Book Image

SharePoint Development with the SharePoint Framework

By : Jussi Roine, Olli Jääskeläinen
Book Image

SharePoint Development with the SharePoint Framework

By: Jussi Roine, Olli Jääskeläinen

Overview of this book

SharePoint is one of Microsoft's best known web platforms. A loyal audience of developers, IT Pros and power users use it to build line of business solutions. The SharePoint Framework (SPFx) is a great new option for developing SharePoint solutions. Many developers are creating full-trust based solutions or add-in solutions, while also figuring out where and how SPFx fits in the big picture. This book shows you how design, build, deploy and manage SPFx based solutions for SharePoint Online and SharePoint 2016. The book starts by getting you familiar with the basic capabilities of SPFx. After that, we will walk through the tool-chain on how to best create production-ready solutions that can be easily deployed manually or fully automated throughout your target Office 365 tenants. We describe how to configure and use Visual Studio Code, the de facto development environment for SPFx-based solutions. Next, we provide guidance and a solid approach to packaging and deploying your code. We also present a straightforward approach to troubleshooting and debugging your code an environment where business applications run on the client side instead of the server side.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)

Getting started with SharePoint Online

SharePoint Online has a separate administration and management interface called the SharePoint Admin Center. To access the page, click Admin on the Office 365, landing page (https://portal.office.com). This takes you to Office 365 Admin Center and requires you to be a SharePoint Admin or a Global Admin for your organization:

Under Office 365 Admin center, on the left-hand side, you'll get a navigation pane with all Office 365 management pages. Scroll down and click Admin centers and then click SharePoint:

This takes you to SharePoint admin center, with a direct address of the format https://{tenant}-admin.sharepoint.com/, where {tenant} is your Office 365 tenant name that you specified during Office 365 provisioning and sign-up phase:

In SharePoint admin center, you can create new collections of SharePoint sites, called site collections, configure any of the built-in services, and access any existing site collections within your tenant.

The interface is somewhat different from the more modern Office 365 admin center, but certainly still very usable. Many times, developers need to access this interface mostly to check on something, rather than spending time doing daily management tasks such as provisioning new site collections or fiddling with quotas. We anticipate the SharePoint admin center to get a refresh sometime in the future.

Your tenant should have at least the root (home) site collections provisioned at https://{tenant}.sharepoint.com. We recommend that, in the following chapters, when you build your solutions and try out the sample code, you provision new site collections and do not deploy any code in the root site collections. This way, other users in your tenant do not get confused if you leave around sample code or code that is still being worked on and might not work as intended.