Announcements

• New Release of Widget Wrangler (1/31/2017) - When you’re writing a widget in Angular 1.x, it’s possible to pass configuration information into the widget using the ng-init directive, as shown in this example. (Angular 2 isn’t ready for widgets yet since there’s no way to put multiple copies on the page; Microsoft is working with Google on a fix. Here’s a sample.) … Continue reading New Release of Widget Wrangler
• Roadmap to the Future of SharePoint (5/7/2016) - (cross-posted to the BlueMetal Blog) This week Microsoft mapped out a bold new plan for SharePoint. Microsoft is investing heavily to modernize the product to make it work as well in the Device and Cloud era as it once did in when the Web was still shiny and new. This article will explain how these … Continue reading Roadmap to the Future of SharePoint
• Learning TypeScript: A Code Camp Adventure (4/4/2016) - Last weekend I had the pleasure of presenting a couple sessions on TypeScript at Boston Code Camp 25, one on my own and one with my good friend and colleague, Bob Goodearl. We’ve just posted the materials, which may be useful beyond the presentation. TypeScript 101 This session covers the basics of the language. I tried … Continue reading Learning TypeScript: A Code Camp Adventure
• Microsoft’s New Approach to Collaboration and Portals (5/12/2015) - At the Ignite conference last week, Microsoft laid out a new vision for collaboration and portals that is a major departure from the site-based approach that has been the core of SharePoint for more than a decade. Microsoft still fully supports SharePoint in its current form and will continue to do so, both on premises … Continue reading Microsoft’s New Approach to Collaboration and Portals
• A Brand New Vantage Point (1/30/2015) - Welcome – you have arrived at my new blog! After nearly a decade blogging at MSDN, it’s time for me to strike out on my own. Microsoft was really nice to let me keep blogging after I left their employ to work at BlueMetal Architects, and Chris Bortlik was good enough to sponsor me (thanks Chris!) But … Continue reading A Brand New Vantage Point

Architecture

• Roadmap to the Future of SharePoint (5/7/2016) - (cross-posted to the BlueMetal Blog) This week Microsoft mapped out a bold new plan for SharePoint. Microsoft is investing heavily to modernize the product to make it work as well in the Device and Cloud era as it once did in when the Web was still shiny and new. This article will explain how these … Continue reading Roadmap to the Future of SharePoint
• Flexible SharePoint Development with Widget Wrangler (1/13/2016) - (Cross posted at Julie Turner’s blog, SharePoint Customization: Vedi, Vini, Vici) What’s a widget, and why should I care? In economics, a widget is a name for a generic gadget or manufactured good; on the web, a widget is a generic piece of web functionality running on a page. What makes widgets special is that, unlike controls … Continue reading Flexible SharePoint Development with Widget Wrangler
• SharePoint As a Service (7/2/2015) - NOTE: For more on this topic, please check out this episode of the Office 365 Developer Podcast where I discuss these topics with Microsoft’s Jeremy Take; it was a great discussion! For many years, Microsoft and others in the SharePoint community promoted SharePoint as a Platform. The idea was to develop business applications within SharePoint … Continue reading SharePoint As a Service
• New Guidance from Microsoft for Packaging and Deploying SharePoint Solutions (1/31/2015) - This article is reposted from my old MSDN blog. Please post comments here as I am no longer able to publish or respond to them on MSDN. Thanks! Microsoft is cleaning house. Now that it has to maintain SharePoint for thousands of enterprises and millions of users in Office 365, Microsoft is working to clean up all the … Continue reading New Guidance from Microsoft for Packaging and Deploying SharePoint Solutions

