Office 365 Development Patterns & Practices launched

The Office 365 Development Patterns & Practices team shipped the new open source repository today to GitHub.com/OfficeDev. This marks the transition from the Office App Model Samples (Office AMS) project, which was an internal Microsoft initiative, to a broader open source community vision.

Background

The Office AMS team shipped three main releases in the last year that focused on common customer scenarios. Many existing SharePoint developers were extremely familiar with how to build these scenarios with SharePoint Full Trust Code solutions and Office VSTO/COM add-ins, but didn’t know how to approach implementing these same scenarios with the App Model. The main purpose of providing these samples is to address this transformation from Full Trust Code to the App Model.

Each of these existing scenarios was reviewed by the Office 365 Developer Platform engineering team before being shipped into the main branch and packaged as a zip on CodePlex. Our internal MSDN content team then took these scenarios, added additional content, and shipped them on Microsoft Download Center as solution packs, such as the SharePoint 2013 and SharePoint Online solution pack for branding and site provisioning.

The future

With the new model, there will be a development branch on GitHub, where the internal Microsoft team will continue to build out scenarios. At controlled times, the team may merge this development branch with the main branch in GitHub. Our internal MSDN content team will continue to publish solution packs based on the scenarios built here.

Our new name, Patterns & Practices, highlights our focus on providing not only scenarios/samples, but also core patterns and practices to help you as a developer build business solutions on Office 36–for your enterprise or for your customers as an independent software vendor (ISV).

Road map

Our team will also keep a Developer Patterns & Practices Road Map up to date to show what we’re currently working on and what’s scheduled in the future. Key customer scenarios are driving the road map, especially those that depend on Full Trust solutions, which need to be transformed into the App Model approach. The engineering team is actively involved in discussing the road map, because that map sometimes requires improvements to the development platform, including the App Model and related APIs.

Community contributions

Community contributions will be received in the development branch of GitHub and reviewed by the internal Patterns & Practices team. These contributions can include additional scenarios or improvements to existing scenarios. The team is available to discuss this on the Office 365 Technical Network and add to the road map to improve visibility to everyone involved.

Documentation

The existing getting started documentation has been converted from Word format to GitHub markup pages to allow for community collaboration on improving these along with the actual samples. In addition to this documentation, there will soon be 15-minute videos that explain each of the scenarios, how each one was built in SharePoint Full Trust Code, and how it is built in the App Model. The team is also sharing PowerPoint presentations that they use with customers to explain concepts in more detail and to allow the community to make changes from one single location.

The team

A big thank you goes out to all those involved on the project to date! The Office 365 Developer Patterns & Practices team welcomes the community to join these folks too!