As 2020 ends (finally!), I realized that I neglected to post about an acheivement that I am very proud of. Last month, I was confirmed as a Microsoft Certified Trainer (MCT) for 2021. This is my 5th MCT certification and I even received a nice polo shirt for the 5-year acheivement. I am very proud to be counted among professional instructors in Microsoft technologies and look forward to more opportunities to use my certification help educate others.
Recently, I built a web part for a client, which led to a discussion about why the web part background was static white, which did not reflect the branding on the page. My quick fix was to just change the color manually, but now I wanted to know more about how I could build webparts that are aware of the area that they are in. It turns out, there are several options, depending on the capabilities needed and the web part framework.
Have you ever found yourself looking for an icon, but not able to quite track down the perfect one? Between SPFx projects and the new modern list formatting capabilities in Microsoft 365, I am often looking for the icon to perfectly represent my idea. Until now, this process involved browsing through the Fluent UI website in hopes that I will stumble across one that works. Now there is a better way: Flicon.io
This new site is the brainchild of Chris Kent, Microsoft Office Development MVP and speaker extraordinaire. As a member of the Microsoft 365 PnP Core team, Chris spends a lot of time working on samples of List formatting, often using icons in those samples. I’m betting that he got tired of trying to find appropriate icons for his entertaining demos on the weekly “Sharing Is Caring” calls and decided to build a better solution. The problem with the current process is that you can only search for icons by name and often the name does not fit into the category of icon you are looking for.
Flicon.io is a tool that lets you search for icons based on categories and tags that have been associated with each icon instead of just the name. Let’s take a look at how that works.
Anyone that knows me, knows my passion for community. This comes from the appreciation of so many people that have helped me over the years on their own time and free of charge because of their own passion for community. While I have seen this behavior in other IT “communities,” the SharePoint community is a special group that loves sharing knowledge with others. (It is right in the name!)
I was introduced to this concept about 14 years ago in my local Dallas-Ft Worth SharePoint User Group (DFWSPUG then, now O365 Community). As a newbie, it was there I found experts in a technology I was desperately trying to learn and not only did they teach us during the meetings, they offered themselves up to be contacted anytime. And they meant it! I know because I called often. Some members were Microsoft employees. Others were MVPs or MCMs. Most of us were mere SharePoint users and developers that were just helping each other expand our knowledge of the platform so that we could help our companies or customers. There are too many to name here, but a special shoutout goes to Eric Shupps(@eshupps), Kirk Evans(/in/kaevans), Miguel Wood(/in/miguelwood), and Corey Roth(@coreyroth) for answering so many questions I had during those early days (and still do!)
