Article
15. October 2018
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by Stefan Bauer

PnP/SPFx Version 1.3.0 released – Check your project version on the fly

Right before the launch of the first version of PnP/SPFx I had a longer chat with a friend of mine Thomas Goelles, and he pointed out that it is great to be able to re-run the generator to add more web parts using a specific version of a framework. There was one fact that we haven’t thought about or maybe overlooked. What happens when the current project setup does not support the required version yet?

Evergreen SPFx project - Version 1.3.0 relased

The previous version had merely a blocking mechanism implemented that checked if the current project was created using version 1.6.

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Article
17. September 2018
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by Stefan Bauer

The Community SPFx generator – The ideas, the patterns and possibilities

I am pretty excited that finally the first version of the open source community driven SPFx generator has been released last Thursday and publicly announced and is part of the SharePoint / Office 365 Pattern and Practices Personally, for me, it was a great journey to bring this to life in collaboration with Microsoft engineering.

It was a longer journey than expected but there were some considerations and decisions to make to have a solid fundament for future improvements and to allow fast and easy integrations.

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Article
23. May 2018
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by Stefan Bauer

A smart stupid web part consumes a third party API through Azure Functions – Part 3

The second blog post in this series was pretty long. This time I keep it way shorter. This time I focus more on the user experience and the ideas behind the final web part that consumes the third party API. Like I promised the web part code itself contains only a single REST query against my Azure Function and that’s it.

Let’s first take at the typical behaviour of the first party video web part available on Office 365.

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Article
2. May 2018
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by Stefan Bauer

Use Microsoft Graph to evaluate SharePoint Urls

Recently I added a new sample to the PNP SharePoint Framework examples. The goal of this sample was to take text field input evaluate it against the Microsoft Graph and get information back information about a site collection, websites and list or libraries.

This blog post is no in-depth article on how to query the Microsoft Graph or how to make the code to work and authentication works. If you need to install microsoft visit https://softwaredepot.co/download-microsoft-office.html. Instead, I like to give you an overview of the ideas behind the implementations.

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Article
27. April 2018
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by Stefan Bauer

How to change the modern theme on classic sites without PowerShell

Once a wise man cited a wiser woman with the following statement:

“My mom always said life was like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re gonna get. – Forest Gump”.

This quote can be applied to SharePoint in Office 365 nowadays too. When you have a provisioned classic site or even a modern site, then you never know what primary colour you get as your default theme.

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Article
29. March 2018
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by Stefan Bauer

Remove Feedback Buttons from SharePoint Footer through Application Customizer

IMPORTANT NOTICE:
This blog post is outdated. I newly introduced a new solution named Whitespace and a new repository which makes this overall solution outdated. Especially it does not include the previously introduced additional design elements.

I know the Feedback and Mobile App buttons are essential for Microsoft, but many of my customers ask me to remove it. There a mainly three reasons for that. The first is the location and loading behaviour of those buttons. It takes a while until those buttons are loaded and catch a lot of attention of the user once they are visible on the page.

The second reason is that the location sticky on the bottom of the page might not be the perfect spot for those buttons. I might be more useful to have them somewhere in the header or suite bar.

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Article
19. February 2018
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by Stefan Bauer

Extend the SharePoint generator to your needs?

Whenever you start a new SharePoint project, you might depend on external libraries. These libraries are maybe small helper tools such as jQuery or maybe like to go beyond KnockOut or React. Let’s say you want to use Handlebars, VueJS or perhaps Angular 1.x. Everything you perform the same setup steps in the same order. In my case, I start most new projects using Handlebars. Luckily I wrote my documentation to make the configurations pretty smoothly. To be honest, it is proper training but on the other hand a complete waste of time. Why not automate my personal preferences and start a new project from scratch with my settings already applied. This article takes a look at why you might consider writing your own SharePoint generator in future. [Read more]