Article
0 comment

How to create an SPFx project using a specific version

Have you ever wanted to run an older version of the SPFx generator? Maybe on an existing project to add some new assets? It is possible without any installation of the generator at all. Recently a tool was released inside your NPM installation that is named ‘NPX‘.

In short, NPX is a tool that allows you to run npm binaries and packages without having them installed locally. This tool got first released in NPM 5.2.0.

[Read more]

Article
0 comment

New extension to SPFx for VueJS: PnP/SPFx generator v1.2.0

I firmly believe that the Yeoman generator provided by Microsoft is a great tool. It serves all the capabilities to create new web parts, extensions and customisations in the future. With the current support of ReactJS, Knockout and bare-bone HTML version, you have three great possibilities.

This PnP/SPFx generator project goes beyond these possibilities and supports enhanced functionalities. A way to add additional capabilities in the future not even for new frameworks and libraries on the market. It also helps organisations to defined their development standards.

[Read more]

Article
0 comment

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.

[Read more]

Article
0 comment

Custom SPFx generator: Make Yarn your default package manager

The most straightforward example to make you familiar with how to create a custom SPFx Yeoman generator is to use Yarn instead of NPM as your default package manager. The approach to change the default package manager is simple, and many people already use it as there default package managing solution.

So, instead of adding the ‘–skip-install’ option whenever you start a new project just add this option to a generator.

The first step is, as always, to create a new NPM package.

[Read more]

Article
0 comment

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]