Seb's Development Journey

One of the great feature of the SharePoint Framework ecosystem is the availability of the Office UI Fabric. What is great with this set of components is that it is easy to include in Office applications (client, web) and in SharePoint as it shares the same UI philosophy and it simplifies the development of those experiences.

One of the great feature of Angular is the easiness to use third party libraries. There are tons of open source libraries that can make you more productive while you are writing your code. On of my favorite (especially because I simple can’t make things pretty) is Angular Material, the Angular implementation of Google Material Design. And even better, it fits nicely with Angular Elements withing your SharePoint Framework webparts!

I’ve been working in the last few months to understand better the integration possibilities between Angular and the famous SharePoint Framework and I had a lot of fun discovering this landscape! I’ve been building some kind of a workaround with the help of some resources being made available by Microsoft a couple of months ago (funny story, I’m writing this blog post at the exact same coffee shop in a suburb of Montreal where that journey started 10 months ago) and I’ve been touring with a session to show that it was indeed possible to play with Angular and SharePoint, even though I was not recommending it for anyone who wanted to push that code to production. It was more a proof of concept than a future-proof approach. We had great conversations with Andrew Connell, Waldek Mastykarz, Marc D. Anderson and even a couple of debates with Sahil Malik. Even though it was a great learning resource (especially for anyone wanting to try out Angular in a SharePoint context), this solution had to die, some day…

In this post, we will cover the general concepts used to make the SharePoint Framework Angular Boilerplate work and how it solves the challenges that were preventing the production use of both technologies together.

So… This had to happen. Being an Office Developer and using Angular as my main UI framework, I really wanted to find a solution for supporting Angular in the modern SharePoint development toolchain, the SharePoint Framework. I’ve been starting my journey where Microsoft left (the angular2-prototype proof-of-concept that was created by some of the Microsoft folks) and made sure we can improve it to make it usable and supportable in the long run.

So! I joined an awesome team at Valo Intranet recently and I’m super excited of what we are cooking to make you fall in love with your intranet! Even though thing are going fairly smoothly over there, one very specific Office 365 feature was making me go crazy, every single day!

My next speaking engagement is gonna be an epic one! A good friend of mine, Luc Labelle from Kabesa and 2 awesome MVPs from Ottawa and Toronto (Rez Khamis and Mike Maadarani), with the help of several other MVPs from all over Canada, are throwing an amazing series of events during the second week of February. From February 6th until February 10th, we will be travelling from Quebec City to Toronto (which is 807 km!) in a bus to meet SharePoint, Office 365 and Microsoft Cloud enthusiasts!