Introducing the SharePoint Framework

The SharePoint Framework is a rather new approach to implementing and customizing SharePoint. We use the term customization quite loosely in this chapter, meaning mostly all types of custom implementations that organizations typically request as part of their SharePoint projects.

In order to understand the essence of the SharePoint Framework, we'll start with extensibility.

SharePoint extensibility

Ever since SharePoint was introduced, and the add-in model was introduced, the thinking from Microsoft for SharePoint extensibility has been that a supported model must exist, and it should be in the long term. Now, you might be thinking that after the previous chapter, where we had a brief encounter with many different approaches--where is the long-term thinking? Granted, some of those models, such as sandboxed solutions, should maybe have been more refined and possibly even not released in their past forms. But at the same time cloud computing, together with...