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Get in touchWhat a year! This year passed by so quickly, probably because a lot has happened this year personally and business-wise. Some career changes U2U and Valo Intranet (Blue Meteorite) The first article I wrote this year was about announcing that I was quitting my job as a consultant and start working as a trainer for U2U (Change is on the way) as of February 2017.
Read moreWhen creating solutions with SharePoint Framework, in many cases you might want to call some API endpoints. Like for instance the SharePoint rest API or Microsoft Graph. To speed up your development, testing and overcome issues like CORS (cross-origin resource sharing). You might have implemented some mock data objects or mock services which return static data.
Read moreThe reason you probably read this post is that you already wrote some unit tests for SharePoint Framework projects and you stumble upon a problem and want to debug one of your unit-tests. Apparently, the process is not so easy as linking your debugger to the gulp test task. There is a bit more plumbing involved to get a good experience.
Read moreIn one of the previous posts I showed that since SharePoint Framework version 1.2.0, code coverage reports were added. When you run the gulp test task, it will execute the tests, and generate a code coverage report which you can find under the temp/coverage/js project folder. Read more about this in the following article: SharePoint Framework code coverage reports for unit-tests
Read moreBased on the number of questions I receive in my mailbox, I can see that display templates are not yet forgotten. A long time ago, I wrote about how to correctly include scripts into your display templates. Read more: Correctly including scripts into your display templates The main issue when using the default functions (for example $includeScript) to include scripts into your templates, is that they are loading your scripts asynchronously.
Read moreWeb part icons help you to distinguish your web part between all the others. Show image Modern client-side web parts SharePoint Framework provides use two options at this moment of specifying an icon: Office UI Fabric font icons (officeFabricIconFontName) Images by providing a URL (iconImageUrl) Info: Waldek Mastykarz wrote a great article about this a while ago.
Read moreA while ago I wrote an article about writing unit tests for your SharePoint Framework components. One of the missing things was a code coverage report to check how well you unit-test your codebase. Read more: Writing unit-tests for your SharePoint Framework components Apparently, with the v1.2.0 of SharePoint Framework they added a tool called Istanbul which can generate such reports.
Read moreOne of the new things in the latest releases is the functionality to bundle multiple components into a single JavaScript bundle file. Quote: Multi-component bundles can make it easier to share code and logic across similar components, as well as reduce the overall size of your JavaScript since you only get one instance of the shared code.
Read moreSince the SharePoint Framework v1.2.0 release; it is now possible to let your custom property pane fields trigger the apply button in non-reactive property panes. Before this release, you had to implement your own logic to re-render the contents of your web part or use the reactive property pane. So, what changed?
Read moreSome time ago I wrote a couple of articles about how you can automate the process of releasing your SharePoint Framework solutions. This was achieved by two custom Gulp tasks to upload the static assets and solution package and a complete Visual Studio Team Services build and release pipeline. This process already saved me a lot of time, but since some time ago, I noticed that I had to manually deploy the solution package to get the latest version activated.
Read moreWhen SharePoint 2013 got released there was something missing in the UI. There was no breadcrumb control anymore like in SharePoint 2010. A couple of clients and users were struggling finding their way on the site. In March 2013, I created a script that allowed you to transform the SharePoint text in the suite bar (on the left side) into a breadcrumb.
Read moreWith the latest release of the SharePoint Framework generator, they introduced extensions. These extensions provide you a way to extend the modern site experience in SharePoint. You can, for example, add your own headers and footers, override how fields are rendered and create some custom list actions. In this article, I will focus on how you can use the ListView Command Set extension to create your own custom list actions that are shown based on permissions and selected list items.
Read moreSince I wrote the article about how you could configure build and release pipelines in Visual Studio Team Services, I got a couple of people asking if it is possible to get different builds working on one tenant. When you build something with the SharePoint Framework and are ready to move from development (workbench) to test or production.
Read moreIf you ever created Gulp tasks which made use of arguments to specify certain configuration settings to be used during the execution. You probably made use of a module called yargs. The yargs module makes it easy to check if arguments are provided and to retrieve their values. If you are building your own custom Gulp tasks for your SharePoint Framework projects, you do not require this module.
Read moreJust a quick article about how you can let your Azure Function runtime know there was a problem during the execution. This is important when you are for example working with queue triggered functions. The default method to let your Azure Function know it has finished is the context.done() method. When you use the method like this: context.
Read moreIf you already used the HttpClient and SPHttpClient in your SharePoint Framework projects, you might have noticed that you have two types of request methods options: GET and POST. These two types of requests are the most used ones, but what if you want to use other HTTP methods like PUT, PATCH, DELETE?
