Did you know that you can easily test your SharePoint Framework web parts on modern pages?
If there’s one guy who know, it’s my friend Waldek Mastykarz. Today he had a post outlining how you can debug/test SPFx web parts on a real modern page, not the SharePoint workbench.
I have had a Cisco Meraki MR-33 hooked up for a little while, which is positioned pretty centrally in an L shaped space. The issue is that the building is old with lots of brick walls. In the far room of the long leg of the L there is about 2 meters of space which gets pretty spotty connection. Not a huge deal, but enough to irritate :)
Setting up a second access point via cable is not a viable option so I decided to mesh two access points instead. The setup was easy, but the throughput was not amazing, averaging around 15mbit/s, and lower. You might think this is ok as we’re meshing, but the good thing is that it can be improved.
Note: Read the Meraki guide Manually Changing Channels in a Mesh Network for information on how you can change the channel used for meshing.
By default when you have auto channels for both the 2.4GHz and the 5Ghz radio, the 5GHz channel will be set to the same channel for both devices, and this is used for meshing. Having band steering on, where clients also use 5GHz, this will greatly reduce the speed.
What I did was this.
This setup “ensures” clients use 5Ghz, while the mesh traffic have the full bandwidth itself on the 2.4GHz radio. Now my throughput is pretty consistent around 55mbit/s.
Ever in the need to use Office 365 icons and wonder how they can be used? Head over to https://fasttrack.microsoft.com/dl/brandingkit (requires login) and download the Microsoft Office 365 Branding Toolkit today.
The downloaded zip file has icons in different formats. Below are samples of the 256x256 icons, and the file only contains .png files.
The web part haven’t change much, but the following configuration options are now available:
I have also fixed the code so that it won’t fail when loading AMD module scripts – meaning the scripts will not detect themselves as module scripts, but load globally instead.
You can get the code from https://github.com/SharePoint/sp-dev-fx-webparts/tree/master/samples/react-script-editor.
Image by Emily Morter on Unsplash
This is a short one, and not much has changed. Basically I removed the old browser based SharePoint Online login method as it caused too much friction on Windows 10 machines. And I fixed an issue where all properties did not show when using the new SharePoint Online login method.
Photo by Ash Edmons on Unsplash
Modern sites are no longer using the old theming engine directly with .sptheme, .spcolor and .spfont files. Instead you can use the Theme Generator tool to get your colors the way you want them, and this is what this post will focus on, how you can automatically set the right colors using PnP. The post has two samples, one using PnP PowerShell and one using a PnP Provisioning template.
Saving photos or images from PowerApps to SharePoint is not easy, but there are workarounds using for example Flow to get this to work as I’ve written about previously. The caveat with this approach is that when using the camera control you won’t get full resolution on the images you take, but a scaled down version – and adding Flow to the mix increased complexity.
With the recent release of supporting attachments with SharePoint lists in PowerApps it’s now possible to get those high resolution photos into SharePoint. But, it’s not straight forward. Even though it’s possible you should think it through before going full on production with this.
Note: This post is written based on testing on iOS.
Uploading photos is a common ask when using PowerApps on mobile device. You might create a reporting application of sorts which supports adding photos as documentation. My first thought was to utilize the new attachment support, pick the camera as input and be done with it. Turns out I should stop believing in fairy tales when a feature is just released :). When tapping the “Attach file” link, you get a dialog to browse your iCloud Drive, not an option to tap into the camera. Which makes sense as you need an attachment filename. This means we cannot use the default add attachment functionality.
What I came up with was using the “Add picture” control with a custom collection, and then binding the forms attachment control value to this collection. You also need to reset the form after you modify the collection in order for the change to be picked up in the control (which is needed for it top be submitted). The reset has a timing issue, so I had to add a timer control which reset’s the form every 1 second. It’s all in a days works of duct tape.
Oh well.. let’s build the application, and you will see for yourself.
This is not hard at all these days, as the Modern Yammer web part recently got updated and allows you to pick “All Company” as the feed to display.
First add the Yammer web part to your page.
Then search for “All Company” and pick it. Previously you had to paste the link to a group, but this search experience makes it a lot easier indeed.
Here’s my presentation and don’t hesitate to contact me if you want to learn more.
