Introducing SharePoint Framework Web Parts and Extensions

Speaker: Hello and welcome to Introducing SharePoint Framework. Let’s start with introductions. About me: I’m at consultant, author and trainer. I’ve written about 20ish books, been an MVP for about 15+ years, spoken in numerous conferences and videos, so on and so forth, and this is my Twitter handle and you can reach me through my website. Let’s get started.

The road to SharePoint development hasn’t been a straight line. We used to write something called Farm Solutions, followed by Sandbox Solutions. Then came the Add-In model and they were two flavors of that, the SharePoint Hosted Add-In model and the Provider Hosted Add-In model followed by SharePoint Framework, which is the focus of this video. The question is, if we’ve gone through so many iterations, why should we bother to focus on SharePoint Framework? Why don’t we pick one of the previous choices that Microsoft has offered us? Well, let’s find out. Starting with Farm Solutions. Well, the first problem is that they work only on-premises, but perhaps the bigger problem is that they’re highly discouraged. The problem with Farm Solutions is that they have a lot of rights to the server, administrative rights, so they can break your server and they frequently did. They put your server in an unsupported state. Microsoft highly discourages you from writing Farm Solutions. Or what about Sandbox Solutions? The idea behind Sandbox Solutions was that they gave you a sandbox where your code could run safely, couldn’t damage the server. That was the idea. Technically speaking, it didn’t damage the server but it didn’t really keep your data safe and these are deprecated also. They’re practically speaking, not very useful. So Sandbox Solutions that have code like C# code in them are definitely deprecated and the ones that are purely declarative, like you know, deploying modules through an element.xml, well, they’re not deprecated yet, but they are still discouraged because that’s not the way going forward. There are better ways of achieving the same things today. Then they came up with the Add-In model. And the idea behind the Add-In model is that this was code running off of the SharePoint server. So your service site code could not run on the SharePoint server. The Add-In model, well, a good first try, but it did not offer a consistent on-premises to cloud story. The way that you would write things on-premises and the way authentication, et cetera, would work was completely different from Office 365. And the two flavors that it came in, SharePoint Hosted apps and Provider Hosted apps, both of them had their own disadvantages. SharePoint Hosted apps were extremely limited in what they could do and Provider Hosted apps are so cumbersome to install that they were not a good choice for third party ISVs. So now we have SharePoint Framework. It is cross-platform. What I mean by that is that you can develop for SharePoint Framework on a Mac, Windows or Linux machine. It has a consistent on-premises to cloud story. Well, there’s a little fine print there that whatever works on-premises will work in the cloud, but the reverse is not true. So what Microsoft is doing is that they’re introducing features in the cloud first and eventually some of them make it to on-premises. But you can use SharePoint Framework on-premises for certain things like web parts today. And it’s modern. It uses things like node based development, typescript, et cetera. I’ll be covering the basics of what you need to know to follow through this course as well.

So what will I be covering in this course? Well, this is what a SharePoint site looks like. This is a modern site. There’s also classic site but let’s follow through this. So if you click that edit button, this area that just got shaded, that area is where you can drop rectangular widgets of prepackaged functionality. Those rectangular widgets are called as web parts. You can write web parts using SharePoint Framework and I will be showing that in this course. Why just web parts? There are certain well-defined areas of a page like the header and the footer, perhaps more. SharePoint Framework allows you a standard way to customize these well-defined areas on a page through something called as application customizers. And I’ll be showing you that in this course as well. This is what a typical list view looks like. In here, the area that you see over there is a number field that is being rendered out of the box, just looks like a number, but it’s called percentage. Would it be nice if instead of showing a number, we could show a progress bar there? That is a job for something called as a field customizer, and I’ll be covering that in this course as well. A field customizer lets you override the out of the box rendering of any field. And that bar you see up there, that is where the various actions go. Using list view command parts, which is also a SharePoint Framework extension, you’re able to add your custom commands in that area on the page, and yes, I’ll be showing you this as well.

Let’s wrap up this introduction with objectives. Following this introduction, I’ll walk you through some prerequisites, things that you should know to follow along with this course, setting up your development machine, et cetera. Then I’ll talk about authoring solutions. No, we won’t dive into the basics of your business logic. That’s your headache. I’ll be showing you the SharePoint Framework way of authoring a web part or authoring different kinds of SharePoint Framework extensions. I’ll also be showing you how to debug these during development time. That’s a very valuable topic. And finally, I’ll be showing you how you can deploy SharePoint Framework solutions and with that, let’s dive in.