This post is meant to be a quick supplement to the documentation provided by Microsoft around the Nav component of the Office Fabric UI React. This Nav component gives you a control that you either create URL links or maybe more commonly, support navigation via code. For general links, where the URL is either a route or some other page, the implementation of the INavLinkGroup[] and INavLink is quite straight forward, just provide a Key, Name, and URL with a couple other optional parameters. [Read More]

Introduction Azure Active Directory (AAD) Unified Groups, or better known as Office365 Groups, the security principal that underlies modern SharePoint team sites, Teams, Outlook Groups, Planner, etc. is a very powerful management construct that is the glue that holds the Office 365 security pyramid together. Basically, a Unified Group has both an Owners group and a Members group and by adding users (either users in your tenant or external users – with a Microsoft based work and school account or a personal account) you can create a construct that allows you to work across many of the vast product offerings in Office 365. [Read More]

One of the things I’ve been working on lately is harvesting a complete listing of all the site collections in a tenant, including as much metadata as possible. Some of the metadata I’m looking for revolves around adding governance to managing your catalog of sites, especially in a large tenant. For sure I think the SharePoint product group has visibility into the needs here but to get full fidelity might take significantly longer than you can wait. [Read More]

For this last post I want to take what we’ve learned and add the final pieces that have you creating web parts in the same way you would modern SPFx web parts and solutions. We’re going to start by discussing TypeScript and then briefly touch on Sass and how to include these languages into your new Webpack/Gulp environment. TypeScript is becoming almost ubiquitous in modern web development. The pros are numerous, my favorites are the ability to write code to target older browser with modern capabilities, and the ability to use a version of intellisense to validate your objects properties and methods. [Read More]

In our last post I went through the gulp process we were implementing to watch our files and upload them into an appropriate SharePoint library so that we can test our work inside SharePoint regardless of if SharePoint was version 2007 or SharePoint Online. Now we’re going to take things further and formalize our process. One of the tools the SharePoint Framework (SPFx) uses is Webpack. Webpack’s main goal is to take the many files that you create as a developer and bundle them all together into one JavaScript file. [Read More]

In the first post in this series I discussed some of the benefits of formalizing your client-side development process and then a bit about starting the process of tooling up. A common scenario to develop our own client-side solutions in SharePoint is to point a Content Editor (CEWP) or Script Editor (SEWP) web part at our custom html, css, and js files that are sitting in a document library somewhere in our environment. [Read More]

Last year, around this time, Marc and I agreed we should write a blog series on our development process. As often happens good intentions get buried in other commitments, but I’ve finally managed to circle back on this topic which I’m finding has become more important than ever. Over the last year the SharePoint Framework has taken off. Although it still doesn’t support the paradigm that I most often am developing for - the full-page app hosted in SharePoint - I still think it’s a great model for development. [Read More]

A recent comment on my blog post “SharePoint time, is not your time, is not their time.” has prompted me to create a short addendum post that specifically references updates and how your thinking might differ from displaying SharePoint date/time values. To recap our example, I was discussing how to manipulate the date values to have your client-side code mimic (or not) the regional settings of your SharePoint site. The question was raised about how to deal with dates when doing POST to a SharePoint list or library from your client-side code. [Read More]

There will be some that find what I’m about to say entirely obvious. For those that don’t this is a great way to think about development when the terminology changes but really everything stayed the same. Azure Functions are billed as “serverless computing”, and as I’m sure most of you have figured out already, all this really means is that the Azure extrapolates the complexity of managing the hardware and infrastructure that allows your code to execute. [Read More]

Introduction When I last left you (in Part 3) we had completed the round-trip journey that is learning all the facets to accessing the Microsoft Graph API (MSGraph) through an Azure Application and the ADAL.js library. A significant portion of our time was spent simply on the different ways to leverage ADAL.js depending on the framework you were using. In this next installment we’re going to go one step further and streamline our implementation of ADAL, in AngularJS specifically, but with broader implications to any web based framework. [Read More]