A SHAREPOINT AND APPS STORY

CONTENTS

Section 1 - News Scavenger

The concepts

Section 2 - Advanced Powershell Scripting

Invoke-WebRequest

Section 3 – Windows Phone

8.0 – Authenticator

Store Fail

8.1 was it 9.0?

Windows Phone 8.1 and Desktop

Store Success

Section 4 – The cross platform story

Decision time

Language Usage

C# & XML vs HTML 5 & JS

SP Integration Mechanism

CSOM VS REST

Creation Platform

Native?

XAMARin?

Cordova?

VS Cordova?

Section 5 – Development Operations

Reporting Dashboard

Trivia Module

PRESENTATION SCOPE

• To show the journey from It Pro to IT Dev

• To outline the idea and concept of News Scavenger and where SharePoint fits in

• To show the roadmap and decision points that were taken during the process and

explain them in detail

• To show the process and turmoil of publishing live applications that work with

SharePoint on all the different platforms

• To discuss the outline for our cross platform story

• To introduce a meaningful usage scenario for VS Cordova with regards to

SharePoint integration with Android and IOS apps

• To SHOW HOW TO USE POWERSHELL FOR REAL TIME DEV OPS

• To show a new take on accessability

WHOAMI

• Heath Groves Mbcs. MCM (r12)/MCSM/12 year MCT etc.

• Father of 2 (Jericho and Eden)

• Focused primarily on SharePoint since 2006

• Worked all of that time as a Vendor/Contractor

• Worked as a Contractor for Microsoft From June 2011 Supporting D and

MT up until April 2015 (4 YEARS)

• MS Gold Partner since 2008

• Ex- Military (REME – Instrument Tech 8 Years)

• Full contact kickboXER

• Strong desire to move towards dev from being a total IT Pro

EVERYTHING WE ARE ABOUT TO

DEMONSTRATE AND DISCUSS DID NOT EXIST IN

SEPT 2014

THIS PRESENTATION, ALL DEMO CONTENT AND DEMO

SCRIPTS CAN BE ACCESSED HERE:

HTTP://WWW.NEWSSCAVENGER.COM/SITES/RESTTEST

NEWS SCAVENGER

• The apps we are discussing ARE in all THE app STORES RIGHT NOW

• To download and follow along go Your store and search News Scavenger

(Boxing, Rally and Microsoft)

• Alternatively visit https://www.newsscavenger.com

• click on the icon for your device

FROM ACORNS DO GROW…

A bit of general Discussion

Our future will consist of looking at

a pane of glass …

…certainly for this generation at least…

Understanding, and merging these experiences Will

be key to the future of the tech industry

This is why everyone is hitting the space

Hard, trying to conquer the cross platform story –

SharePoint is no different

And can have a unique place in this world

FROM ACORNS DO GROW…

Large Social Housing survey (40k people)

68% said they went online

82% of them said they used Apps

91% of tenants said they used Facebook

Who’s elderly family members are on facebook?

What factors made it get so big?

Accessibility for the masses is everything…

Creating the best app in world is only relevant

For those smart enough to use it

NEWS SCAVENGER: THE CONCEPT

• Huge boxing fan

• Sick and tired of going to multiple sites for all my information

• Don’t want to spend time setting up RSS readers across all my devices

• Don’t want to log on to twitter every 5 minutes

• Don’t want to log on to Facebook every 5 minutes

• Don’t‘ want to log on to Instagram every 5 minutes

• Don’t want to wait for search engines to crawl content

• Don’t want my content ordered by any form of algorithm or promotion

• Don’t want to see promoted content

• want to look at the world of boxing across every medium in real time

… When I want to look at Boxing News I want ALL my content in 1 place… at a glance… to help

me keep one step ahead

IF ONLY…

If only a powerful, web based tool existed that could be used to store

centralised information

…if only it had its own secure, authentication mechanism

…That could be used to service multiple light weight calls…

…that could potentially scale at a collection levels into the millions

…A bit like a central POINT for SHAREING…

HOW IT WORKS

ADVANCED POWERSHELL

SCRIPTING

• Powershell V3 introduced invoke-webrequest

• Possibly the single biggest advancement towards automation this decade

• Can retrieve all elements of all webpages and manipulate as you see fit

• Combine this with the object model and you can create extremely

powerful outputs

• Cookies? -usebasicparsing

ADVANCED POWERSHELL

SCRIPTING

• We use the concept of a ‘BOT’ for the scavenging process

Used to perform automated tasks in the farm

We call the scripts to scavenge Patterns

It is not a fire and forget process

We check consistently to make sure the content is being parsed correctly

Profanity filterer – Never Realised Shiitake was a mushroom!!!

