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Monthly Update 2015 November

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Vesa Juvonen edited this page Nov 10, 2015 · 7 revisions

The Office 365 Developer Patterns and Practices project was announced at the end of July 2014 and there has been tremendous interest for the project since, which we truly appreciate! You can read more details around the history and future direction from our one year blog post at dev.office.com. This month concentration was more on the PnP Core component, PnP PowerShell CmdLets and PnP Partner Pack.

We will also cover the details of the latest release during our November monthly community call on Tuesday November 10th. If you are interested on seeing some of the new samples in action and hear about the future fo this program, then feel free to join that call. You can download monthly recurring invite from http://aka.ms/OfficeDevPnPCall.

November 2015 monthly community call

Agenda for the Tuesday 10th of November community call:

  • Summary on the November release and other updates in program - Vesa Juvonen ~30 min
  • PnP Partner Pack - Demo and Q&A on capabilities - Paolo Pialorsi ~30 min

If you have any questions, comments or feedback, please participate in our discussions in the Office 365 Patterns and Practices Yammer group at http://aka.ms/OfficeDevPnPYammer. We already have more than 3400 members in this group with lively discussions on different add-in model related topics. This is the most active developer group in the Office 365 Technical network and we are definitely proud and thankful of this.

PnP Weekly Web Casts during last month

We started new PnP Weekly Web Cast with video releases on each Monday around key topics around the guidance or around hot topics from the community. All web casts will be to the PnP Channel 9 section.

PnP repo's in GitHub

There are quite a few different GitHub repositories under the PnP brand since we wanted to ensure that you can easily find and reuse what's relevant for you. We do also combine multiple solutions to one repository, so that you can more easily sync and get latest chanages of our released guidance and samples.

In general we do recommend you to use the PnP sample search tool at dev.office.com for locating relevant material for you. This should be easier and faster than trying to locate relevant material from GitHub.

Here's the current repository structure, including short description for each of them.

  • PnP - Main repository for SP add-in, Office 365, Unified API etc. samples
  • PnP-Guidance - Guidance, presentations and articles which are partly sync'd to MSDN
  • PnP-Sites-Core - Office Dev PnP Core component
  • PnP-PowerShell - Office Dev PnP PowerShell Cmdlets
  • PnP-Office-Addins - Office Add-in samples and models
  • PnP-Partner-Pack - Packaged guidance with detailed instructions on setting things up in Office 365 and in Azure.
  • PnP-Transformation - Material specifically for the transformation process. Currently includes samples around InfoPath replacement. Some tools coming also soon.

Latest changes

Provisioning Engine

The first version of the PnP remote provisioning engine was released with the April 2015 release. For the November release we have continued to add new supported capabilities and made improvements from stability perspective for both Office 365 and on-premises. This list contains the main updates that have been added in the November release:

  • Improved and updated delta handling
  • Overall quality and performance improvements
  • Improved on-premises support with CSOM version detection
  • Added support for lookup fields whcih isn't site column
  • Bug fixes on the publishing feature handling
  • Bug fixes on content type handling
  • Bug fixes on list instance handling
  • Bug fixes on workflow extraction
  • Updated system templates for delta detection

PnP sample library

  • PnP Core: Lots of re-factoring done to improve code quality and completeness:
    • provisioning engine updates (see above)
    • Added support for X.509 Certificate authentication in TimerJob
    • Permission handling optimization
    • Improvements on UserCustomAction handling extensions
    • Implement ToXML method for a template
    • Removal of deprecated methods
    • Build and test automation improvements
    • Both PnP Core Nuget packages (cloud and on-premises) have been also updated accordingly.
  • New sample Core.ListViewThreshold.JSOMAndREST demonstrates how to retrieve more items than treshold limit with JSOM and REST.
  • Updated component Core.TaxonomyPicker/ with better suggestion capability and overall technical implementation.
  • Significant updates to Solution Provisioning.UX.App .
  • Updated PnP-PowerShell Commands with new CommandLets and with few fixes
    • Overall quality improvements
    • New-SPOProvisioningTemplateFromFolder CmdLet added
    • Updated Get-ProvisioningTemplate CmdLet
    • Added Samples folder with initial samples
    • Updated documentation for CmdLets

PnP Guidance articles

The PnP Guidance repository has been setup for working on articles. Part of these articles are already available on MSDN and more will follow. Everyone can contribute or update these articles via updating them in GitHub and the changes will flow back to MSDN once the synchronization setup has been completed.

During this month we did some general updates on the articles, but there's no actual new guidance published. You can easily find the relevant guidance for you using our search tool at dev.office.com.

There's already a significant amount of articles that has been added to the PnP MSDN section at http://aka.ms/OfficeDevPnPMSDN

PnP Guidance videos

We did not release any new specific guidance videos, except he new web cast videos mentioned already above in this blog post. You can find all PnP videos from our Channel 9 section at http://aka.ms/OfficeDevPnPVideos. This location contains already significant amount of detailed training material, demo videos and community call recordings.

Key contributors for the November 2015 release

Here’s the list of active contributors (in alphabetical order) during past month in PnP repositories. It's great to see familiar names and also new people joining on the the community effort and assisting others. We are looking forward to continue working with such a talent and hope to get more additional people involved on this joint effort to help the community in the transition towards Office 365 and SharePoint add-in model/app model techniques.

Thank you for your assistance and contributions from the behalf of the community. You are making a difference!

Here’s the list of Microsoft people who have been closely involved on the PnP work during last month.

  • Antons Mislevics (Microsoft)
  • Bert Jansen (Microsoft) - @O365Bert
  • Brian Michely (Microsoft) - @brianmichely
  • Dan Budimir (Microsoft) - MSDN blog
  • Frank Marasco (Microsoft) - @frank_marasco
  • Ivan Bondy (Microsoft) - @ivanbondy
  • Jeremy Thake (Microsoft) - @jthake
  • Kiki Shuxteau (Microsoft)
  • Patrick Rodgers (Microsoft)
  • Ron Tielke (Microsoft)
  • Sami Nieminen (Microsoft)
  • Steve Walker (Microsoft) - @sharepointing
  • Vesa Juvonen (Microsoft) - @vesajuvonen

Latest statistics

Here's some statistics from the PnP, PnP PowerShell and PnP Sites Core (core component) repository. There's visible impact of the GitHub re-structuring, which means that traffic and contributions are divided between multiple repositories.

Statistics from PnP repository

Activities are moving more and more to Core and PowerShell repositories, which are growing.

Still 4 spots to chage... pull close for full house.

PnP Sites Core repository

PnP PowerShell repository

See About Repository Graphs for more details on above statistics.

Next steps

  • November monthly community call is on 10th of November for latest release details - Download invite from http://aka.ms/OfficeDevPnPCall.
  • Following master merge will happen on 4th of December and December community call is on 8th of November

"Sharing is caring" - Vesa

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