

You can find all PnP videos from 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 for the October 2017 release

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 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.

aequos
ClearPeople
CPS
Digia
DMI
piasys
 Puzzlepart
 onebit software
 RapidCircle
 rencore
 SharePointalist
 SoSP


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

Next steps

  • October 2017 monthly community call is on Tuesday 10th of October at 8 AM PT / 5 PM CEST 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

“Sharing is caring”

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