Office 365—monthly Dev Digest for October

This month’s Office 365 Dev Digest was written by Jeremy Thake, technical product manager for the Office 365 Dev team.

Welcome to the eighth edition of Dev Digest, designed to help you—the Office 365 developer—keep up-to-date with what’s new in Office 365 development.

It is extremely exciting to see the Office.js APIs grow in Word and Excel with new features. The Content Publishing team internally has been busy building out code samples to show off these new APIs. Check them out in the code samples section below.

There has also been an update to the Office 365 Unified API preview for how you access users’ OneDrive for Business. This is a breaking change in the preview API, so if you are using these APIs now, please make sure you read this notification.

Vesa Juvonen and the rest of the Office 365 PnP team have been extremely busy over the last two years, and he wrote a great blog post that summarizes all that hard work! The October release brings with it a huge amount of new concepts worth checking out! The team has also started a weekly webcast to talk about this in more detail. So now, each week, you have the podcast by Richard and me, Sonya’s Dev Show and the PnP webcast.

The Property Manager Hero Demo that we’ve talked about since demoing it at TechEd Europe last year has been updated to take advantage of a bunch of new APIs in Preview. Todd Baginski also created six hours of on-demand video training, which walks through setting up the ASP.NET MVC web application and building the iOS or Android mobile apps from scratch.

For Office 365 developer speakers, we have amazing SWAG boxes, which you can request to give out to your attendees at your next speaking session at a public user group or conference.

In the next few months, we have a few hackathons running around the world, including the AngularConnect conference in London, SharePoint Europe conference in Stockholm and AnDevCon in Santa Clara. I hope to see you all there hacking away with your chance to win an Xbox One!

I encourage you all to engage with us on the Office 365 Technical Network with your questions.

Dev documentation

The Microsoft Content Publishing team works hard producing documentation to help developers learn our platform. Here are the key new and updated articles for this month:

Office add-ins

Office 365 APIs

Updates:

For more documentation check out Office developer documentation.

Code samples

Our team is continually on the lookout for new code samples to help you jump-start your own projects. Here is a list of the most recent new and updated samples from Microsoft as well as the dev community.

We added 13 new samples that show you how to connect to the unified API (preview) and make calls to it. The samples span three mobile platforms (iOS, Android and Windows) and six web frameworks (PHP, ASP.NET, Node.js, Angular and Ruby). The snippet samples demonstrate the variety of things that you can do with the unified API.

Most recent Office 365 Dev podcasts

Since joining Microsoft, I have been running around campus interviewing people about various dev topics. If you would like to hear me interview someone on a particular topic, please submit your suggestions in the Yammer group, and I’ll go hunt the relevant people down to interview.

Here are the most recent podcast interviews:

For more podcasts, check out dev.office.com/podcasts.

Patterns and practices

The Microsoft Patterns and Practices team is working hard to release samples to show the power of SharePoint add-ins. Don’t forget to join the monthly community calls to hear the updates from them directly on Skype for Business and the previously launched Skype Developer Platform (developer.skype.com).

Here are the latest updates from the team:

PnP October 2015 monthly release notes at dev.office.com
PnP October community call recording at Channel 9
New weekly PnP webcast series released, with first topic on the OneDrive for Business customizations
Transforming your SharePoint customizations to add-in model—Resources
New training package created based on the PnP guidance at OfficeDevPnPTraining
Numerous updates and new articles to PnP section in MSDN at OfficeDevPnPMSDN

For more on patterns and practices, check out dev.office.com/patterns-and-practices. All questions related to released materials and guidance can be added to our Yammer group at OfficeDevPnPYammer.

Dev community blog posts

The Office 365 dev community has been busy this month. It is exciting to see the effort people put into their posts in their spare time to share with the community.

Check out these articles from the Microsoft field, MVPs and more:

Office Dev Show: Episode 13—Getting started with NodeJS by Sonya and Richard
microsoft.com/EN-US/library/mt616496.aspx—Word
microsoft.com/EN-US/library/mt616485.aspx—Excel
Office 365 Developer Patterns and Practices–October 2015 release
External sharing API for SharePoint and OneDrive for Business
Building an Excel 2016 add-in with Angular and Enhanced office.js by Scot Hillier
Office add-ins—Launch in Office Online by Simon Jager
Office add-ins—Launch in Excel Online from Visual Studio by Simon Jager
mastykarz.nl/office-365-unified-api-mail by Waldek Mastykarz
O365 Dev Challenges–Part 1: Introduction to creating a multi-tenant Office 365 add-in using VS2015 by Mikael Svenson
Introduction to Office UI Fabric by Mark Rackley
com v1.0.0–Full sample coverage of Office UI Fabric v1.0.0 by Andrew Connell
What’s new in Office 2016 for developers
Increase the productivity of users with enhanced Office.js APIs in Office 2016
Office Developer SWAG boxes for your user groups
Using OAuth from PowerShell by Stephen Owen
The Dev Intersection Countdown Show
The new Office is here by Kirk Koenigsbauer
Cloud Roadshow Cities
Office Dev Show Episode 12—Office UI Fabric with Sonya Koptyev and Humberto Lezama Guadarrama
Introducing ng-OfficeUI Fabric—angular directives for Office UI Fabric by Andrew Connell
Introducing OfficeUIFabric.com—demos and reference samples for Office UI Fabric by Andrew Connell
Using Azure Deployment Slots to implement dev/test/production ALM for Office 365 apps and SharePoint add-ins by Chris O’Brien
Two things that are not super obvious when working with the new Office 365 Groups API by Waldek Mastykarz
Building File Handler add-ins for Office 365 by Richard diZerega
onedrive.com/sdks.htm
Office Dev PnP webcast—OneDrive for business customizations
Excel add-in for Azure ML
net/blog/2015/10/posting-to-office-365-onenote-via-powershell
com/waldekmastykarz/sample-yooffice-cors

Office Store

Companies across the globe are extending the value of Office every day with Office add-ins. See how these solutions are making a difference at real companies by watching their stories on betterwith.office.com!

Upcoming events

There are plenty of events on the horizon. Don’t miss out on these great events with Office 365 content. Our team looks forward to meeting you all at these events, so don’t be shy; come say hello at the Office 365 booth!

Oct 26	Dev Intersection, Las Vegas
Nov 9–12	European SharePoint Conference, Stockholm
Dec 1–3	AnDevCon, Santa Clara

For more events check out dev.office.com/events.

Until next month, please join our community discussions at www.yammer.com/itpronetwork and follow us on @OfficeDev on Twitter and on Facebook.

Also, be sure to follow along with us on our daily developer mission: Jeremy Thake (@jthake), Sonya Koptyev (@SonyaKoptyev), Richard DiZerega (@richdizz) and Jim Epes (@j_epes).

—Jeremy Thake