O365 on Thorsten Hans

O365 API — The ultimative list of resources for devs

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

Finding information targeting the latest Office 365 API builds can be a hard job, that’s why Chaks - he’s one of the Program Managers at Microsoft who’s currently working on the O365 API Tools — has summarized an impressive list with all critical resources.

If you’re new to Office365 development and don’t know where to get started, I advise you to read at least this post http://chakkaradeep.com/index.php/the-ultimate-link-roll-for-getting-started-with-office-365-apis

On top of that, he’s frequently blogging great articles on O365 and sharing examples on those APIs.

Office 365 API Tools — GA Release changes

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

Yesterday I only posted a short post about the most recent release of Office 365 API Tools.

I had the chance to get some hands-on since yesterday and the most important thing you’ll see when using the GA Release maybe, that there is no longer a CalendarApiSample, MailApiSample or similar sample class for accessing resources from Office 365.

There are some reasons why those samples are gone, but for developers starting with Office 365, it’s a little bit harder right now to get started.

Office 365 API Tools Update

Tue, 28 Oct 2014 00:00:00 +0000

The Office 365 API Team released a new version of Office 365 API Tools today. The new release can be downloaded directly from Visual Studio Gallery right here or by using Visual Studio’s Extension Manager Window.

With this version, the Tools are official out of preview.

ShareCoffee 0.1.3

Fri, 03 Oct 2014 00:00:00 +0000

ShareCoffee 0.1.3 is available by now on NuGet and bower. It’s only a small release at this time. Previously I’ve added ShareCoffee.Commons.infect() to ShareCoffee as described here .

With 0.1.3 this method got an optional parameter which is very useful for SharePoint Hosted Apps. If you built a SharePoint Hosted App using a plain HTML or ASPX Page, you’ve also to maintain all a and form tags and ensure that SPHostUrl is part of the QueryString.

ShareCoffee 0.1.2

Sat, 27 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000

A while ago I wrote about SharePoint Apps in ASP.NET MVC and how to get them working.

With ShareCoffee 0.1.2 — which is already available on NuGet and bower — you can now ensure that SPHostUrl is appended to all links in your Apps without making changes to spcontext.js which is provided by Microsoft.

You can now remove the OOB bundle config and references to spcontext.js from your Apps and use a single function to extend all links and forms by directly calling

ShareCoffee eBook

Fri, 29 Aug 2014 00:00:00 +0000

About a week ago I finally published my first eBook on LeanPub .

The book covers all the different ShareCoffee features and describes how to use them within SharePoint App projects. On about 100 pages all the different capabilities are explained and demonstrated using small code-snippets.

There is also a short SharePoint App introduction included if you’re not familiar with the SharePoint App platform. Leanpub is offering a flexible pricing model. So usually the minimal price for my eBook is $9.99 but based on a two-week poll the suggested price has been locked at $10.99 (but it’s entirely up to you how much you spend).

ShareCoffee with JsonLight support

Mon, 25 Aug 2014 00:00:00 +0000

A few minutes ago, I published the version 0.1.1 of ShareCoffee.

It’s available on NuGet and bower.io for downloading and upgrading if you’re already using it. New in the current release is JsonLight support for Office365. If you’re running on demand, your tenant can produce different results when calling SharePoint’s REST services.

On August 13th, Microsoft announced the availability of JSON Light responses for Office 365 on its Office blog right here .

Implementing CRUD with Office365 APIs

Sun, 01 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Office365 API’s current preview version can generate some sample code for you. However, the sample only contains code for reading data. People from the community asked me how they can write entities back to Office365, and that’s why I want to share the following sample, which explains to you how to implement all CRUD methods using Office365 API.

I hope this post makes clear, that Office365 is supporting the full CRUD stack, no matter which kind of entity (Contacts, Calendar Events, Users, Groups, Mails, Files) you’re interested in!

Proper Paging Implementation for Office365 APIs

Mon, 19 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000

I’m currently working on another (fancier) sample for using Office365 APIs from Web Applications. During today’s night session I tried to implement the entire Service and Repository for my sample. I started with the current sample API implementation from Office 365 API Tools I made a lot of changes to this to provide even more features and to be more efficient as the current static class sample.

During this post, I’d like to show only the GetContacts method which has been refactored a little bit to provide real paging support for my contacts sitting in Exchange Online.

Building an Office365 development machine using Microsoft Azure VirtualMachines in no time

Tue, 13 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Today Microsoft announced the availability of client machines in Microsoft Azure. It turns out to be an excellent deal for Office365 Developers too. By just creating a new Machine (let’s take a Windows 8.1 including Visual Studio 2013 Update 2 for example) you can quickly spin off an Office365 development machine in no time.

When logged in to the Azure Portal, you’ve to navigate to Virtual Machines and select New and pick an Image from the Gallery

Using Office365 API's in MVC WebApps

Tue, 13 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Yesterday a new version of Office365 API Tools Preview had been shipped. Many things have changed with the latest release. I’ll not write all the new features and changes down manually, instead I’ll explain how to write an MVC WebApp which calls into Office365 and pulls out upcoming events from Exchange Online for the given user.

Before you start

Ensure that you’ve installed the latest Version of Office365 API Tools Preview you can either download the bits from dev.office.com or install/update it directly from within Visual Studio 2013 using the Extensions and Updates window.

ShareCoffee 0.0.11

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

Over the last weeks, I’ve added some new features to ShareCoffee which are now available in the most recent release.

As for all previous versions you can grab a copy using NuGet or Bower.IO.

