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Terminate batches quickly in VSCode

Don’t you ever get tired of being asked “Are you sure you want to terminate the batch?” every time you try to terminate a batch in VSCode? I know I do.

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Using Teams Toolkit with NVS

NVS is great when you need to switch between different versions of Node.js within a VSCode project. But Teams Toolkit needs a default version of Node.js installed – before you start your project. Here is how I fix it.

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Associate Node.js version with your SPFx solutions

If you use a node version manager like nvm or nvs, wouldn’t you like to automatically load the right version of Node.js when you open an SPFx solution in VSCode? I know I do. Because I am lazy.

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From PowerPoint to Demos Easily With Desktops

Introduction If you’ve ever tried to give a PowerPoint presentation and switch to your desktop to do a demo, you may have noticed that PowerPoint tends to fight with you to stay in slide show mode.

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Launching Edge with different profiles using shortcuts

Find out how you create create shortcuts that will launch your Edge browser with a different profile. Bonus: find out how to configure your Stream Deck buttons to launch Edge, Teams, and conference calls using different browsers.

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My Demo Checklist for PnP Calls

I’m not a great presenter. I have been working in IT for over thirty years, during which time I have done many technical demos… and failed many of them.

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Getting rid of JSON validation errors on comments

Introduction If you’re an SPFx developer who uses Visual Studio Code, you may have noticed that the JSON files that the Yeoman generator creates contain comments to help you understand how to configure your manifest. The only problem is: JSON files aren’t supposed to have comments.

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Adding custom Edge profile images

Edge Chromium lets you use different browsing profiles, but did you know that you could have custom profile images for each one? Here’ show.

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Getting to know Microsoft Lists

Introduction As Microsoft Lists starts rolling out to Microsoft 365, I find that more and more people seem to get confused about Microsoft Lists vs SharePoint, or complaining about how they’ll have to “learn a new product … again!

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SPFx Compatibility Matrix

Here is a handy compatibility matrix telling you which version of SharePoint and SPFx work together.

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Ultimate Developer Tool List for SPFx

I asked the SharePoint Developer Community what development tools they use on their workstations to develop SPFx solutions. They came through!

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Fixing base64 SVG icons in SPFx

According to Microsoft, you should be able to use a base64-encoded SVG image for your web part icon, but it hasn’t worked in a while. Here is how to fix it.

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August 2019 Updates to SharePoint pages and news authoring — updates for busy people

If you’ve ever used Visual Studio’s Web Deploy feature to deploy using a file share, you may have experienced issues where some files cannot be overwritten because they are in use. You may not already know this: ASP.NET Core has a built-in mechanism to take applications offline and display a message. This article describes how you can use Visual Studio’s Web Deploy feature to automatically take your web application offline while you deploy a new version, and restore it back online when deployment is complete using (pretty much) all out-of-the-box features of Visual Studio and ASP.NET Core.

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SharePoint Migration: Mind the URL Length

This article discusses the current limitation with URL lengths in SharePoint. It discusses how this limitation manifests itself, and how it can impact you during your SharePoint migration.

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Prevent SCSS from changing your CSS class names

Sometimes, when working on a SPFx project, I just want to define a CSS class in my .scss file but I don’t want the SASS pre-processor to append random strings to my class names.

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SharePoint Framework Timeline

Here is a timeline which highlights the SPFx Yeoman generator’s history since it first became available.

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SharePoint Framework Design Series: Web Part Titles and Descriptions

Anyone who has worked with me on a SharePoint project knows that I firmly believe that a good custom web part must be indistinguishable from the out-of-the-box SharePoint web parts. They need to look and behave like they were written by whichever awesome team at Microsoft is responsible for writing those things.

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Introducing the SharePoint Framework Design Series

Anyone who has worked with me on a SharePoint project knows that I firmly believe that a good custom web part must be indistinguishable from the out-of-the-box SharePoint web parts. They need to look and behave like they were written by whichever awesome team at Microsoft is responsible for writing those things.

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Disabling Telemetry network traffic on SPFx workbench

When testing a SharePoint web part on the SPFx workbench, analyzing network traffic using your web browser’s developer tools can get pretty overwhelming; there are so many telemetry calls every few seconds that it becomes impossible to figure out what calls are real API calls, and which ones are telemetry calls.

