Introduction to "Napa"-Office 365 development tools

Yesterday was an exciting day for office and SharePoint! The Group announced the new office program at the press conference and released a public preview version of Office and SharePoint 2013. You can find available press conferences at Microsoft's press center and watch the video webcast of CEO Steve Ballmer. You can also download and publish in office.com/preview.

But the exciting thing is not just that-if you are a developer, you'll be glad to hear about the new methods for developing office and Sharepoint.

Office and SharePoint 2013 with new cloud applicationsProgramThe model features web standards and allows you to generate a new type of applications that combine Web technologies and cloud services in office and Sharepoint. One of the major investments in office and SharePoint 2013 is cloud activation. Applications can be hosted on the cloud, allowing you to deploy, update, and maintain your applications more quickly. You can also publish your application and sell it through a new office storage, or distribute it-approved applications through the app catalog within your organization. To learn more about the new cloud application model and office storage, I recommend that you read the Ludovic hauduc announcement and watch the video on the new office and SharePoint application blog.

Introduction"Napa"

I am happy to share with you yesterday that we released a new tool set called "Napa ", it is the easiest way to build a new cloud application model application. When we started to create development tools for new cloud application models, we rethink the overall solution we wanted to provide to our customers. We want to provide a lightweight, browser-based experience so that you can quickly build your SharePoint or office Web applications in a browser, the application will also run in the same browser. Therefore, we have created a first-class development environment called "Napa" as an online combination of Visual Studio.

"Napa" is a free application for Sharepoint. Since "Napa" is web-based, you do not need to install anything on your machine to start developing office and Sharepoint. Open your browser to start encoding. As your applications mature, you need more advanced tools, you can seamlessly switch to a more powerful and Comprehensive Visual Studio IDE, and continue development there. For more information about the latest improvements to SharePoint tools in Visual Studio 2012, visit msdn.

Of course, in parallel with "Napa", you can continue to use existing office and SharePoint scalability models, such as VBA, COM, vsto, and SharePoint solutions. (However, note that these cannot be submitted to the new office storage .)

Getting started

Let's have a look at all the content. To try "Napa", first register Microsoft Office 365 Developer Preview in the http://dev.office.com.

When you register, a developer website will be created for you. This website provides you with your own Office 365 instance, where you can develop, deploy, and test your Office 365 application.

Next, you will want to install "Napa" to add the tool to your developer website.

(Visit msdn for a complete description of these "Getting started" steps .)

Create a project

Next ("Napa" has been installed on your developer website), click "get tools to build apps" to start "Napa ".

"Napa" supports building all types of applications for office and Sharepoint, and allows you to use a wide range of Client versions (such as Excel and Word) for web applications and office applications) run.

Let's start by building a Sharepoint application.

Select "app for Sharepoint" and click "CREATE". You can write the code for your application in your browser.Code.

As a web developer, the first thing you will notice is that the new cloud application model is based on web standards. You will spend some time coding HTML, client aspx, CSS, and JavaScript.

Even if "Napa" is a browser-based application (applicable to all modern browsers), we want to ensure that you have a rich editing experience that you want as a developer. Let's dive into several key features of the editor, and you may not see these features in the middle of browser-based developer tools.

Read and Write code

We hope that you can read and write code more efficiently, so we add syntax coloring, instance highlighting, indentation, matching and completion when you type.

For example, when you scroll through the code, you will notice that when you click an identifier, all instances will be highlighted in the editor.

Simple and text-based Automatic completion for JavaScript and CSS includes a rich set of code snippets (CTRL + Space key ). For example, we can use the for loop fragment:

After adding a for loop using a code segment, you can browse through these identifiers and change their names, if needed.

We can also simply select common values, such as true/false and text in JavaScript and CSS.

Code cleanup

To help you sort out your code and ensure its correctness, we have added the ability to view errors and warnings for JavaScript and CSS. Press (CTRL +,) to navigate between errors.

We also set the (CTRL + ALT + F) format for JavaScript and CSS as needed, which allows you to select a code block and organize it.

Code navigation

To help you find your code, we have added search (CTRL + F), search/Replace (CTRL + H), and quick view of the Code outline (CTRL + ALT + O) as shown in.

For the complete list of keyboard bindings, press (CTRL + .). This will display a list page showing all keyboard shortcuts.

Application Properties

"Napa" uses a lightweight designer for the most common settings, allowing you to intuitively edit your Application List and attributes. Click the "properties" icon in the lower left corner to open the designer.

Run

When you view default. aspx and App. JS, you will see that this application is a simple page and the string displays "Initializing ....", After successfully calling a Sharepoint query for the current user information, change it to "Hello <username>", which shows that the application is combined with Sharepoint.

In the lower left corner, click Run to run the SharePoint application. This will package the application, add it to your developer website, and open it in a browser.

That is to say, you do not have to install any software on the client machine. "Napa" allows you to create a project, edit the project, and run it on SharePoint online. Because the code is client-side, you can use your browser's debugging tool to debug the code. (For example, the F12 key in Internet Explorer)

We think this is a great leap in simplifying developer entry. You no longer need to install software on the development machine to create your first application, especially the Sharepoint Server.

InVisual Studio 2012Open a copy

Sometimes, you want to use the complete and powerful functions of Microsoft Office Developer Tools for Visual Studio 2012. For example, one of the key new features in the cloud application model is that applications can be hosted by Sharepoint, Windows azure web sites, or your own web servers. Visual Studio enables you to modify a project started in "Napa" or create a new application from scratch, so that they can target all bearer options. You can also use powerful web development functions in Visual Studio 2012, such as Dom resource manager or Javascript debugger.

To seamlessly transition to Visual Studio, "Napa" allows you not only to download your project, but also to help install any software required to develop office and SharePoint applications.

Click "open in vs" in the lower left corner.

When you use this feature for the first time, if you add server code elements to your project, you are asked to select the language preference used by Visual Studio.

When you click "continue", the system will prompt you to run the EXE file, this will check whether you have installed Visual Studio 2012, Microsoft Office Developer Tools for Visual Studio 2012-preview plug-ins and all dependencies. If you do not, it starts the Microsoft Web platform installer to install the required software. It downloads them and opens the project in Visual Studio 2012.

When running from Visual Studio, you will notice that the project has been set as a developer and remotely debugged to your developer website.

For those who want to start Visual Studio, download the Microsoft Office developer tool for Visual Studio 2012 RC-preview version here.

OfficeApplications

Now that we have built a Sharepoint application, let's go back to "Napa" and then build an application for office. This time, when you create a new project, let's select a content application for excel.

By default, office applications include HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files, which enhances the concept that the Office cloud application model is a standard web development.

This time, when we run the application, we run it in the Excel Web Application-no need to install Microsoft Office 2013 preview to build the first office application.

After installing them, you can run them in the office client application, which is an option in the property designer.

Finally, in addition to SharePoint and Excel applications, "Napa" also supports creating task panes and Mail applications.

Learn more

This article only covers the Office and SharePoint applications. I recommend that you visit the new office application and SharePoint Developer Center to learn more. Don't forget to register a Microsoft Office 365 developer for preview and try "Napa"