Should SharePoint Stop Changing

01-Feb-2017
SPFX

Background

This started as an answer to a SharePoint StackExchange question SharePoint development past and “future”: how to stay calm? which questions, if it’s OK that SharePoint changes all the time:

• Site templates
• “Handcoded” Full Trust Solutions
• Full Trust Solutions with help from VS
• Sandboxed Solutions
• SharePoint Apps/Add-ins
• SharePoint Framework

This is just my take on it (at the current time)

Developer => Accept change

If you want to stay calm and not have your world changed all the time, then maybe a job as a Software Developer isn’t the right for you unless you want to maintain old legacy applications.

• Cobol hasn’t changed much lately.
• Companies/Application staying on SP2007 hasn’t changed much lately.
• A carpenters job hasn’t changed much lately.

But working with the latest technologies will/should always mean change.

SharePoint Developers has always wanted to get up to date

As long as I’ve been in the SharePoint area the developers have always asked why they couldn’t work with the latest technologies:

• In SP2003 they wanted real ASP.NET not that strange SP fake
• Later the wanted ASP.NET MVC not that old WebForms.

Microsoft/ASP/SharePoint has resisted change too long

Microsoft/ASP/SharePoint has way too long tried to protect the developers from change:

• Coding ASP.NET WebForms should be just like coding WinForms, no need to learn web
• Coding Async JavaScript is hard, we’ll hide that in UpdatePanel
• Coding JavaScript/REST is hard we’ll hide that in JSOM

If you want to stay at the edge now is the time to wake up

Microsoft/SharePoint has finally accepted that if they want to be a player in web/intranet then it means playing by the webs rules.

This means that if you want to stay on the leading edge, then you should learn the tools the web world has been using for years:

• Node.js, npm, ASP.NET Core
• Grunt, Gulp, Webpack
• …
• VS Code, Atom, Sublime
• …

The jump to all these technologies is huge due to the well-meant, but harmful protection in the last section.

The leading edge will make mistakes

Staying at the leading edge means that you’ll run down some dead ends and have to restart when we as a community becomes wiser

But if you don’t want to stay on the edge then just ignore it

But there is nothing that dictates that you should stay on the leading edge if you don’t want to.

• MS has promised classic pages will stay (but not for how long)
• It seems that “old” web parts (Full Trust/Add-ins) will be supported on modern pages

Office 365 may force you to be more on the leading edge than you want to, but then there is on-premises.

Note that SPFX isn’t released yet, this is just the new Microsoft talking about things to come.

Disclaimer

All of this is easy for me to say as we in my company already switched to the new way of developing for SharePoint more than a year before SPFX, so we had time to learn the new tool chain at our own pace.

But I’d kick and scream if you tried to force me to use the full Visual Studio and ASP.NET X.X