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Monthly Update 2016 March

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VesaJuvonen edited this page Mar 7, 2016 · 2 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 March 2016 monthly community call on Tuesday March 8th. 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.

March 2016 monthly community call

Agenda for the Tuesday 8th of March 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 4000 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.

Spring 2016 PnP community survey

We are conducting a community survey around the Office 365 Developer Patterns and Practices (PnP) program. Your input truly matters and we want to collect some feedback around the PnP initiative for the future direction. You can find this short survey from the following address. Survey will be open for feedback until Friday 11th of March 2016. Results and details will be shared with the community.

Thank you for your input on this survey, your feedback and comments are highly appreciated.

PnP Office Hours and Special Interest Groups (SIGs)

We started bi-weekly PnP Office Hours during February for addressing questions on how to contribute towards PnP. These are open discussions around what the Core team is doing and where the community members can assist. This time is also open for discussing aroung design decisions, challenges and possible issues in the PnP deliverables. You can download invite for the bi-weekly invite from following location.

Due constantly growing interest on the PnP program, we also are piloting Special Interest Groups (PnP SIGs), which are more targeted on specicic topic, like SharePoint Client Side (JavaScript) development or other areas. We are currently piloting this model with SIG for Client Side development, which have had great interest. Client Side Development SIG has already started building generalized library to be used with JavaScript development using TypeScript and with modern development practices. If you're interested of joinign this effort, please use following resources.

Please read more around PnP Office Hours and Special Interest Groups (SIGs) from following blog post.

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 March 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 March release:

  • Significant overall quality and performance improvements
  • Updates on home page extraction process with publishing and non-publishing sites
  • Updates on the workflow extraction handling
  • Updates on calculated column handling
  • Updates on the custom theme and welcome page extraction with tenant or web application root site
  • Updated base templates for the SPO and 2016 - used in delta handling

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)
    • General bug fixing, performance and quality improvements
    • Updates on the CAML class helper
    • v1.0 of automated documentation creation to md file
    • Removal of deprecated methods
    • Build and test automation improvements with unit test changes
    • Preparations for SP2016 specific version - coming in April
    • Both PnP Core Nuget packages (cloud and on-premises) have been also updated accordingly.
  • New sample MicrosoftGraph.Office365.GroupsExplorer which is ASP.NET MVC project which lists all groups in the user's tenant, along with all the properties..
  • New Core.TaxonomyNavigationComponents component as a set of common taxonomy navigation components (main menu, contextual menu and breadcrumb) for SharePoint Online using Office UI Fabric and JSOM.
  • New sample Python.Office365.AppAuthentication which shows how to set up authentication between a Python app (using the Flask microframework) and Office 365 SharePoint Online site. The goal of this sample is to show how a user can authenticate and interact with data from the Office 365 SharePoint site.
  • New Tenant Information Portal which can be used to display information regarding your Azure Active Directory Tenant specifically related to Service Principals that are only surfaced via PowerShell. By default, when you register an add-in with appregnew/appinv, these service principals are not displayed in the Azure Portal and the default expiration is 1 year. This solution will also assist you with identifying apps (add-ins) that are expired or that may be expiring soon.
  • Updated Provisioning.UX.App provisioning solution with better UI handling and sub site provisioning override.
  • 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
    • Additional Updates on the setup guidance
    • Code quality improvements

PnP Guidance articles

The PnP Guidance repository contains guidance articles which are mostly being published at 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 there was significant effort on synchronizing the MSDN and GitHub artciles to ensure that both sides are in sync and there's matching page in the GitHub. Targe is to update the MSDN based on community contributions.

See MSDN artciles from 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 March 2016 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 from which we only list 3 here.

Statistics from PnP repository

PnP Sites Core repository

PnP PowerShell repository

See About Repository Graphs for more details on above statistics.

Next steps

  • March 2016 monthly community call is on 8th of March at 8 AM PST / 5 PM CET for latest release details with demos - Download invite from http://aka.ms/OfficeDevPnPCall.
  • Following master merge will happen on 8th of April and April community call is on 12th of April 2016

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