Frontend on Thorsten Hans

Accessing an WebAPI using ADAL.JS and Azure AD within AngularJS

Wed, 12 Nov 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Building a secured WebAPI using Azure Active Directory (AAD) is pretty easy, OWIN middleware allows developers to integrate AuthN in their services quickly.

Accessing those API with plain old C# is easy because AAD Authentication Library (ADAL) for .NET is available for quite a long time (at least what we call a long time in our business :D)

During TechEd Europe, Microsoft announced and released the developer preview for ADAL.js — a lightweight JavaScript library for integrating AAD authentication into your Single Page Application (SPA).

grunt-nuget - Create NuGet packages on macOS and Linux

Wed, 24 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000

While building ShareCoffee, I recognized that building NuGet packages doesn’t work on macOS or Linux. Today I’d the chance to look again into this issue.

I’ve used grunt-nuget for building the NuGet packages for ShareCoffee from within my GruntJS tasks.

Responsible for the fact that I wasn’t able to create the NuGet packages on MacOS or Linux was the .nuspec file. To build NuGet packages on other operating systems than Windows systems, you’ve to use Unix paths instead of Windows paths.

Use 'bower install' on Heroku

Wed, 24 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000

bower.io is a fantastic tool for managing client-side dependencies. When you’re deploying a Node.js app to Heroku , you’ve to add script to your package.json file instead to get bower running right after installing your app using git.

First, you’ve to ensure that bower is part of your dependencies. Either double-check the dependencies object within your package.json or execute

npm install bower --save

Somewhere in your package.json you’ll find another object called scripts add a dedicated script for postinstall like shown in the following snippet:

SharePoint.Jasmine — Test your JavaScript directly inside your App

Tue, 25 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Today I’ve published SharePoint.Jasmine on GitHub and NuGet which allows you to test your JavaScript code directly inside of a SharePoint App. By installing SharePoint.Jasmine into your project using

Install-Package SharePoint.Jasmine

All required artifacts for executing JavaScript UnitTests using Jasmine are automatically integrated into your App project. The updated App structure will look like the following

Most important is the actual test page located in Pages/tests

An Introduction to SASS

Tue, 18 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Throughout this post, I’ll give you a rough introduction into SASS as part of my branding SharePoint sites with yeoman series. See all other posts from this series here.

SASS

SASS (Syntactically Awesome StyleSheets) is a language which compiles into CSS and allows you to write your styles in a comfortable and use all the cool things which CSS is missing like variables, mixins or nested rules.

An Introduction to CoffeeScript

Fri, 14 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000

A while ago I started a series about how to brand SharePoint sites using the Yeoman web development workflow. With this small introduction to CoffeeScript, I’d like to continue the series.

CoffeeScript is a small language that compiles into JavaScript. The initial release of CoffeeScript was published back in 2009. Since then the language has become more and more popular. The CoffeeScript source code is hosted on GitHub , and there is an excellent website (coffescript.org ) which teaches you all the things you’ve to know about the language.

Write your own ShareCoffee AddOns using the yeoman generator

Fri, 31 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Today I’ve published a new yeoman generator which allows you to create new ShareCoffee Add-Ons easily. (view on GitHub ) If you haven’t heard of Yeoman, you should check out its website at yeoman.io .

By using such a yeoman generator, you can start building web-apps or –in this case– ShareCoffee Add-Ons in no time.

Moreover, the best advantage is: All these frameworks and tools are based on Node.js and can be used from any platform running Node.js. (Also a low budget Chromebook can run Node.js).

CoffeeScript vs TypeScript vs JavaScript — my thoughts

Wed, 29 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Throughout this post, I’d like to share my thoughts on Coffee-, Type- and JavaScript, because many people from the community were asking me for which language they should go or why I’ve chosen CoffeeScript for writing my SharePoint framework ShareCoffee. First of all, I’ve been doing JavaScript for a long, long time. I’ve spent much time reading books on how to write JavaScript code and how to do it well. Here, for example, two (in my opinion essential) books for JavaScript Developers, independent from their skill.

Creating an ExcelServices JavaScript UDF — A working Sample

Mon, 11 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Excel Services in SharePoint 2013 is offering some new functionalities. One of these is a JavaScript User Defined Actions (UDFs). There is currently one a little documentation on MSDN covering this topic. The given MSDN sample contains a small example which didn’t work at all. Because a customer would like to see the new features Excel Services are offering in 2013 (including Office 365). I had the choice to discover this feature by myself 🙂.

An Introduction to Pug (aka Jade)

Tue, 22 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000

‘An Introduction to Pug’ is part of my article series ‘Branding SharePoint sites with yeoman’ see the list of all related articles here.

Why Pug (aka Jade)?

Well, HTML MasterPages and PageLayouts are great, and this is precisely what we’re going to create, but instead of writing the HTML directly we decided to use Pug (which compiles into HTML) to build robust HTML sites.

Yeoman the web development workflow

Fri, 18 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000

See other posts on ‘Branding SharePoint sites with yeoman’.

Okay , let’s get started with Yeoman. As I mentioned within the introduction, Yeoman is more a web development workflow for front-end apps than a single tool. Yeoman has been founded by leading JavaScript developers from the community (Paul Irish for example) and is maintained by Google and the community. The most important fact about Yeoman is that Yeoman is based on Node.js, which makes Yeoman available on all popular platforms such as Windows, Linux and of course macOS.

From Zero to Hero — How we brand SharePoint using Yeoman

Tue, 08 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Branding SharePoint has been taken to a new level with SharePoint 2013; you can now easily brand your SharePoint (on Premises and Demand) by using HTML MasterPages and HTML PageLayouts. This step allows many design agencies to brand SharePoint sites without digging deep into SharePoint Insights. About a year ago Experts Inside was faced with the first huge (really huge) SharePoint 2013 project were we had to provide both custom MasterPages and custom PageLayouts. Starting with HTML was fine, but after a few days working on these artifacts, we recognized that the development workflow isn’t as smart as it could be. Kevin Mees (one of our developers) started with combining both, latest SharePoint capabilities and latest web development tools. After some iterations, we’ve built an incredible development workflow for branding SharePoint portals using the latest languages such as

Maintaining Brownfield JS Apps? Check Js2Coffee

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Do you love CoffeeScript? Alternatively, you’ve to maintain Brownfield JavaScript based Applications?

Checkout Js2coffee! Js2coffee translates your JavaScript Code into nice, readable and valid CoffeeScript. In addition to the Js2coffee website (js2coffee.org ), there is also an NPM package available. You can install it directly from the terminal

npm install js2coffee
# or globally
npm install js2coffee --g

You can translate your JS file easily by providing the following command.