Chaks' Corner

Downloading Office Developer Tools for Offline Install

Office Developer Tools uses the Web Platform Installer (WebPI) to install the latest version of the tools. This has a lot of advantages over the traditional setup packages, such as it helps us to always deliver the latest package. WebPI however requires internet connection to download the require packages to install. That’s a bummer for ...read more

Deploying Root Items in apps for SharePoint

SharePoint development has never been easier, thanks to Visual Studio SharePoint Tools. If you remember the Visual Studio Extensions for Windows SharePoint Services (VSeWSS), you will know what I mean. To deploy specific files (like pages, scripts etc.,) in SharePoint from your app or solution, you have to know about Modules in SharePoint which groups ...read more

Office Developer Tools for Visual Studio 2012 Now Available

Today we released Office Developer Tools for VS2012 RTW and is available for download here – http://aka.ms/OfficeDevToolsForVS2012 There are some great updates to this release, few mentioned below: First and foremost, you do not need to run Visual Studio 2012 as an administrator to build apps for SharePoint! [Well, there are some corner cases, but ...read more

‘Fast Update’ in Apps for SharePoint

This is one of my favorite features introduced in the Office Developer Tools for SharePoint app development – we call it ‘Fast Update’ ! What is ‘Fast Update’ ? ‘Fast Update’ enables you to update files on the fly while debugging (F5) your app so you can see the changes with just refreshing the page ...read more

Custom Actions in Apps for SharePoint

Introduction Custom actions in Apps for SharePoint allow users to interact with list menu and SharePoint ribbon. You can deploy custom actions either to host web or app web. Deploying to app web will restrict the custom action just within your app. When a custom action is deployed to the host web, you can allow ...read more

Autohosted SharePoint Apps Deep Dive – Part 3

Autohosted SharePoint Apps Deep Dive Part 1 Autohosted SharePoint Apps Deep Dive Part 2 Introduction In the previous post, we built a simple contacts list app. I thought I would spend some more time in exploring the code. As explained in previous posts, an app has to request permission to access SharePoint resources such as ...read more

Autohosted SharePoint Apps Deep Dive – Part 2

Autohosted SharePoint Apps Deep Dive Part 1 Autohosted SharePoint Apps Deep Dive Part 2 Autohosted SharePoint Apps Deep Dive Part 3 Introduction In my previous post we explored a simple ‘Hello World’ autohosted app. Let us now build a real sample – Contacts List app The app consists of a contacts list and it will ...read more

Autohosted SharePoint Apps Deep Dive – Part 1

Autohosted SharePoint Apps Deep Dive Part 1 Autohosted SharePoint Apps Deep Dive Part 2 Autohosted SharePoint Apps Deep Dive Part 3 Introduction In my previous blog post I introduced the new app model in SharePoint 2013. Developers can easily extend SharePoint 2013 by building apps. You will need to consider how you are going to ...read more

Debugging Remote Event Receivers in SharePoint 2013

Remote Event Receivers in SharePoint 2013 allows you to respond to SharePoint events within an app like list added, list item added etc., Remote event receivers are only supported in autohosted and provider-hosted app. If you are new to remote event receivers, get a quick overview in here. They are basically WCF service endpoints to ...read more

Building your first SharePoint App using “Napa” Office 365 Development Tools

If you are not familiar with the new App Model, I would highly recommend users to read my previous blog post to get familiar with the new App Model before building your first SharePoint App: Introducing Apps for Office 2013 and SharePoint 2013 Getting Your Office 365 Preview Account To build apps using the new ...read more