Best Practices

• ALM for Widget Solutions (11/11/2016) - Colleague and fellow SharePoint developer Brian McCullough asked a great question on Twitter: This is such an important topic I thought it was worth more than a 140-character reply; hence this article. Whole books have been written on Application Lifecycle Management,and there are many facets beyond simple software deployment, but this article will focus on the baseline … Continue reading ALM for Widget Solutions
• New Performance Best Practices for SharePoint Online Portals (10/20/2016) - or, Avoiding the BLOB (and other) caches in SharePoint Online SharePoint was designed to work best in relatively small farms on premises. A typical configuration has 2-4 web front-ends, so caching information on the web servers is a good strategy. In SharePoint Online, however, a typical farm has hundreds of web front-ends, and is shared … Continue reading New Performance Best Practices for SharePoint Online Portals
• Flexible SharePoint Development with Widget Wrangler (1/13/2016) - (Cross posted at Julie Turner’s blog, SharePoint Customization: Vedi, Vini, Vici) What’s a widget, and why should I care? In economics, a widget is a name for a generic gadget or manufactured good; on the web, a widget is a generic piece of web functionality running on a page. What makes widgets special is that, unlike controls … Continue reading Flexible SharePoint Development with Widget Wrangler
• The Well-Tempered AngularJS Web Part (3/21/2015) - Listen while reading … The mathematics of music isn’t as simple as you might think, and early musical instruments often didn’t get it right. Keyboard instruments were especially susceptible to this. On a particular organ, for example, the fifth interval in the key of C might sound harmonious, but the fifth above Ab might be sour … Continue reading The Well-Tempered AngularJS Web Part
• New Guidance from Microsoft for Packaging and Deploying SharePoint Solutions (1/31/2015) - This article is reposted from my old MSDN blog. Please post comments here as I am no longer able to publish or respond to them on MSDN. Thanks! Microsoft is cleaning house. Now that it has to maintain SharePoint for thousands of enterprises and millions of users in Office 365, Microsoft is working to clean up all the … Continue reading New Guidance from Microsoft for Packaging and Deploying SharePoint Solutions

Puzzlers

• Vantage Point Puzzler: Drive Synchronicity (10/25/2016) - Here’s a little puzzler based on a personal experience I had a recently. I had finally outgrown my backup drives, so I purchased two identical new ones online. When they arrived, I set about backing up my home server to both drives. I use Beyond Compare to make backups; while this is a wonderful file synchronization … Continue reading Vantage Point Puzzler: Drive Synchronicity

Quick Tips

• HTML Templates and CSS in SharePoint Framework Apps (12/12/2016) - “The time has come,” the Walrus said, “To talk of many things: Of template files, cascading styles, And bundles made of strings, And why SharePoint is boiling hot, And whether pigs have wings.” Like many SharePoint developers of late, I’ve been exploring the SharePoint Framework (SPFx), doing experiments, and porting code over to the new web … Continue reading HTML Templates and CSS in SharePoint Framework Apps
• How to read information in a SharePoint Person field via the REST API (9/16/2015) - A colleague of mine recently had a challenge reading data out of a SharePoint person field via REST and then rendering it in AngularJS. As it turns out, I had the same challenge recently and found the solution … so here it is! If you simply read the person field, you’ll end up with the … Continue reading How to read information in a SharePoint Person field via the REST API
• Understanding Javascript Promises (3/16/2015) - I have to admit I found the concept of Promises difficult to grasp at first; once I understood, I’ve been looking for a good way to explain it to others. This article is my attempt to make Promises easy to understand through a simple metaphor. Imagine you’ve entered a crowded restaurant. You force your way … Continue reading Understanding Javascript Promises
• Stretching the (HTML 5) Canvas: Fixing Aspect Ratio Problems (3/9/2015) - The Problem I’m working in a web part that uses the HTML 5 <canvas> element, and I ran into a little problem. The web part is a “microsurvey” that asks a single question and, when the user clicks an answer, displays the results of the survey so far. For the results, I wanted to show a bar … Continue reading Stretching the (HTML 5) Canvas: Fixing Aspect Ratio Problems
• How to: Display the name of the Windows user logged into your ASP.NET Site (2/5/2015) - This is really pretty simple but I was surprised not to find it in any one blog posting. It's easy to display the Application Pool account rather than the logged in user. Some articles said to turn on Impersonation, but that's often a bad idea for other reasons. This is what worked for me just now.