Office 365 Developer Patterns & Practices

Many years ago it was a lot of fun and a real privilege to contribute to the SharePoint 2010 Patterns and Practices project. During the last couple of months I had the opportunity to work on the new Office 365 Developer Patterns and Practices project as well.  🙂  This time around, my team and I contributed the following 5 samples to the latest release.   The Office 365 Developer Patterns and Practices contains a lot of really handy, real world patterns and code examples you can learn from, reference, or just straight rip off to implement all sorts of goodness in SharePoint.  Don’t miss it!  You can read more about this latest release on the O365 Developer Blog here.

Here’s a little bit about each sample we made and links to download them.

Branding.ClientSideRendering – https://github.com/OfficeDev/PnP/tree/master/Samples/Branding.ClientSideRendering

This sample shows how to customize a field type with Client-Side Rendering (also called CSR, JS Link) technology in SharePoint 2013.  We built this sample from a previous MSDN sample you can read me about in the scenario documentation.  We extended the previous sample to deploy all of the components necessary to implement Client-Side Rendering via the remote provisioning pattern.

Branding.DisplayTemplates – https://github.com/OfficeDev/PnP/tree/master/Samples/Branding.DisplayTemplates

This sample demonstrates different ways to use Display Templates to render a hero image and content rotator in a Content By Search Web Part.  In this sample you can see how to make Display Templates using Responsive Web Design (RWD), Device Channels, and good old fashioned HTML and JavaScript.  Desktop web browsers, iPads, and iPhones are targeted in the mobile examples.

Core.DataStorageModels – https://github.com/OfficeDev/PnP/tree/master/Samples/Core.DataStorageModels

This provider-hosted sample application for SharePoint demonstrates the differences, advantages, and disadvantages between different data storage patterns associated with the App Model and how they are built.  It also illustrates limitations associated with certain data storage components that should be considered when deciding which data storage components to use when building with the App Model.  This is quite a sample which contains a LOT of remote provisioning for many different components in the host web and the app web.  This is a very interactive sample which includes functionality that allows you to ‘break’ SharePoint by exceeding different threshold limits associated with host and app webs.

Workflow.CallCustomService – https://github.com/OfficeDev/PnP/tree/master/Samples/Workflow.CallCustomService

This sample shows how to create a workflow that calls a custom web service that updates SharePoint list data.  This is one of the simplest patterns you can use to implement a web service which authenticates to SharePoint.

Workflow.CallServiceUpdateSPViaProxy – https://github.com/OfficeDev/PnP/tree/master/Samples/Workflow.CallServiceUpdateSPViaProxy

This sample shows how to create a workflow that calls a custom web service that updates SharePoint list data via a web proxy.  This is definitely a more complex pattern.  Just like the previous Workflow sample, you can use this pattern to implement a web service which authenticates to SharePoint.

Happy coding and keep your head up; there’s only 79 days to go until the Ski Lifts start turning again! 🙂 🙂 🙂