As someone who’s been blogging about technical topics for years, I’ve always struggled with consistency. Some articles feel more conversational, others too formal. Some include helpful context and anecdotes, others jump straight into code. The voice varies depending on when I wrote it, how much coffee I’d had, and what mood I was in that day.

What if I could capture my writing style—the good parts—and have AI help me maintain that consistency across everything I write?

I’m very excited to announce I’ll be in Miami for the Microsoft 365 Community Day Miami event. This will be my first time speaking in Miami, but have heard so many awesome things about the event and the city itself. If you are in the area, please come by and say hello. I always love meeting new people and catching up with old friends.

If you’ve been working with SharePoint Framework (SPFx) for any length of time, you know the drill: look up the Node.js version compatibility, install the right LTS version, manually install Yeoman, the SPFx generator, and the correct task runner (Gulp or Heft, depending on the version). For modern SPFx versions, this might take 5 minutes if you know what you’re doing. For older versions or platform-specific deployments like SharePoint 2019 or Subscription Edition? Much longer.

What if I told you there’s a way to do all of this in under a minute, completely automated, for any SPFx version—past, present, or future?

Updated for SPFx v1.21.1

With the release of SPFx v1.22.0, Microsoft has moved the default build toolchain from Gulp to Heft. This article provides a quick start guide to setting up a new SPFx development environment using Heft as the toolchain. If you are new to SPFx or just want to set up a new environment, this guide will walk you through the necessary steps.

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 with SPFx using the Gulp toolchain. In case you haven’t heard, v1.22.0 will no longer use Gulp 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 switched to Heft a while back. Since they are actively maintaining Heft for their own use, we will now benefit from that work.

Expect a companion post soon on getting started with SPFx using the Heft toolchain.

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.