SharePoint on Thorsten Hans

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 .

From the field: Ensure SharePoint Context for all kinds of redirects in MVC

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

During the last months, I was responsible for building a huge Provider-Hosted SharePoint App. During this journey, I’ve used the latest version of ASP.NET MVC and Entity Framework to build a beautiful, scalable and clean Web Application to fit customer’s requirements.

When building SharePoint Apps using Visual Studio, a NuGet Package is installed which is also responsible for including spcontext.js into your Web-App’s script folder.

This small part of JavaScript is critical. It’s responsible for concatenating SharePoint’s HostUrl QueryString Parameter to each link tag sitting in your Web-App. By concatenating this QueryString parameter, we can create a SharePointContext from within the Controller sitting behind the route that catches the target of the Hyperlink.

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.

Using SharePoint 2013 Search REST API to execute PostQueries

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

Because I’m currently writing my first Add-On for ShareCoffee which is going to provide a fluent and easy way to consume SharePoint’s Search Services, I had to dig a little bit deeper into SharePoint Search REST API.

Executing Search requests as a GET request is straight forward, and there is nothing special about them. However, if you hit the URL length limitation of your browser you should consider executing the search query using SharePoint’s PostQuery endpoint. (/_api/search/postQuery).

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:

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

Talking to SharePoint's REST Services with C# using RESTSharp

Wed, 02 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000

When it comes to SharePoint App Development (especially Cloud- and Provider Hosted Apps), most samples out there are demonstrating how to use CSOM from ASP.NET or ASP.NET MVC. Most REST Samples are dedicated to client-side logic either in JavaScript, CoffeeScript or TypeScript.

That’s fine for most scenarios, but for me, it’s important to do as many calls as possible with a single kind of data-access or service consummation.

Therefore I tried to get rid of CSOM calls from my ASP.NET MVC backend (Controllers, Repositories,…) Of course, it’s possible to deal with SharePoint’s REST API by using plain .NET Framework, but it’s not the kind of code I’d like to write in these days.

Wrong MSDN documentation on SharePoint's REST interface

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

Today I stumbled upon a documentation bug in MSDN (once again). When trying to access the list of all available WebTemplates on a SPWeb, this article describes that you can use SharePoint’s REST interface by sending an HTTP POST request to http://yourtenant.sharepoint.com/sites/yoursite/_api/web/getAvailableWebTemplates(1033).

I was wondering why I should call a GET method using a HTTP POST operation. So I gave it a try. Using Chrome’s Postman plugin (which is fantastic for experimenting with REST interfaces), I tried to call the method as described within the MSDN reference.

Create a SP2013 VM on Azure using PowerShell

Thu, 23 May 2013 00:00:00 +0000

A few weeks ago Windows Azure IaaS features reached GA. Since then I’m continuously replacing my OnPremise SharePoint development machines by new Azure VMs. To save money, I’m going to remove the virtual machines as soon as I don’t need them. Automating the process of creation and deletion is essential for me because I don’t want to spend a few minutes each day in PowerShell to get my machine up and running.

Launch modal dialogs from ECB CustomActions from within the HostWeb

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

When you’re building Apps for SharePoint 2013, you can create Pages, Client Parts or CustomActions.

For CustomActions there are two different targets, either the Ribbon or the Edit Control Block (ECB) in both cases it’s not allowed to inject JavaScript. If SharePoint allowed adding JS in these situations, the client script would run in the context of the HostWeb which would cause possible security leaks.

For ECB CustomActions you can provide an URL-Action which redirects the user to a URL defined by you (the App developer). You can add various tokens to the URL, as a SharePoint developer you’re perhaps aware of this functionality from previous SharePoint versions.

ShareCamp 2013 recap

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Last weekend we did our fourth ShareCamp at Microsoft’s German headquarter in Munich (Unterschleißheim). The ShareCamp is not a typical conference; it’s a BarCamp, BarCamps typically have no schedule until the conference starts. Every attendee can submit sessions, discussions or Hands-On Workshops.

Therefore it’s great for people who’d never spoken at huge, favorite conferences. The entire audience votes for the session proposals and depending on these votes sessions are moved to bigger or smaller rooms. (More information on BarCamps can be found here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BarCamp ).

Windows Azure IaaS reaches GA

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Windows Azure’s IaaS components have just reached GA (General Availability) status. There is also a SharePoint Template existing which can be used to host SharePoint 2013 Farms on Windows Azure IaaS. Microsoft is also providing a whitepaper describing how to scale and create a SharePoint Farm on Windows Azure using all the great features offered by the Windows Azure Cloud. You can find the whitepaper here (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=288782&clcid=0x409 )

Prevent errors while using SPWebConfigModification

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Today I ran into an issue with SPWebConfigModification.

SPWebConfigModification can be used to make changes to SharePoint’s web.config. The advantage of using SPWebConfigModification - instead of manually changing web.config files on each server - is that changes are applied automatically to each Web Frontend Server (WFE) in the farm.

Internally SharePoint is holding a collection of modifications (a collection of SPWebConfigModification) that should be applied to the web.config File. Once a modification failed, this particular instance of SPWebConfigModification may resist within the collection. Therefore you should always clear the collection directly before staging your modifications on an instance of SPWebApplication.

Yammer vs SharePoint Social in 2013

Tue, 26 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0000

There are several discussions on SharePoint’s social strategy going on at the moment. I had some great discussions with my MVP mate Adis Jugo during Summit last week. Since #SPC12 almost every SharePoint addicted developer, it-pro, power user has reviewed Yammer. If you don’t know what Yammer is, here a short introduction.

Yammer is an enterprise social network, which allows you and your coworkers to communicate in a modern way as on Facebook. The vast difference between Facebook and Yammer is, Yammer is private. That means only people from your organization or the people you’ve invited to join your network can see and take part in the conversation which is going on in your Yammer network. With the common understanding of Yammer, you should be able to follow up the ongoing discussions. Adis wrote a great post , summarizing his thoughts on SharePoint and Yammer integration and the upcoming social future. I agree with Adis; many things are missing at the moment. However, here my thoughts on Yammer vs. SPSocial