Tuesday, May 31, 2016

Consuming SharePoint Data on Cross Platform Apps

So Xamarin is freely available with Visual Studio 2015 Update 2. I wanted to tryout building a cross-platform application that consumes SharePoint Online data. Earlier I provided the CSOM code sample which allows you to interact with SharePoint On-Premise and Online within a universal application. But this time I am going to try out and Android. 

As the tryout is still in progress, I will update sooner the implementation is done. 

Before that, you need to have Visual Studio 2015 with Update 2 that has inbuilt support for Cross-Platform development upon selection during the installation. (This is the easiest way, of course you can install Xamarin separate and use Xamarin studio as well.)

The setup will take around 33GB across all the drivers during the installation.

Stay tuned... This is going to be awesome.

Thursday, May 5, 2016

SharePoint Framework for developers

Let me start with simply stating this is the best news I heard about SharePoint as a developer. As it is announced at the Future of SharePoint, SharePoint Framework is a Page and Part model that enables fully supported client-side development. This means the client-side development models on SharePoint just got even better. 

Microsoft has been very busy providing new APIs frequently for supporting multiple technology stacks throughout the past few years and they kept trying making these APIs platform independent with the JavaScript and REST API support. This is made even simpler and understandable with the support of the Microsoft Graph API though it is still at a level of gaining the best maturity when accessing Office 365 components.