I am still around! As with so many people, life happens and keeping my blog up to date dropped below the active line. Rest assured, I have not been inactive during my “absence,” just not updating my blog as much as I would like. I know I have a couple of historical articles that people still come up to me at conferences and tell me they use them all the time, which makes me proud, but also guilty that I have not been keeping those updated. As we all know, an article that covered ground-breaking changes 3 years ago is now out of date and potentially misleading. So, I will be working on updating those articles over the next few months.

It’s been a while since I posted, but with SPFx v1.22.0 due out in the next couple of weeks, I decided to make a final update to this article on how to get started in SPFx using the gulp toolchain. In case you haven’t heard, v1.22.0 will no longer use the Gulp toolchain as it is being replaced with Heft. The main reason for this change is that the Gulp toolchain has been very difficult to keep up-to-date and the internal engineering teams at Microsoft changed to Heft a while back. They are actively keeping this up-to-date since they are using it, so now we will benefit from that work.

New content being built for this topic. Stand by…

UPDATE2: Almost 4 years ago, I wrote a post on how to setup up your SPFx developer environment because, at that time, I found the available documentation to be very “challenging” to understand. Since then, the official documentation has gotten much better and if you want a walk-through that explains everything, follow the link in the next paragraph.

BLAH BLAH BLAH! Just take me to the code!

This is the Quick Start guide I use when I am setting up a new computer to work with SPFx. Microsoft has a very detailed guide for SPFx setup at Set up your SharePoint Framework development environment. The Microsoft guide is good, but covers a lot of stuff that you might not need. If my guide doesn’t work for you, I would recommend that you go back to the official documentation. When working with SPFx, there are lots of additional tools that can be installed to enhance your development experience. For this Quick Start, I wanted to keep those tools to a minimum. I deviate from the “stock” installation from Microsoft with three tools that I use on a daily basis and feel are critical for developers that will be building many SPFx projects over long periods of time.

I recently started a training course with the amazing Andrew Connell through his company Voitanos. The subject for this course is Microsoft Teams Development. This is an area I have wanted expand my professional expertise in for a while, so I am very excited about the course. We are using the Teams Toolkit to develop all of the project types available in MS Teams. Our first project is an app to be surfaced as a personal tab and since we want to build a modern UI, we are using the Tab option for “React with Fluent UI.”

Have you ever sat through a presentation, watching the presenter struggle to find the next browser tab, code window, slide deck, etc., to continue the show? Or watch that awkward transition from slides to demos and back? Or the presenter uses Alt-Tab, but has dozens of apps open and struggles to find the right one? I know you have and it might have been one of my sessions! I learned a while back about a technique to make your presentations just flow from one section to the next. If you are using Windows, multiple desktops make these transitions fast and seamless.

updated from 2022-01-22

I am thrilled to announce I was selected to speak at this year’s Microsoft 365 Conference in Las Vegas on April 30th-May 5. This is always one of the premier conferences, with a large supporting cast from Microsoft and the MVP community. I am really looking forward to connecting with attendees and learning how they are using Microsoft technology to make the world better.

I recently took the certification renewal appraisal and passed! This used to be the certification earned with the passing of MS-600 exam titled “Building Applications and Solutions with Microsoft 365 Core Services.” The certification was orignially called the “Microsoft 365 Developer Associate” certification, but is now called “Microsoft 365 Certified: Teams Application Developer Associate.”

Originally, I heard that recertifications would be via an exam that was just like the original exam, but not as long. Apparently the process has changed since then and the current process is to take a recertification exam, but not like normal certification exams. There was no cost, no time limit, and if you didn’t pass, you could take the exam again. I remember reading that after the 2nd failure, you would need to wait 24 hours before re-attempting the exam.

I am so exited to announce that I will be traveling to Slovenia this May as a speaker at the Thrive Conference! I will be presenting a session on “Custom List Formatting.”

Thrive is not as well known as some of the bigger conferences in Europe, but it has an amazing reputation for being a smaller conference where interactions with the speakers and sponsors are much easier to arrange. There is even rumors that some sessions are held under the trees in beautiful Lipica, Slovenia.