SharePoint / Office Dev Patterns & Practices – October 2016 release

Vesa Juvonen

October 10th, 2016 0

SharePoint / Office 365 Dev Patterns and Practices (PnP) October 2016 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 / Office Dev 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 October 2016 release

  • GitHub repository forks at different repositories 
  • Unique visitors during past 2 weeks cross PnP repositories – 12916
  • Unique visitors during past 2 weeks in SharePoint organization repositories – 3302
  • Merged pull requests cross PnP repositories (cumulative) – 2365
  • Closed issues and enhancements ideas cross PnP repositories (cumulative) – 860
  • PnP Core component NuGet package downloads – 49794
  • Unique visitors in PnP MSDN pages during August 2016 – 28894

Main resources around PnP program

October 2016 monthly community call

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

If you have any questions, comments or feedback, please participate in our discussions in the new Microsoft Tech Community under SharePoint developer group.

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

PnP Office Hours has be rebranded as Special Interest Group (SIG) for PnP Sites Core, PnP PowerShell and provisioning engine. This way attendees know what the calls are concentrating more efficiently and can decide which areas they want to be more closely involved. SIG calls are bi-weekly calls where we talk about PnP sites core and related topics. 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 or old office hour meetings kept after previous monthly communications.

Notice. Next SIG for PnP Component / PowerShell will be on Wednesday 19th of October – 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 cant’ make the actual call. You can find the latest recordings from the PnP YouTube Channel. Here’s the latest recordings.

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.

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-Office-Addins – Office Add-in samples and models (starting)
  • 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-Schema – PnP Provisioning engine schema repository

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 faciliate 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

Provisioning Engine

The first version of the PnP remote provisioning engine was released with the May 2015 release. For the October 2016 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 October 2016 release:

  • General overall quality and performance improvements for on-premises and online
  • Allow to apply and extract groups to subwebs
  • Fixes on RoleAssignments and RoleDefinition Provisioning
  • Significant 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 v1.0

PnP JavaScript Core Library has moved to version 1.0.5. This is JavaScript library which will increase productivity of developers when you are developing JavaScript based customizations on top of SharePoint. Library has been released as a npm package and you can find the source code from GitHub. PnP JS Core library is being developed and coordinated by the PnP Special Interest Group for SPFx and JavaScript, which has weekly meetings around this development effort and general topics on upcoming SharePoint Framework. PnP JS Core library is developed using typical open source web stack tooling, so that it’s fully aligned on the development models with SP Framework. 

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

v1.0.5 is coming out early October with following capabilities.

  • Exporting Types from within the library to make it easy to use them directly and better support webpack and similar bundlers
  • Various fixes
  • Various enhancements
  • Removed many selectable properties to shrink the library (saved 11K minimized) – use select to access those properties
  • Documentation updates to clearly describe how to contribute to or use the library
    • Includes updates in readme.md
  • Moved to TypeScript 2.0 and the new @types system to ease installation for both developer and consumer of library

PnP 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.

  • PnP Core: Lots of re-factoring done to improve code quality and completeness:
    • provisioning engine updates (see above)
    • Implemented native CSOM webpart export for SPO
    • Improved support for site and site collection around enabling responsive UI capabilities – support to be set at site or site collection level
    • Automated documentation updated to md file
    • Removal of deprecated methods (methods are 2 releases in the code after deprecation)
    • Build and test automation improvements with unit test changes
    • All PnP Core Nuget packages (cloud and on-premises) updated with new version
  • New sample WebHooks.Nodejs as Node.js webhook application for Sharepoint. This application allows you to manage all subscriptions for a specific list or library and shows you the webhook changes when they happen.
  • New sample jquery-cdn illustrating using jQuery and its plugins loaded from CDN for building SharePoint Framework Client-Side Web Parts.
  • New sample jquery-photopile illustrating using JQuery and Photopile.Js with the SharePoint Framework
  • New sample js-powerbi-embedded illustrating SharePoint Framework Client-Side Web Part embedding a PowerBI report using PowerBI Embedded without any server-side code.
  • New sample react-aad-implicitflow illustrating SharePoint Framework web parts built using React illustrating different scenarios using implicit OAuth flow with Azure Active Directory.
  • New sample react-organisationchart illustrating simple Organisation Chart webpart using Office UI Fabric, React, OData batching and ServiceScope plumbing.
  • New sample react-search illustrating Search Web Part with internal and external template support. This sample illustrates how you can use React and Flux within the SharePoint Framework.
  • New sample sharepoint-crud Web Parts illustrating performing SharePoint CRUD operations in React, Angular, JavaScript without any framework and using the SP PnP JS library.
  • New Script SharePoint.Hybrid.CloudSSA.Configuration designed for configuring a SharePoint Server farm with a hybrid Cloud Search Service Application
  • Updated Solution Business.O365StarterIntranet Intranet projects shouldn’t have to reinvent the wheel every time for basic features (like navigation or multilingualism). This solution aims to provide the fundamental building blocks of a common intranet solution with SharePoint Online/Office 365 through a lightweight client side solution using the latest web stack development tools and frameworks.
  • Updated solution AspNetCore.Authentication An ASP.NET Core implementation of the TokenHelper and SharePointContext classes for use in SharePoint Apps. This library (and sample) demonstrates how to get ASP.NET Core provider-hosted apps authenticated through SharePoint. Updated to align with ASP.NET Core RTM version.
  • Updated solution Provisioning.VSTools to support VS2015, including numerous improvements
  • Updated PnP-PowerShell Commands with new CommandLets and with few fixes
    • Overall quality improvements and bug fixes
    • Load-SPOProvisioningTemplate and Save-SPOProvisioningTemplate for loading PnP template from pnp file for in-memory manipulation in PowerShell
    • Add/Remove-SPOFileTo/FromProvisioningTemplate Cmdlets for adding files to pnp templates
    • Remove-SPOTermGroup for removing term groups from taxonomy store
    • Remove-SPOTaxonomyItem for removing terms from taxonomy store
    • Added support for unit testing of the Cmdlets
    • Updated documentation for CmdLets
  • Updates to the PnP Partner Pack
    • Fine tuning and polishing based on community input

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 new guidance articles since the last release communications

See MSDN articles from the PnP MSDN section at http://aka.ms/OfficeDevPnPMSDN

 

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 have released one additional guidance video:

Since YouTube channel is relatively new, some of the PnP videos are also in the PnP Channel 9 video blog.

Key contributors for the September 2016 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!

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 this communications. If you still want your logo for this month’s release, please let us know and share the logo with us. Thx.

 
 ClearPeople
 Canviz
 Content and Code
 Digital Illustrated
 piasys
 onebit software
 rencore
 Triad


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) and JavaScript Core component repositories.

Traffic at PnP repository

Stats on PnP repository

Traffic from PnP Sites Core repository

Stats on PnP Core repository

Traffic from PnP PowerShell repository

Stats on PnP PowerShell repository

Traffic from PnP JavaScript Core Component repository

Stats on PnP JS Core repository

See About Repository Graphs for more details on above statistics.

Next steps

  • September 2016 monthly community call is on 11th of October at 8 AM PDT / 5 PM CET for latest release details with demos – Download invite with detailed schedule for your time zone from http://aka.ms/sppnp-call.

“Sharing is caring”

Vesa Juvonen, Senior Program Manager, SharePoint, Microsoft – 10th of October 2016

Vesa Juvonen Principal Program Manager, Microsoft 365 Platform

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