Latest Microsoft 365 topics

I was recently asked by a conference attendee to help him understand when to use the @pnp/logging package that we ship with PnPjs. This is an excellent question, and I’ve addressed it somewhat before in a previous post called Resolve to Log. All of the guidance I included about the package in that post still applies, however the examples references V2 of the library. To recap there is the ability to create a ConsoleLogger, a FunctionalLogger, or a custom listener class and then register that listener to the PnPjs timeline via the PnPLogging behavior. [Read More]

Getting Stared with hTWOo-React presentation This PnP Community demo is taken from the Viva Connections & SharePoint Framework Bi-weekly sync call recorded on January 12, 2023. I recently had the opportunity to present a “Getting Started with hTWOo React” session on the bi-weekly Viva Connections & SharePoint Framework call. I always love being able to present the fun stuff I’m working on to the rest of the community. For those of you who are not familiar, hTWOo is an open source alternative for Microsoft’s Fluent UI Web Design system. [Read More]

This content has also been posted on Microsoft 365 Platform Community Blog. Introduction As a co-maintainer of the PnPjs library I know it can be difficult for those just starting out with the library. I wanted to introduce a blog post that goes into more depth about how to start your journey. Let’s drive right in. What is PnPjs PnPjs is a collection of fluent libraries for consuming SharePoint, Graph, and Office 365 REST APIs. [Read More]

After several years of building SharePoint Framework solutions on an almost daily basis you get to the point where you’ve managed to find some things that work pretty well. I recently started a new project and after sharing them with the team realized that maybe these tips would be useful to others and so thought to consolidate them into a list. Change the default view for the tenant app catalog Probably not the oddest, but certainly in a top 10 oddest OOB settings in SharePoint, is the list view settings for the default view in the tenant app catalog for SharePoint apps which groups by Product ID. [Read More]

This content has also been posted on Microsoft 365 Platform Community Blog. When someone says to you, they are using their “dev tenant” what they’re probably referring to is their personal development “sandbox” they received as part of joining the Microsoft 365 developer program. By visiting Developer Program - Microsoft 365 and selecting “Join Now” you’ll be walked through a wizard that will help you provision your very own Microsoft 365 tenant. [Read More]

I suspect, like Elio Struyf and Velin Georgiev before him, we’re all suffering from PTSD trying to properly load an application customizer into modern pages. It all started with an issue posted in the sp-dev-docs repo that was about partial page load across site collections but devolved into and issue with the OnInit function firing multiple times. Velin’s post describing his solution to the issue starts with a masterful breakdown of the page loading cycle and his need to track page hits. [Read More]

I learned about CSS Variables from Stefan Bauer and his post CSS Variables support for SPFx projects through spfx-uifabric-themes. In a nutshell, this npm package, which I’ve started using regularly, transforms the current theme colors available to the SPFx web part into variables that can be used within your SCSS/CSS files. This intrigued me as it’s a native browser capability that’s been around since 2015 and because it means that you can affect the styling at run-time vs build-time… which translated means that lots of things you would normally think you’d need script for you can now do with a crafty use of CSS and some variables. [Read More]

Curate the News Social Following Sites on behalf of a user The impetus for this post was the desire to follow a site for a batch of users. Why? Well, the news that shows up on the SharePoint home page stems from news posted to sites you follow. So as an organization, especially a large one, if you want to somewhat curate what news gets pushed to your users you need to make sure they’re following the sites that have the news you want them to see. [Read More]

This post has been updated in a more recent post Console Log Better Practices with PnPjs V3. My Sympraxis partner Marc Anderson mentioned that we’ve been talking about PnPJS packages for SharePoint Framework a lot lately and called out that I would be blogging about utilizing the logging package in his post Using PnPJS and Async/Await to Really Simplify Your API Calls. If you haven’t checked it out and aren’t using PnPJS and the Async/Await method instead of Promises in your SharePoint Framework solutions, you should give it a read. [Read More]

If you’re developing SharePoint Framework web parts you may have run across an issue whereby your anchor tags will not honor the target=”_blank” attribute allowing you to open a url in a new browser tab. The issue manifests itself only when your goal is to open another SharePoint page from a SharePoint page, i.e. the href is in the SharePoint domain. The reason for this is SharePoint’s built in but rather complex Page Router. [Read More]