New Shorthand for ShareCoffee

To save even more keystrokes when building Apps for SharePoint, you can access ShareCoffee now by using the $s shorthand.

Inject custom AppWebUrl

Since the first release of ShareCoffee, you’re able to load AppWebUrl by providing a custom function. With the release of 0.0.11, you’re also able to load the AppWebUrl by yourself and provide the actual string to ShareCoffee.

The ShareCoffee logo

Sat, 22 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000

I’m glad to present the new ShareCoffee logo.

A big thank you to Oliver Jungmann for creating the awesome logo. A big thank you to Stefan Hübsch for providing his awesome new font Typocalypse Lichtspiele .

For me as a developer, it’s always amazing to see people creating such logos in almost no time. Creativity is just awesome.

For all the SharePoint Conference attendees out there, Hopefully, the ShareCoffee stickers are shipped before #SPC14. Come and visit my #SPC417 session and grab some of those cool stickers.

ShareCoffee.UserProfiles is available

Fri, 21 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Today I’ve published the next AddOn for ShareCoffee . ShareCoffee.UserProfiles. It’s providing a dedicated wrapper for SharePoint’s UserProfiles API.

By using the new AddOn, you can easily configure REST requests for dealing with SharePoint’s UserProfile REST API from both, SharePoint Hosted and Cloud-Hosted Apps.

Installation

You can install the AddOn (which will automatically pull ShareCoffee as a dependency) by using.

NuGet
bower.io

Coverage

Not all UserProfile methods are currently available as REST endpoint. Currently, SharePoint is offering the following methods which can, of course, be used with ShareCoffee

Query FormDigestValue from SharePoint using ShareCoffee

Tue, 28 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000

When running in a SharePoint-Hosted App, you can easily receive the FormDigestValue by executing ShareCoffee.Commons.getFormDigest() which is very easy.

However, if you’re executing queries from a plain HTML page sitting in your SharePoint-Hosted App - or in the case, you’re running in an Office Add-In - you can ask for a FormDigestValue using ShareCoffee’s REST interface. The following sample code shows how to receive the FormDigestValue from within a plain HTML Page using AngularJS.

ShareCoffee.Search is available

Tue, 28 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000

I’m glad to announce the availability of ShareCoffee.Search GitHub 0.0.1.

Today I’ve published the first Add-On for ShareCoffee. By using ShareCoffee.Search (which is also available on NuGet, bower.io, and GitHub) you can now easily execute Search queries from any SharePoint App. ShareCoffee.Search offers a fully configured PropertyObjects to support you by writing any search query. Of course, can you use ShareCoffee to execute a GET or POST request against SharePoint’s Search API but then you’ve to remember all of the property names, which turned out to be very time-consuming. That’s why I decided to publish this Add-On.

What's new in ShareCoffee 0.0.8

Thu, 16 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Today I’ve published ShareCoffee 0.0.8. You can download the latest version from GitHub or directly include the library into your project by using NuGet or bower.io.

What’s new in this release

Version 0.0.8 of ShareCoffee ships with some great new features. I’ve added full API documentation which is hosted directly on GitHub (see the docs folder) or have a look at the .coffee sources. I’ve also removed the classes ShareCoffee.REST.angularProperties, ShareCoffee.REST.jQueryProperties and ShareCoffee.REST.reqwestProperties. Instead, a unified, new class called ShareCoffee.REST.RequestProperties was added.

Visualise your data with ShareCoffee and ChartJS

Fri, 20 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Visualizing data in SharePoint Apps is easy if you combine ShareCoffee and ChartJS.org . ChartJS.org is a small JavaScript library which is responsible for rendering HTML5 charts in websites.

Creating a sample App

For this post, I’ve prepared a small SharePoint list containing EnergyDrinks and their amount of caffeine. 🙂 To read the data from SharePoint, you need to include and reference ShareCoffee. Using Visual Studio’s Package Manager Console you can install ShareCoffee using Install-Package ShareCoffee Including ChartJS.org is also really easy, grab the Chart.js file from GitHub or the project site chartjs.org .

Loading the App ChromeControl with ShareCoffee

Fri, 13 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000

ShareCoffee assists you as a SharePoint App Developer in various situations. Of course is the most significant benefit the unified REST layer across all different kinds of SharePoint Apps and query targets (AppWeb / HostWeb).

But there are some other nice features backed into ShareCoffee. Within this post I’ll explain how to load SharePoint’s ChromeControl and CSS within Cloud-Hosted-Apps. First, it’s important to mention that ShareCoffee does not require any other JavaScript library. It’s no problem if you’re using jQuery or similar libraries, but you don’t have to. Instead of following the MSDN and writing about 40 lines of JavaScript code to get the ChromeControl into your app, ShareCoffee exposes a single function which has to be called to achieve the goal. First, you’ve to install ShareCoffee within your App. ShareCoffee can be installed in various ways.

ShareCoffee is available

Tue, 29 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve published ShareCoffee today on GitHub . ShareCoffee is a small library containing cool stuff for SharePoint App developers. ShareCoffee is entirely written in CoffeeScript using the test-driven-design approach with (Mocha, ChaiJS, and SinonJS). Since the SharePoint App model is available, I thought about writing this library, but within the last four days I sat down and created it! 🙂

ShareCoffee is offering all the stuff I was faced with since I started App development for SharePoint. The goal was for me to create a library which provides a single programming interface for any SharePoint App. What is ShareCoffee offering ShareCoffee is offering various functionality which I’ve grouped into the following namespaces: