Are Today’s SharePoint Developers in Jeopardy?

I recently gave a presentation Global Office 365 Developer Bootcamp in New York. I introduced SharePoint Framework. It was fairly demo-oriented and I was asked a lot of great questions. Questions are great and I love that kind of back-and-forth Q&A best of all. However, this experience reminded me of last July’s SharePoint Saturday event. I sat in on a fellow, Rob Windsor, who introduced the TypeScript programming language. Read his abstract here: http://lanyrd.com/2017/spsnyc/sfrxry/. I’m a big fan of TypeScript and I was excited to hear someone else speak about it. His talk drew a very large crowd and he also had a great back-and-forth Q&A.

Both his Q&A and my Q&A session at the bootcamp both strongly suggested to me that lot of today’s SP developers may be in jeopardy and they don’t even realize it. Let me explain why.

For those of you that don’t know it, Microsoft made SharePoint Framework (SPFx) generally available in February this year (2017). I summarized it like this:

SPFx is Microsoft’s attempt to enable today’s developers to use common front end development tools to create SharePoint web parts.

This is over-simplified and if you’re inclined, read more about it here to get a more indepth explanation: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/dev/spfx/sharepoint-framework-overview

To this end, SPFx has adopted commonly used tools including:

• Node JS
• Gulp
• Webpack
• TypeScript
• Yoeman
• React

Why Jeopardy?

Here’s the jeopardy part — if you’re an experienced SP developer or even architect, that means you have 5 to 7 or even more years experience working with SharePoint. If that describes you, you’ve worked hard to learn how to customize SharePoint using techniques that are becoming obsolete. Mostly anything you’ve learned about server-side JavaScript is irrelevant in the SharePoint online world and anecdotally, at least, that online world is getting bigger every day. And server-side isn’t the only worry. Most SP customization shops regularly modify SharePoint via JavaScript injection. We do this via script editor web part or a content editor web part or possibly adding it to master pages and such. Again, I’m over-simplifying but I think this covers the map pretty well.

Meanwhile, Microsoft has released SPFx and it doesn’t use hacky script editors and CEWPs at all. It creates real, bondide web part with property panes and robust deployment strategies and uses tools that a boat load of “full stack” developers use every day.

Between my talk Bootcamp talk this weekend and recalling the nature of the questions I recall from Rob W’s talk in July, I think a lot of SP professionals today are suddenly very behind the curve. To an extent, we are always behind the curve in this fast-paced tech world, at least in something. SP pro’s may not realize just how far behind the curve they are, however.

I was imagining a kind of race between my son’s friend who is currently a 3rd year computer science undergrad student in Washington, DC and a reasonably experienced server-side SharePoint developer who has built complex workflows possibly triggered by event receivers that fires off emails and uses the SP object model to create, delete and update list items. The race is “create a CRUD application against a SharePoint list with a half dozen list columns using SharePoint framework.” On the one side, you have the experienced SP professional and on the other, you have a college kid who mostly only knows client-side dev and is accustomed to using REST APIs as a matter of course.

That college kid may not win the race, but both of them would be done in a week. And the college kid might actually win.

I don’t know exactly what I think to achieve with a blog post like this. I guess that what I’ve seen makes me worry that a lot of the SP professionals I’ve known and the many more that I don’t may not realize how out of step they are with the current direction of SharePoint customization. The client-side dev paradigm is in ascension at a lot of companies and if you’re not paying attention, you’re going to end up being someone else’s lunch :). So, I guess the moral is — pay attention to what’s going on, embrace these new tools and bring yourself up to speed. It’s not that hard, but it’s pretty important.

Thoughts?

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