This year again I have the opportunity to speak at the SPS NYC.

I’ll give a speech about “Migrate your custom components to the SharePoint Framework”.

Together we will see how you can transition from either the server-side object model or the add-ins development fashions to the modern SharePoint Framework approach. This session is mostly meant for developers and technical architects who are curious about getting started on the new model and that might have legacy applications.

This year again I have the privilege to be part of the organizing committee for SharePoint Saturday Montréal 2018 taking place June the 2nd at Cégep du vieux Montréal.

It’s free, it’s the occasion to learn a lot, not only about SharePoint but also about Office 365 and Azure.

This year in a few numbers:

• 25 sessions (in English and French)
• 1 Keynote by the Great Serge Tremblay
• 16 Microsoft MVP (Most Valuable Professional)
• 1 MSP (Microsoft Student Partner)
• 5 MCT (Microsoft Certified Trainers)
• 9 partners
• 200 attendees (planned)

Besides the content, it’s also the occasion to develop your network, eat some Schwartz (smoked meat) and “SharePint” (Share a pint) !

This year again I have the honour to be selected to speak at the Techorama Belgium 2018.

It is a paid event taking place at the Kinepolis Antwerp (attending/speaking in a cinema theater is really cool!) from May 23rd and 24th. They have a great content, great speakers (many folks from Microsoft or other MVPs) and if you haven’t booked your ticket yet, I suggest you do!

I’ll be giving two sessions that are related:

The history being this situation….

Internet Explorer has been a corporate browser for two decades now. And many of us remember the dark ages of web development when we needed to have “IE compatible code” and “web compatible code”.

As many companies invested deeply in the browser building portals that worked with specific versions, Microsoft provided a decade ago a compatibility mode, allowing the browser to “behave” like a former version of itself and stay compatible with websites that had not been updated.

Part of my role at 2toLead is to help set guidance around best source management practices either internally or for our customers. One of the questions I get often is: Should I fork this repository or do something else with it?

It’s hard to get clear and simple guidance on the web so I thought I’d take a stab at it.

As we’re using Visual Studio Team Services, my examples and screenshots will be based on it, but it really applies to any git service like Github or internal git servers.

TL;DR;

I added two new SharePoint framework WebParts PnP sample to demonstrate how to use the Unified Communications Web API JavaScript SDK from Skype for business. This SDK allows you to do things like subscribe to a person status, start instant messaging conversations, calls…

To get a look:

• The plain JS sample
• The reactJS + Office UI Fabric React sample(persona card)

Long version

I recently had the occasion to make my first contribution to PnP (besides creating issues and helping investigate those). In these two new samples I show you how to you how to leverage the Skype UCWA SDK to subscribe and display people skype status.

SharePoint Fest DC (Washington) 2018 is happening from March 26th to March 30th. This event will feature 2 days pre-conference workshops and 3 days of conference. You can find more information about it on the website. I’ve been selected amongst 44 other speakers to present this year two sessions:

AZR204 – Microsoft Graph and SharePoint framework under steroids with Azure Functions

“Modern development means client side first, backend second. However, there are still cases where you might need some backend processing, for long running operations, heavy computing consuming tasks or security concerns.

TL; DR;

Microsoft replaced @types/es6-collections by the es2015.collection library in version 1.4.0 of the packages. Those had a conflicting definition of weakmap which caused issues with packages like lodash.

Long version

Microsoft recently release v1.4.0 of the SharePoint Framwork and it’s packages. It contains a lot of improvements and one of those probably went unnoticed by many of us.

@types/es6-collections has been replaced by es2015.collection library (native, comes with the compiler/JS Engines). That package had a “special” definition of WeakMap (among other things) which was causing numerous packages not to work properly, include one of my favorites: lodash.

This year again I have the opportunity to speak at the SPS Detroit.

I’ll give a speech about “Improving DevOps using Microsoft’s Business Productivity Tools and more” and I’ll be co-presenting the session with my friend Haniel Croitoru.

We’ll explore together how DevOps practices impact and improve solutions delivery for your customers and for the best. With real life scenarios and experience for the field we’ll show you how you can get started and what to expect out of it.

Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) provides great Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Deployment (CD) functionalities you can leverage to implement DevOps pipelines and automation with your custom developments.

If your custom solutions rely on PnP PowerShell during their build and/or deployment processes, you will need PnP PowerShell to be installed on the agent. Unfortunately the Hosted Agents do not have PnP PowerShell installed by default. Note: that documentation only applies to the Hosted and Hosted 2017 agents, the Linux Hosted Agent is not supported at the moment