SharePoint

I got back to active SharePoint development some months ago and first thing to do was to port bunch of workflows from in-prem SharePoint to cloud. Where I live we don’t usually have any simple workflows. Most of them need some backing code due to custom logic. So, my only option was to go with Microsoft Flow or Azure Logic Apps and Azure Functions. Here’s the project with one dummy function to get started.

My first draft of hierarchy traversing component got some serious feedback and it’s time to make some changes before moving on to next challenges. Hierarchy traverser is not optimal yet as it uses tail-call recursion and it’s easy to run to stack overflow with it. This blog post solves this problem and prepares for next challenges like node cache and continue-from-given-node.

I started playing with small idea about how to go through document repository on SharePoint using more universal approach than just piling code to using-blocks and methods that depend on these. My goal was to separate in code hierarchy traversing logic from document exporting logic so I can use traversing part also in other projects on different types of hirarchies. Here is my nice and clean solution.

Azure Cognitive Services has wider audience than cool young guys developing very cool mobile apps. These services can be used in very different use cases. This blog post shows how to use Azure Cognitive Services to automatically describe and tag photos added to Office 365 SharePoint picture library.

I have page in SharePoint where users can search for specific type of items and see different results in Search Results Web Parts. The page I have has eight results web parts and when nothing is found I want to keep results web parts laconic and minimal so they don’t waste space on screen.

I started learning SharePoint Framefork (SPFx) to get better on client-side development for Office 365. I decided to go with SharePoint Framework as it has simple lightweight tooling available and also because it is well documented. This blog post is short and practical introduction to SPFx and it brielfy summarized everything important you need to know to get your first client-side web part up and running.

We cannot use classic SharePoint workflows on Office 365 but using Microsoft Flow we can create new era flow applications that are triggered by events that happen in different sources. This blog post shows how to use Microsoft Flow and Azure Functions to send out e-mail when new meeting is added to SharePoint list. The idea of this blog post is to illustrate how to create the flow where custom code takes over in some point.

SharePoint timer jobs can be inconveniet to debug as you have to attach debugger to OWSTIMER.EXE after deployment. Often you must restart this process so it starts using latest version of your assemblies. When building something complex we want to run our code many times to see how it works and if there are errors. But deploying, attaching to debugger and so on – is there easier way to run timer job? Yes, there is!

MSDN subscribers can activate Office 365 developers benefit that gives them free Office 365 development instance for year. If you have this subscription then you can use your local Visual Studio to develop new style applications and then run and test them on Office 365 environment. In this posting I will introduce you hybrid development of Office 365 SharePoint applications.

SharePoint 2013 introduces new application model that externalizes all custom code from SharePoint environment and keeps SharePoint environment this way clean of bad code and hacks in system files. It seems that new app model will dominate over next versions of SharePoint. In this posting I will introduce you new application model and describe different deployment models.