Bots run the timer service only – no other Sharepoint services

Reboot every 24 hours

Clears out an nasty memory leaks

Confirms cache is refreshed

Ensured all services are up

unclean way of doing things – but does get rid of potential heartache

WINDOWS PHONE 8.0

The current IT Pro Conundrum :

the market is steadily being pushed towards apps

• Sharepoint, phone, tablet… towards the universal APP message

• Sooner or later your going to have to start developing

• As an IT PRO – where do you start?

Windows phone with integration to SharePoint is the perfect starting point

for any SharePoint IT Pro

• c# and xaml

RECOMMENDED READING

• Recommended reading

AUTHENTICATOR

The single hardest

portion of

phone > SharePoint

integration is

Authentication

clientauthenticationmode

FBA = .FormsAuthetication

claims = .default

O365 = .Microsoftonline

THOUGHTS AND IMPRESSIONS

Some thoughts impressions and observations when developing on

windows phone with SharePoint

• Mvvm,vvm,mm,mmmsmmmmfmm,d,mms <<<<<< errrrr…

• Choose what is right for your application – not because this weeks

sweetheart thinks it’s the way forward

• Best practice is just that – its not perfect practice, mistakes will

always be made – as long as you take the safest possible route you

should be fine

STORE FAIL!!!

• After 8 weeks of hard slog we were ready for submission

• All the guides alluded to project > store > build…

• This was greyed out…. ???

STORE FAIL!!!

• The reality of development right now in the Microsoft space is that you

are in a state of flux between multiple platforms, policies and procedures:

• VS 2012, lots of image work, wrong package - 8.0 only

• Store only accepts windows 8.1 packages for both desktop and phone

• To create the required package for upload the best and easiest way is to

create a universal app project…

• Universal APPs also work on Windows 10

• Once windows 10 is main stream all these issues will go away

UNIVERSAL APP PROJECT –

THE BAD

• When converting from 8.0 to 8.1 we noticed that approximately 40% of the

code base had changed

• Massive amounts of rework

• The DLLs for key things (windows phone toolkit by telerik) where not

compatible with 8.1

• The only dlls that would work were SharePoint mobile OOTB dlls

• This destroyed our authentication mechanism!

• Had to Change from FBA to network

• Created our own encryption mechanism to retrieve creds for use in the app

UNIVERSAL APP PROJECT –

THE GOOD

• The code we wrote for phone, now worked on desktops as well !

• Although this was a major upheaval – in the end it ensured that we

re-wrote the whole application with out reliance on DLLS from third

parties

• This also helped us embrace the universal app mantra

STORE SUCCESS!!!

• Once the packages were built we could upload really quickly

• Image work and descriptions completed at this point

• Phone and desktop are done separately (2 different apps)

• Validation took less than 1 hour for each

• Appeared in search results in 24 hours

• Totally searchable across the globe within 48 hours

STORE SUBMISSIONAt present both phone and

desktop have different

stores

This has been promised to

be unified in Windows 10 –

but until then…

CROSS PLATFORM STORY

App was live in windows store for phone and desktop

SharePoint Backend infrastructure stable

Scavenging process refined

Next….

How do we get this working on other, non-ms devices?

Dogs and cats!!!

CROSS PLATFORM DECISION

FRAMEWORK

There are three main areas that need to be addressed up front before your

cross platform development can begin:

Programming language

SharePoint integration Mechanism

Programming platform

Making the right decision for all three of these questions is vital for your

project and can have catastrophic consequences if the wrong decisions are

made

PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE

SHAREPOINT INTEGRATION

SHAREPOINT INTEGRATION

The biggest decision sway of the whole project:

When you are providing

rapid real time updates

1/3rd

reduction in traffic

size matters…

…it really matters!

PROGRAMMING PLATFORM

Developing cross platform you have MANY options – we looked at

these most common options:

• Native

• Xamarin

• Cordova

• Visual Studio Cordova

NATIVE

Android studio

Reduce the layer of complexity

Use native xaml

No third party involvement

Large ramp up per platform

investment for android

investment for apple

investment for Samsung

Need an apple mac!

