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Monthly Update 2015 September

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Vesa Juvonen edited this page Sep 9, 2015 · 9 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 was slightly slower on the contributions, since we were also working on the repository structure updates. Still great stuff shared for others and significant updates on the samples, PnP engine, PowerShell and Core component.

We will also cover the details of the latest release during our September community call on Tuesday September 8th. If you are interested on seeing some of the new samples in action and hear about the future then feel free to join that call.

September 2015 monthly community call

Agenda for the 9th of September (8 AM PST) community call:

  • Summary on the September release and other updates in program - Vesa Juvonen ~30 min
  • Mail Add-In For Outlook Using Office 365 APIs (ADAL.JS, ANGULARJS, WEBAPI, AZURE AD) - Matej Vodopivc ~15 min
  • Demonstration of "microsurvey" web part as add-in implementation - Bob German ~15 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 3200 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.

Splitting of PnP repo's in GitHub

As part of the September release, we have now completed structural changes in our repository structure. Since original PnP grew to be big for easy management, it was split to multiple sub repos. Main PnP repo will still remain as the main location for the SharePoint Add-in/App samples and solutions, but other material is redistributed to smaller sub repos. Here's the detailed repository structure around PnP topics. Some of the needed sample relocation work will still happen during September.

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

  • PnP - Main repository in future as well, but will be smaller
  • 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-Office365-API - Office 365 and Azure AD related add-ins
  • PnP-Partner-Pack - Packaged guidance with detailed instructions on setting things up in Office 365 and in Azure. This initiative will be started during August and target date for final delivery is on mid-Oct.
  • PnP-Transformation - Material specifically for the transformation process. Currently draft version of the InfoPath transformation guidance.

Note. There will be some additional repositories as well, whcih will be communicated as we proceed.

Latest changes

Provisioning Engine

The first version of the PnP remote provisioning engine was released with the April release. For the September 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 August release:

  • Improved and updated delta handling
  • Overall quality and performance improvements
  • PnPMonitoredScope implementation for engine operations
  • Significant improvements on the on-premises support

Note. Some additional engine support capabilities were delayed for October release (2nd of Oct) to ensure sufficient testing for them. This includes support for workflows, regional settings, languages, auditing settings, publishing settings, etc.

PnP library

  • PnP Core: Lots of re-factoring done to improve code quality and completeness:
    • provisioning engine updates (see above)
    • PnPMonitoredScope model introduced for better logging with default implementation (more later)
    • Introduction of new token options for dynamic association
    • Nested token parsing support for tokens
    • Build and test automation improvements
    • Both PnP Core Nuget packages (cloud and on-premises) have been also updated accordingly.
  • New sample Core.KnockoutJSForm shows how to implement a simple dynamic form using Knockout.js. In the sample standard Event display form is extended to enable registrations.
  • New sample Core.ListViewThreshold shows a ContentIterator implementation that can be used to query large lists as it reads items in batches.
  • New sample Core.RestFileUpload demonstrate how to upload files to SharePoint using REST APIs.
  • New sample Outlook.RelatedData demonstrates mail add-in for Outlook which extracts data from a mail message and retrieves data from Office 365 APIs.
  • New sample Provisioning.MicroSurvey](https://github.com/OfficeDev/PnP/tree/dev/Samples/Provisioning.MicroSurvey) shows a "microsurvey" web part, which will display a single question and gather up the answers. The app provisions SharePoint lists to hold the questions and answers, including custom New, Display, and Edit forms for one of the lists.
  • Updated sample Core.PeoplePicker to fix bugs on component handling
  • Significant updates to Solution Provisioning.UX.App with multi-lingual support for UI and other improvements.
  • Updated PnP-PowerShell Commands with new CommandLets and with few fixes
    • Overall quality improvements
    • Unit test model introduced for CmdLets
    • Updated documentation
    • Updated contribution guidance
    • Add configuration for Chocolately gallery
    • New Set-SPOUserProfileProperty cmdlet
    • New Set-SPOTraceLog cmdlet

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 also release any additional videos to 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 September 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 communnity effort and asisting 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)
  • Frank Marasco (Microsoft) - @frank_marasco
  • 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 repository. It's great to see the growing contribution numbers and for example how our punch card looks like, since it proofs that this is truly a global effort with contributions 24/7.

Contributions

Traffic

Punch Card

We are missing 4 spots from full house!!!

See About Repository Graphs for more details on above statistics.

Next steps

  • September monthly community call is on 8th of September for latest release details
  • Following master merge will happen on 2nd of October and October community call is on 13th of September

"Sharing is caring" - Vesa

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