On December 16, 2016, DevFacto hosted Quality Conf 16.2 – a full-day internal conference dedicated to learning and team building. A number of sessions were presented by our team members which focused on everything from personal to technical growth. In this post, we recap “The New SharePoint Framework” which was originally presented by DevFacto consultants Chris Buchanan and Vili Bogdan.
Overview
People have been enhancing SharePoint over the years using custom JavaScript solutions. However, there have been times when changes done by Microsoft have broken those solutions. With the release of the SharePoint Framework (SPFx), currently in developer preview, Microsoft is providing developers a new way of enhancing SharePoint using custom JavaScript solutions with less risk of SharePoint changes breaking them. In this session we briefly reviewed the history of development options for SharePoint, looked at what the SharePoint Framework and the associated tooling provides, got our environments set up and created a basic SPFx web part.
The SharePoint Framework is a new way of developing functionality for SharePoint in a way that is responsive and mobile-accessible. It is the primary way in which Microsoft is adding U.I. enhancements to SharePoint and will be the way for third party developers to do the same, provided there are no special security requirements.
Key Takeaways
Traditional SharePoint developers will need to update their skill-set to learn how to use modern client side development techniques and tools. Microsoft has made it relatively easy for somebody to get started with developing using the SharePoint Framework by following their guidelines.
Further SharePoint Framework Reading
- Getting Started
- Channel 9 Getting Started Tutorial
- Microsoft SharePoint Blog: “ The Future of SharePoint”
- SharePoint Framework – A Beginners Guide
- SPFx Web Part Samples and Tutorials
- Using Visual Studio 2015 instead of VS Code
View the entire slide deck here.
