What's New in the SharePoint Framework Developer Preview?

Recently, Microsoft announced the new SharePoint Framework, which is a Page and Part model offering modern capabilities including client-side development, open tooling support and integration with Microsoft Graph.

The SharePoint Framework is believed to take the development of Sharepoint Solutions to the next level. It offers client-side application development using open source JavaScript technologies and web template framework, both on cloud and on-premises SharePoint. The world’s top ASP.NET Development Company, Microsoft designed this framework to empower SharePoint developers across the globe to build advanced Sharepoint applications.

What is SharePoint Framework?

Before we proceed further, let us first understand what actually a Sharepoint Framework is. Basically, it is a new model allowing the developers to develop customized sharepoint applications on the SharePoint platform. It is based on the concept of developing client-side solutions that can be integrated with the modern SharePoint UX.

What’s the big thing about SharePoint Framework?

With the new SharePoint Framework, developers for the first time can develop their applications beyond platforms like Microsoft and Visual Studio. Also, with this new Framework, developers can use any JavaScript to build SharePoint Framework solutions. Since SharePoint Framework offers an extensive web development support, solutions can be developed on any platform including Linux and OS X using code editor of developer’s choice.

Microsoft hasn’t used a proprietary development model specific to SharePoint this time. Instead it offers tools and techniques that can be widely used by developers across all platforms. In addition, the Product Group is dedicated to be used with publicly available APIs for building solutions with improved capabilities than the existing ones.  

The SharePoint Framework and its tool-chain empower developers to solve the common challenges they face. Since the new SharePoint Framework has a structured approach to modern application development, developers can build end-to-end customized solutions that are no more dependent on .NET.

However, an important thing to note here is that although customized solutions built using the SharePoint Framework run on both old and new websites, SharePoint Add-ins work only with the old one. Therefore, in order to extend the capabilities of your new SharePoint UX, developers would need to make use of the SharePoint Framework.

Organizations for now don’t need to use modern team sites and they can still use the user experience that they are familiar with. This is a great way of cost saving for those organizations who have already invested big in SharePoint solutions and have a trained team for working with the specific UX. But once your organization starts adopting the modern team sites, you can build your solutions using the SharePoint Framework to further enhance their capabilities.

New SharePoint Page Experience

One of the key components of the SharePoint Framework is the new SharePoint Page experience that begins with the page structure. As mentioned above, pages in the modern Sharepoint Framework are technology independent and can be built using any client-side templating and JavaScript framework. With this new page structure, developers get a number of new opportunities, other than the ability to host add-ins, web parts, and more.

Hence, it can be said that this modern page structure will allow developers to extend the capabilities of their SharePoint more efficiently with greater reliability and speed than ever. Plus, it is mobile-responsive too.

With the announcement of this modern Sharepoint Framework, a common question is being buzzing around – When should one use the Shared Framework? Microsoft explains that whenever developers want to extend the capabilities of their modern team sites, they can use this framework, which is their only option. This is because SharePoint Framework is the only SharePoint development model that supports all modern SharePoint sites.  Plus, the SharePoint Framework solutions can work both in the classic and modern experience. This means that regardless of whether your organization is using modern team sites or not, building your solutions using the new SharePoint Framework is worth it so that they can be used in the future. In addition to these considerations, there are also some architectural concerns to use the SharePoint Framework and other SharePoint development models.