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Sorting SharePoint List Items Using a Custom Sort

Sometimes, you need to create a view in a SharePoint list where the items are sorted using a custom sort order. For example, if you had a list of items that needs to be sorted by Rating where the possible choices are High, Medium, and Low, your list items would appear in the following order: High, Low, and Medium because SharePoint will want to sort your Rating values alphabetically.

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Setting the default timezone for SharePoint Online

Every once in a while, I write a blog post as a note to myself about something that I couldn’t find easily with the hope that next time I (or someone else in need) look for it, it’ll be easy to find. This is the case with this one.

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The Mysterious Case of the Checked-Out spcommon[1].png

When migrating from SharePoint on-premises to SharePoint Online/Office 365, you may find that some users have a checked-out file called spcommon[1].png. If you ask users about it, they’ll have no idea what you’re talking about.

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Converting SPFx Web Part from JavaScript to React

This article is written as if you’re following along and converting the application yourself. Feel free to skip to the end to get the code and compare Eric’s JavaScript-only SPFx web part with my React version of the same web part.

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Multi-Cursor Editing in Visual Studio Code

This article will demonstrate how to use multi-cursor editing. I don’t think it is particularly earth-shattering, but I do hope that someone else will learn ways to save some keystrokes.

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The Cone of Uncertainty

In software projects, we have a tendency to repeat the same mistakes over and over again.

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Information Architecture in SharePoint: 3 Dimensions of IA

In my previous post on Information Architecture (IA), I explained how using your organization’s Org Chart leads to bad IA. Unfortunately, creating an IA that caters to every user in your organization, then trying to fit it all in a single navigation structure would be difficult to achieve.

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UPDATE: Inject Custom CSS on SharePoint Modern Pages using SPFx Application Extensions

A while ago, I wrote an article describing how you can inject a custom CSS stylesheet on SharePoint modern pages using an SPFx application extension. The code sample is now part of the SharePoint SP-Dev-Fx-Extensions repository on GitHub. Since the article, I have been getting tons of e-mails asking all sorts of questions about the solution. Since SPFx 1.6 was released, I took the opportunity to upgrade the solution to the latest and greatest version of the toolset. You can find the latest code on GitHub, or download the latest SharePoint package. In this post, I’ll (hopefully) answer some questions about how to use it.

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Creating a calendar feed web part – Part I

So, I thought: why not try re-creating the out-of-the-box SharePoint events web part, but instead of reading events from a SharePoint list (or group calendar), it would read from WordPress?

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SPFx, Semantic versioning, and CHANGELOG.md

This article is a great example of that mentality. I’m really standing on the shoulder of giants and combining a few links and re-using someone else’s code (with credit, of course) to document what my approach to versioning SPFx packages is, with the hope that it helps someone else.

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Creating SPFx web part property panes with an Apply button

When you create an SPFx web part, the default Property Pane automatically submits changes to the web part. There is no “Apply” button. But sometimes you don’t want changes to the property pane fields to automatically apply. All you have to do is to add this method in your web part class…

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Getting to know SharePoint Hub sites

Unless you’re a SharePoint geek like me, you may not have been eagerly waiting for this new feature announced at Ignite 2017 in Orlando. Hub sites are a special site template that allows you to logically group team sites and communication sites under another site, with a shared navigation, theme, and logo.

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View an Article Page in Edit Mode using Query String Parameters

You may never need this tip, but I recently ran into an issue where my article page’s Edit Page button stopped working in SharePoint 2013 (probably something I messed up with the master page… I’ll fix it later). I Googled and Binged everywhere, but couldn’t find how to switch an article page to edit mode.

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Play SketchFlow/WPF Animation Programmatically

Microsoft Expression Blend makes it easy launch animations. It is easy to launch animations with a few clicks… But sometimes, you need to launch animations from within your code – for example, to launch an animation after performing calculations. This article will show you how to play an animation from within your code.

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Customizing New, Edit, and Display List Forms using InfoPath

A new feature in SharePoint 2010 is that you can customize the form that is displayed when you create a new list item by using InfoPath. That means that you can leverage the extensive capabilities of InfoPath without having to write a single line of code – and that’s a good thing, if you’re as lazy as I am and want to avoid resorting to custom code.