XAMARIN

3rd

party tool

Runs dlls in its own runtime

Maps to the native device api’s

Licensed per platform

Integrates with visual studio

Adds a layer of complexity

Can run c# on other platforms

Good discount using MSDN

Subscription

If I had large amounts of custom c# this is the route I would choose

CORDOVA

Cordova is a command line tool made by apache

Creates projects for all the device platforms

Found that we were spending time learning cordova…

…not actually creating the app…

I would use this option if I was a native android or ios programmer,

then wanted to reduce re-work

VISUAL STUDIO CORDOVA

Visual Studios implementation of cordova

VERy, VERY similar to universal APPS

Some online training resources - but they are poor

Can use html 5, javascript and REST in a visual studio shell and run it

on android

Many android emulators

Compiles for IOS – but need an apple mac to deploy and test (mac in

cloud works fine $4 subscription)

AND THE WINNERS ARE…

Programming Language

Sharepoint integration

Platform

THE REST 1 PAGER…

Most interwebz articles start with “REST is simply…” or “REST is easily

the..”

Well… if you don’t know the principles rest is NOT easy!

…in fact it can be downright obtuse at times…

I’ve put together a 1 page guide to creating a rest page using our sample

environment. This way you can create your own SharePoint asp.net page

that pulls rest. Once you have it working you can tweak for your own needs

as you see fit

REST 1 PAGER

Full working demo can viewed here:

http://www.newsscavenger.com/sites/RestTest

THE VS CORDOVA 1 PAGER…

Setting up and implementing VS corodva from scratch can be time

consuming

The training materials on the interwebz are very basic, fragmented

and quite frankly not very good…

This 1 pager shows you how to

install and configure visual studio for cordova

Create a multiple platform Project

Populate that project with the rest 1 pager

Deploy that application to an android/ios/windows emulator or device

WELL DONE

If you follow the two 1 pagers you will have just:

• Installed your cross platform programming solution

• Integrated it with SharePoint

• Created an application that uses SharePoint across:

• Windows phone 8.1

• Windows desktop 8.1

• Windows 10

• Android (phone and tablet)

• IOS

REPORTING DASHBOARD

We all love reporting right? Imagine the cross platform data we can get from this!!!

Enter the fray Development Operations:

REPORTING DASHBOARD

Each scavenger has its own site

All articles are parsed into one list

In the APP when ever a link is pressed we also do an inert “get” to a reporting page

on the Scavenger site

This allows us to not only track all the usual data, but also allows us to track the

data by usage

We store each report on total number of downloads individually

REPORTING DASHBOARD

On a nightly basis we set a daily task (23:59) – this does the following

Copies the log files from the web front ends to the BOT

Uses Log parser to gain all relevant information

Hits per day Total

Hits per day by source

Uploads that data to the reporting list on the scavenger site

Use the SP2010 (yes it still works) chart part to connect to that list

Display web parts however you wish on the page of your choice

Benefits

All heavy lifting done by the bot

As its based on the logs can report on anything really

As its in powershell can combine with other PS modules

Hyper-v

Local machine (think disk monitoring)

Not reliant on timer jobs

Very easy to get to grips with

REPORTING DASHBOARD

PATTERN

Ensure that you replace the site,

statistics list and the local location to

store the files

You must have logparser.exe present in

your local folder being used to compete

the reporting

Text version can be found here:

http://www.newsscavenger.com/sites/RestTest/Shared%20Documen

ts/ReportingDashboardDemo.txt

LAST BUT NOT LEAST A WORD

ON ACCESSIBILITY…

We are continually told that the future of the internet is visual this, visual that, visual the other….

(Delve, office graph, Datazen etc..)

Maybe it is…

But what if they are mistaken…

What is the future of the web was audio…

When you drive down the road on your normal commute – how many web sites can you read?

… how many websites could you listen to?

… the use of audio accessibility should be for everyone

… if only a scavenger app existed on all devices, that made all content totally audio compliant… if

only….

FINALLY…

If I had to sum up the last 9 months the one word I would use is…

CHAOS!

THANK YOU

I’d like to take this opportunity to thank you all for listening to my

dullest tones

If you have any questions please don’t hesitate to contact me +44

7506 578092

Heath.groves@sundownsolutions.co.uk