So today was the last of the 3 day Evolution conference that has been running at the QEII centre in Westminster. http://www.sharepointevolutionconference.com/
The whole conference has been fantastic with a very good selection of speakers
My highlights were Andrew Connell’s (http://www.andrewconnell.com/blog) Talk on single page applications or SPA’s. I am sure this will appear on his blog soon
the other was Chris O’Brien’s (http://www.sharepointnutsandbolts.com) talk on SharePoint App’s and why they make a lot of sense. He did a mock conversation, which i have gone through myself, on how SharePoint hosted apps are not powerful enough and we want to use c# in a provider hosted app which then leads down the rabbit whole of either Azure costs or the maintenance and DR of our own server. This all leads back to the question “What was wrong with SharePoint hosted apps anyway?”
The big take away from the conference was that there is not that much you cannot do with SharePoint hosted app if you really think about it. So we need to get outside of our nice comfy C# sofa and start learning JavaScript.
By this I mean REALLY learn JavaScript and not the hacking about we have been doing for the last few years. This means that we need to treat JavaScript as a real language (I realise that it is) and write the code properly using proper patterns. So that when we look at it all in a weeks time or have to show it in a demo it will make sense and that other people can actually support the code.
This seems daunting given the limited tooling that exists for JavaScript, especially when we think how lucky we are with the debugging tools we get for .NET code.
Someone, I forget who, came up with a brilliant analogy for what JavaScript is and it was “JavaScript is assembly language for the web”
When you think about it this makes a lot of sense. In the end the C# code we write is assembly when it finally gets executed.
This means that to write good JavaScript we need to use extra tools and frameworks that other people have provided.
The obvious one is jQuery which i now think is synonymous with JavaScript. If you are not using jQuery in you JS then you are just making life difficult.
The other frameworks that we should look to use and the main reason for this post are the following:
- TypeScript (http://www.typescriptlang.org/)
- TypeScript is a typed superset of JavaScript that compiles (YAY) to plain JavaScript.
- This looks very easy to write, especially as a C# person
- I am not sure there is a reason why you wouldn’t use this for everything.
- Modernizr (http://modernizr.com/)
- Modernizr is a JavaScript library that detects HTML5 and CSS3 features in the user’s browser.
- Knockout (http://knockoutjs.com/)
- Implements a MVVM pattern
- Durandal (http://durandaljs.com/)
- a Single Page App framework
- Bootstrap (http://twitter.github.io/bootstrap/index.html)
- Makes pages look nice
- Font Awesome (http://fortawesome.github.io/Font-Awesome/)
- Made for Bootstrap and provides icons and animations all through CSS and JS
- This is very cool
- LinqJS (http://linqjs.codeplex.com)
- I have actually used this in an app I have been working on and it is very useful
- Toastr (https://github.com/CodeSeven/toastr#readme)
- SharePoint style non-blocking notifications
Using some or all of the above does make the learning a little more daunting but after seeing the results this is clearly the way to move forward. When you see how little code you actually have to write it is just amazing what can be done.
As well as the extra frameworks the other key JavaScript things to learn are namespaces and promises.
Something else to note. Make sure you have the latest version of the SharePoint development tools installed and make sure you have the “Web Essentials 2012” extension installed as well. This will make life easier.
Please do not ask me for any code samples or video’s of the event as I do not have any and if I did I wouldn’t be allowed anyway.
