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Monthly Update 2016 February

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VesaJuvonen edited this page Feb 8, 2016 · 5 revisions

The Office 365 Developer Patterns and Practices (PnP) program was announced at the end of July 2014 and has been great tool for Microsoft to engage with the community and vice versa. PnP program is community driven program driven by the community for the community. PnP guidance has concentrated heavily on the SharePoint development models, but we are looking to extend the guidance more towards MIcrosoft Graph, Office client add-ins and how you can take advantage in general capabilities in the Office 365 platform. All contributions on this area are more than welcome.

We will also cover the details of the latest release during our February 2016 monthly community call on Tuesday February 9th. 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.

February 2016 monthly community call

Agenda for the Tuesday 9th of February community call:

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 3600 members in this group with lively discussions on different SharePoint and Office 365 development 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 on October 2015 and have continued releasing new video web casts for each week. All web casts will be to the PnP Channel 9 section. Here's the new web casts released after the last monthly release.

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-Tools - New repository for tools and scripts targeted more for IT Pro's and for on-premises for SP2013 and SP2016
  • PnP-Office-Addins - Office Add-in samples and models (starting)
  • 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.
  • PnP-OfficeAddins - Samples for the Office Add-ins development
  • PnP-Provisioning-Schema - PnP Provisioning engine schema repository

Latest changes

Provisioning Engine

The first version of the PnP remote provisioning engine was released with the April 2015 release. For the February 2016 release we have continued to add new supported capabilities and made significant improvements from stability perspective for both Office 365 and on-premises. This list contains the main updates that have been added in the February release:

  • Significant overall quality and performance improvements
  • Export support for master pages and page layouts in publishing sites
  • Support for custom action resource handling (language support)
  • Updates on publishing site handling process
  • Updates on home page extraction process with publishing and non-publishing sites
  • Updates on feature handling process - possible exceptions logged, but process not aborted
  • Localization support for labels
  • Token parser changed to be public
  • Updated base templates for the SPO and 2016 - used in delta handling

**NOTICE: ** February release of the PnP Core Component or specifically engine has dependency on using latest SharePoint Online CSOM package released on 4th of February.

Known issues

  • There's a known issue around JSON seriazliation in context of the CustomAction.Rights element. Team is working on getting this resolved. Propability of hitting the issue is relatively small.

PnP sample library

We have done general cleaning in the repository related on Nuget package updates and also removed some samples, which are no longer releavant. We are planning to continue these cleaning activities during the next months as well to streamline the repository and to combine some samples for reducing the overall number of similar samples and ot make more room for Graph and Office 365 API related content. Currently repository is still heavily bias for the SharePoint related samples.

There's also significant amount of general updates on the existing samples done by the community on the code and documentation, which is great way to contribute as well.

  • PnP Core: Lots of re-factoring done to improve code quality and completeness:
    • provisioning engine updates (see above)
    • Updates on rating controls in the lists - enable also for non-publishing sites
    • Methods for enabling and disabling Request access at web level for SPO CSOM
    • Remove field by fied ID added as new method
    • General bug fixing, performance and quality improvements
    • Removal of deprecated methods
    • Build and test automation improvements with unit test changes
    • Yammer embed support added for on-premises (SP2013)
    • Preparations for SP2016 specific version - coming in March
    • 16 nuget package includes a dependency for the WindowsAzure.Storage and Microsoft.Azure.ActiveDirectory.GraphClient nuget packages
    • Both PnP Core Nuget packages (cloud and on-premises) have been also updated accordingly.
  • New sample OutlookNotificationsAPI.WebAPI which is ASP.NET Web API project validating and responding to Outlook Notifications - created with the Outlook Notifications REST API. The sample covers the concept of subscribing for notifications, validating notification URLs and inspecting the monitoried entities by calling the Outlook REST API using persisted tokens.
  • New sample MicrosoftGraph.Office365.Generic as generic sample solution which demonstrates typical operations with Microsoft Graph towards Calendar, Contacts, Files, Unified Groups and users.
  • New sample MicrosoftGraph.Office365.Simple.MailAndFiles as simplistic ASP.net MVC application to query personal emails and files using Microsoft Graph showing also dynamic querying of the information with ajax queries. Sample uses also Office UI Fabric to provide consistent user interface experience with standardized controls and presentation.
  • New console utility JDP Remediation - CSOM which can be used to discover or address typical add-in model transformation issues using CSOM operations.
  • New farm solution Feature activation blocker which can be used to block activation of features from the UI of SharePoint farm. Feature Id's and message shown for the end users can be configured dynamically.
  • Updated PnP-PowerShell Commands with new CommandLets and with few fixes
    • Overall quality improvements and bug fixes
    • Updated documentation for CmdLets
  • Updates to the PnP Partner Pack (delayed release later this week)
    • Significant updates on the setup guidance
    • Updated to use latest CSOM Nuget package
    • Updated code to handle the provisioning time logic

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 release two new guidance video during this month on top of the 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 February 2015 release

Here’s the list of active contributors (in alphabetical order) during past month in PnP repositories. PnP is really about building tooling togther with teh community for the community, so your contributions are highly valued cross the Office 365 customers, partners and obviously also at Microsoft.

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.

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

PnP Sites Core repository

PnP PowerShell repository

See About Repository Graphs for more details on above statistics.

Next steps

  • February 2016 monthly community call is on 9th of February at 8 AM PST for latest release details with demos - Download invite from http://aka.ms/OfficeDevPnPCall.
  • Following master merge will happen on 4th of March and February community call is on 8th of March 2016

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