With Markshell I created a small tool that allows you to output Markdown files directly to the console. Why that? Right now, when you write a CLI or any console application, you like to provide some help for it. On the other hand, you also want to have proper documentation set up on Github pages or only in the Github Repo.
Markshell is precisely for that and helps and provides this opportunity and helps you to avoid writing multiple documentations.
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There are many blog posts out there that show how you can install packages to your SPFx project. Many of those projects tell you that you have to install exactly this specific version.
To give you an example upgrading your rush stack compiler in an existing project you can use the following line of code.
Today I published the first beta version of the upcoming PnP/SFPx version 1.6.0. It is the most significant releases since the launch of the Angular Elements support for SPFx.
Instead of adding new frameworks at the moment this release focuses more on your development workflow. There are updates included that helps you to write cleaner code, reduce bundle sizes and last but not least helps you on testing your ReactJS projects.
Like I promised yesterday. You can even run a specific SPFx generator version with a specific NodeJS version through the help of NPM.
While it might not is a practical approach it can help you sometimes when you like to run for example an older version of the project to test some behaviour before you fix the issues.
Now the SharePoint Framework has become general available I expect that it requires only to update only the npm packages mostly. A simple upgrade of the installed packages will be enough in future. During the beta phase you add to do manual step in addition to upgrade your project to the latest drop.
Project versioning as we used to know it was not a big challenge. Not as long as you only used Visual Studio.
The thing is that assigning a proper version of your SharePoint Framework project is more tricky than simply apply a single version to it. There are more than one version of your project, that doesn’t match and have different purposes.
When you are working with SPFX and you start it with gulp serve, it takes some time to start. During this startup many things happen but there are not clear indication if SPFx is working or what it actually does.
gulp server – default start
Once the workbench was started you see all the gulp task that will be executed with or without error and what it actually does.
The background tasks are well hidden, but you can take a peek into those background activities. It’s just a simple trick, but I use it every time now when I work with SPFX now.
Instead, execute gulp server and add the command line option --verbose. Execute SPFx with:
gulp serve --verbose
Now the hidden world and architecture of SPFX will become more visible. In additon you get sometimes many additonal informations what might goes wrong.
gulp serv – with verbose logging
From my point of view, it is easier and helps with debugging.
I will also see if the issue is caused by your configuration, code or locate a problem with SPFX.
Happy coding!!!
You might have heard the Unix Bash Shell is now coming to Windows. To be more specific a whole Linux sub system based on the Ubuntu distribution comes to Windows. This addition to Windows was announce at this years Build Conference and I knew exactly how this would match to my clients and other people in the SharePoint Community. Especially with the new SharePoint Framework you should know this option because it makes many things easier using NodeJS on Windows.
I started web development in 1997 with some basic HTML pages and Style Sheets. Shortly after I installed my first Apache Web Server, PHP and MySql on my PC.
Soon after I fell in love with the web and web technologies in general. It was natural for me that I got my first job as a web developer for a huge company in my home town. The following year we built intranet systems and web application for this company. All built on this web stack and developed mostly locally.