Read moreIn the previous article, I wrote how I achieved to setup a build and release pipeline to automate the publishing process of my SharePoint Framework app package and JS file to my environments. Info: Use build and release pipelines in VSTS to automate your SharePoint Framework deployments. In this article, I will focus on explaining the steps in detail how you can achieve it yourself.
Read moreA while ago I wrote two articles about how you can automate the publishing process of your SharePoint Framework scripts and solution package via custom gulp tasks. Info: you can find the articles here and here. These gulp tasks are already a great step forward but still, requires you to manually launch these gulp commands to push everything to your environments.
Read moreLast week I published a sample project on GitHub which shows how you can test your SharePoint Framework components with some predefined unit tests. Info: here is a link to the repo - https://github.com/estruyf/spfx-testing-wp The current sample is created with React. The unit tests are created only to test the actual component instead of the main web part.
Read moreProbably one of the great things about App Service is that you can easily secure your applications via Azure Active Directory. Securing a Web API or API App can easily be achieved by enabling the app service authentication option and selecting Azure Active Directory. The express configuration only requires a few clicks until you have it all up and running.
Read moreI am currently busy with preparations for my next course about development on Azure. One of the things that is covered in the course is Logic Apps. Today I was exploring the development options and what you could achieve by creating / integrating custom APIs. Custom APIs enable you to extend your logic app flow and there are two ways how you can do this:
Read moreBack in January, I wrote an article about how you could retrieve the site URL of an Office 365 Group. Linked article: Get the site URL of an Office 365 Group via the Microsoft Graph The way how I achieved it back then was via calling the drive end-point and parsing the site URL from the response.
Read moreWe all get a lot of emails every day. Did you know that some of these emails are being tracked by others? There are various kinds of email trackers available, most of them work by inserting hidden images and/or changing the links in the mail by a tracking prefix. This allows them to see when and how many times you opened your email and which of the links you clicked from the mail.
Read moreDo you have a refiner template that shows the refiners based on the hierarchy of a term set, or can you explain how to build it? These are probably two of the most asked questions I received the last couple of months/years. Back in 2015 I created such a template, but never shared it until today.
Read moreWebhooks are an easy way to do something when an event occurs. For example, when you want to do something when a new email is received. Currently, I have such a webhook subscription running which checks every mail for mail trackers. I just love to have control of my emails and know which of them are being tracked.
Read moreA couple of weeks ago I wrote a simple Office add-in which just added a custom add-in command. An add-in command only requires that you specify an URL to a page / HTML file to make it work. As it would be overkill to create a website for just that one file, I thought about using an HTTPTrigger Azure Function to return me the necessary HTML for my command.
Read moreThese days I use Azure Functions quite a lot for automating things. Since the general availability of Azure Functions which was announcement back in November 2016, they are becoming even more popular and are being used for various kinds of things. Even the local development process of Azure Functions got a lot better.
Read moreThis article is an addition to my previous one about how to automate the publication process of your JavaScript file to Office 365 public CDN. Related article: Automate publishing of your SharePoint Framework scripts to Office 365 public CDN Not long after I had published my previous article, I got the following question on Twitter:
Read moreLast year Microsoft announce the Office 365 public CDN capability. This is CDN option from Office 365 is a great way for you to host your assets like images or JavaScript files. Most important, this is probably the easiest option for publishing your SharePoint Framework client-side web part assets. This is because it does not require you to setup anything on Azure.
Read moreIn January, a colleague and I built our first Outlook module. With the Outlook module extensibility, which was announced at Build 2016, you can create your own applications/modules inside the Outlook client. By default, you have mail, calendar, tasks, but now you have also the ability to put other applications in it.
Read moreUpdate Since 29/03/2017 I discovered a new API endpoint which makes retrieving the SharePoint site URL even easier. You can read all about it in the following article: Get the SharePoint site behind an Office 365 Group via the Microsoft Graph Original article One important piece of information I required for an application which I am currently building is the site URL of the Office 365 Group site.
Read moreGetting to know to which Office 365 groups users are a member of, is very useful information. You can use this information for building your own group applications or to keep a record where users have access to (governance / guest access). The way to retrieve the groups is already documented in the Microsoft Graph documentation, but it is a bit hidden and deserves more attention.
Read moreIn one of my previous posts I explained how you can retrieve external / guest users via the Microsoft Graph API. Last week someone asked me if I knew how you can add guest users to an Office 365 Group via the Microsoft Graph API. As this was also a requirement for one of my projects, I did some digging to find a way to make this possible.
Read moreFor the past eight years, I worked as a consultant for Xylos and Ventigrate. I loved my job, I had great colleagues and worked on interesting projects. I am grateful for the opportunities and support I got while working for these companies. For some time now, I was thinking of heading in another direction.
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