Over the weekend I had the honor of speaking at SharePoint Saturday Detroit. It was a well organized and well attended event. I had a great time and the feedback I got from attendees was extremely positive.
The event was held at Wayne State and the campus was covered in squirrels. Including totally black squirrels which I’d never seen (and assumed were rats at first) so of course I took a video:
Here’s a picture somebody else took:

SharePoint is cool and all, but those squirrels were great!
My Session
I presented Getting Started with the SharePoint Framework. You can find the slides below. Here was the outline:
- Setup Steps 1 & 2
- Installing NodeJS LTS
- Installing VS Code
- SharePoint Development: A Brief History
- SP 2016 Development Recommendations
- Office 365 Development Recommendations
- The Modern Experience
- Setup Step 3 & 4
- Installing Yeoman & Gulp
- Installing the SPFx Generator
- An Introduction to the SharePoint Framework
- Client-side Web Parts
- SPFx Extensions
- Tool Comparison
- The SharePoint Workbench
- Building Your First Client-Side WebPart
- Running the Generator
- Trusting the Dev Certificate
- Exploring the Local Workbench
- Adding a Custom Property
- SharePoint Patterns & Practices
- What’s in PnP (Selective Highlights
- Staying Up to Date with PnP
If you have any questions about what I presented, or the SharePoint Framework in general, you can comment here or reach out on Twitter anytime. It was really tough to fit everything above into a 45 minute session so although it was a bit rushed, I think it went over pretty well and people seemed genuinely excited to get started with SPFx!
Resources
- Slides: Getting Started with SPFx – SPSDetroit17
- SharePoint PnP: aka.ms/sppnp
SPS Detroit was a great event. Thank you to all the sponsors, organizers, speakers, attendees, and squirrels!