Forum Discussion
Is it possible to develop in No-Code Sandbox Solution style with Sharepoint PnP?
Hi, Dmytro Lapshyn
You are confusing things a bit. I personally like to think that PnP provides solutions to all the problems in SharePoint development (and more than that).
You can start here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/dev/community/community
Also, the GitHub repository is a never-ending list of extremely useful solutions and samples (for both classic and modern experience). Definitively have a look here: https://github.com/sharePoint
In this case, I assume you are referring to provisioning, so in short, I would suggest that you stop investing your time in WSP solutions and start using PnP as soon as possible.
There is a PnP provisioning schema (check the latest version by date) file that you can use in your code editor to get validation.
In short, PnP will probably have a solution for all of your problems! You just need to look for it, but it probably exists! If it doesn't, raise the discussion and someone will offer you some options ;)
Hope this helps you get started and potentially join the community later on :)
- Dmytro LapshynAug 09, 2018Copper Contributor
Hi Joel!
Thanks a lot for the prompt reply!
In this case, I assume you are referring to provisioning, so in short, I would suggest that you stop investing your time in WSP solutions and start using PnP as soon as possible.
I would be happy to, but wouldn't that mean that I would loose access to all the Visual Studio tooling for making content types, list definitions, workflows etc.? This is actually my biggest concern so far, as going backwards to a plain text editor sounds scary especially given the amount of cross-dependencies and the complexity of CAML (not even mentioning workflows which I've always designed only visually).
I understand there's an XSD schema for the provisioning file itself that I can use for validation, but it won't help me much with all the CAML, elements.xml etc.
- Aug 09, 2018It may not sound like that at the start and when you are comfortable with the tools you currently use, but once you get into it, you will be a lot more productive. Also look at the PnP PowerShell for provisioning scenarios as sometimes it's a lot simpler than a full C# application.
The PnP provisioning engine is just amazing! The option to save a site as a XML template is pure gold 😉
And you can use any code editor of your choice, including Visual Studio.
The documentation is very good, and you have lots and lots of videos on the PnP channel with tutorials.
The SharePoint development sorry was never so strong 😀- Dmytro LapshynFeb 06, 2019Copper Contributor
Hi Joel Rodrigues and Steve Johnson ,
In retrospective, you both are totally right. We are using PnP for our current internal SharePoint project, and I have also started using PnP for applying updates to an originally SharePoint Designer-authored web, which turned out to work quite good.
As for workflows, we've found a way to design them in Visual Studio and then compile into a form that could be provisioned via PnP.
Thanks a lot for the inspiration!