Today is the day many of us have been waiting for since the big SharePoint event at May the 4th. The highly anticipated SharePoint Framework (SPFx) is here and announced in at the SharePointFest, in this blog post, as well as in the new Github repo for SharePoint. Personally I’ve been waiting for this even longer after being involved by the product team to give early feedback and also attending the first top secret DevKitchen “hackathons” where we could try out very early bits.
The first release of many to come…
This is the initial public preview release, officially christened the SharePoint Framework Developer Preview, is a beta, maybe an alpha, of the SharePoint Framework. This is by no means something you should use or deploy to production. Things will change! Period. There are several known issues at the moment and some of them will likely incur breaking changes. But please, build stuff and give feedback to the product team, use the Issues feature in the Github repo.
This initial release focuses on client-side Web Parts which can, once released, be used in you classic SharePoint sites and pages as well as in the new modern user experience that is slowly being rolled out throughout the suite. As some of you know, I’ve spent quite some time on Web Parts and written a book on the topic, so this is something that gets me really excited.
How and where to get it!
All you need to do to get your hands on it is to follow the instructions on the Github repo. I’m sure we’ll see tens and hundreds of blog posts on how to do it, but I recommend you to follow the one in the repo to start with. And, if you can’t follow it, create an issue, make a pull request with an update - make sure we get good official documentation! Heck, I’m pretty sure I will write a couple of posts on the topic, but I will also continue to provide feedback on the framework and the documentation.
You will find samples, documentation and all you need in a set of brand new repositories in Github, also under a brand user/organization called…SharePoint (yes, no more generic Office dev, SharePoint is back!).
- SharePoint organization at Github, the main source for all your SharePoint Framework details - https://github.com/SharePoint
- SharePoint Framework documentation
- SharePoint Framework API documentation
- Office UI Fabric - the React edition
Need to know more?
Keep the conversation going on Twitter, SharePoint Stack Overflow, the new Office 365 Community network and other social media, and do use the #SPFx hashtag. I’ll try to hang around at the SharePoint Stack Overflow as much as possible, since that is the best platform of the above mentioned ones.
I’ve previously written a Q&A on SharePoint Framework and will continue to update that post with details and changes in the current preview release.
Now, go, build something awesome!