About Patterns and Practices

The SharePoint / Office 365 Dev Patterns & Practices (PnP) initiative was originally formed in 2013 by a group of Microsoft consultants who were working on the transformation effort of the Office 365 Dedicated customers to Multi-Tenant. This involved taking the SharePoint full Trust Code Solutions and transforming the customizations to the add-in model, but PnP guidance started evolving to other areas as well, including SharePoint Framework, Office 365 APIs, Office Add-ins and Microsoft Graph. PnP initiative has now evolved as open source community effort with both internal and external contributors. Notice that SharePoint / Office 365 Dev PnP is not directly linked with the official Patterns and Practices team at Microsoft, which concentrates more on the general development topics.

How to get started or contribute?

We would recommend you to have a look on specific web cast as "How to get started with Office Dev PnP?" from our Channel 9 video blog. If you are looking to contribute back for the PnP initiative, would recommend to have a look on another web cast called "How to contribute to Office Dev PnP initiative?" or check details on how to get started from our PnP GitHub Wiki, which also contains step-by-step instructions on setting up your environment for GitHub usage. GitHub is slightly different tool than classic TFS, if you have used that in the past, but this guidance will provide you all you need to setup your environment with GitHub and how you can always pull down the latest code to your personal GitHub fork.

Monthly releases and community calls

Office 365 Dev PnP releases are done typically first Friday of each month when we perform master merge in GitHub and update Nuget packages among the other key actions. You can always access the latest development time version from the dev branch. We cover details on monthly releases in our monthly community calls. Download calendar invite (ics) to save the call details to your calendar. We also have Special Interest Group bi-weekly meetings for discussions on specific areas. You can find the recurrent invites from following links: SIG for PnP CSOM Core / PowerShell, SIG PnP for SharePoint Framework / JavaScript development.