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Disable IE 11 support for SharePoint Framework Projects

Suppose you have great customers like I have that do not rely on IE 11 anymore. There is no time to wait to make the web parts and extension only work in true modern browsers.
The switch you have to make it simple and in seconds, even for older projects. When you created a new project and run the first build, the code output in your lib folder would look similar to this.

Default TypeScript compiled web part code

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Multilingual support review of SharePoint Online – An information architecture perspective

SharePoint Online for a long time, has multilingual support. On classic experience, there were language packs and Variations available for that. Yet also the modern experience has multilingual capabilities for that.

It might look that SharePoint is well capable of providing the language chosen by the user for the user. While I had to take a closer look under the hood over the last couple of month, multilingual and SharePoint has a complicated relationship.

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Develop SPFx web parts for different section designs using CSS

Over the last couple of days, I banged my head against the wall. I hate when things don’t work as expected. On the other hand, I love challenges.

The thing we are talking about the documentation on “Supporting section background“. To be clear, the documentation is correct. It works as described. The issue I and many others have with this documentation it does not apply to your project.

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Design Review: Page layout and typography of communication sites

This time we take a look at the fundamentals on the page and text layout on modern SharePoint pages in communication sites. The text layout is the essential design element on web sites and the intranet. 95% of a current information system is base on just text.

First, let us define some basics on typography on the web to have a better understanding later on the available layout options we currently have.

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Kick-start SPFx build chain on any file change

Whenever you save a TypeScript file in your SPFx project, the build chain creates a new build and refreshes the local workbench automatically.

There are some situations you like to have this support for other asset or frameworks too. In most cases with the PnP/SPFx generator, we need to force a build when a Handlebar or VueJS file get saved.

So the goal is to hijack the build process and add some custom file watch based on the requirement of the framework or file. Why file? Imagine you have an SVG file in your solution. The expected outcome is that you see the changes immediately in your browser.

The key word to this is watch. It requires a custom file extension watch that than trigger the build.

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Smart stupid web parts with SharePoint Framework – Part 1

When you write a new web part with the SharePoint Framework you might create a genius web part, where all the business logic is compiled into your web part. This approach makes sense when the web part is an isolated piece of work.

Image with text saying Smart stupid web parts with SharePoint Framework

Sometimes you like to write pretty simple web parts that only access a backend or third-party API from somewhere on the Interweb. In this case, you can write all the data access inside your web part. Give the user the option to store APP Key, APP Secret and particular access token directly in the web part. Might pre-populate some of those properties of with your company-wide secrets and API keys too.

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