Sympraxis’ SharePoint Client Side Development Pipeline – Where Should We Put Our Stuff?

As I mentioned in my previous post, when Julie Turner (@jfj1997) joined Sympraxis, we quickly realized we needed to get smarter about managing our code and our overall development process.

One of the first things Julie and I discussed was where we should store our code. Even way back before SharePoint entered my life, I’ve thought of code as content. It’s just a different type of content that has different content management requirements. For this reason, I’ve never fretted too much about storing my code in a SharePoint Document Library or in the Master Page Gallery.

That works fine when you’re a development team of one. But as Julie and I started working on a project together, we knew we needed to do better. Plus, angst and all that. One thing that is key here – and is key in many conversations about stuff like this – is there is no one-size-fits-all answer. Managing code is like managing any other content in that there should be some governance around it. But the governance doesn’t have to be – nor should it be – the same in every instance.

So we thought about what we wanted to be able to accomplish. Basically, what our requirements were to get rolling.

• We needed an offsite (meaning not just on our machines) repository. This would make us worry less about disaster recovery. We were both doing backups to the cloud (me with Crashplan and Julie with Acronis), but we wanted a repository that belonged to the company, not to either of us personally.
• We wanted to improve our code reuse. It’s not that we build the same thing over and over, but like the functionality in SPServices, there are some things we do fairly often. In other words, our tricks of the trade. By storing all of our code in one place, we hoped we would make reuse easier.
• We work with clients on project-based work. Sometimes we work with a client for a while, then they take over for a while, and we reengage with them when a new need arises. We wanted to make it easier for ourselves when that re-engagement happened: basically improve our speed-to-useful again.

As Julie mentioned in her post, she had used Team Foundation Server (TFS) Online at a previous job. I had touched TFS at a previous gig, but like many Microsoft tools it seemed way overblown for our needs. Plus, it’s really tuned for Visual Studio, which I never use.

Julie decided to set up a private Github repository, figuring it would be more palatable to me. I’m always a fan of using things that are simple (Github confused me for years, so I’m not sure it qualifies as simple!) and I liked the fact that we would be using something the wider tech community had stamped with a seal of approval.

We went with an Organization Bronze Plan – which now seems to be obsolete. (Here’s a link to the old plans courtesy of the Internet Archive Wayback Machine.) This gave us up to 10 repos and unlimited users for USD$25/month. Not much money, really, and we figured 10 repos was plenty.

Once we had the repo, we thought about how to organize it. We started with three repos for our organization: clients, admin, and samples. Our thought was that we would put all of the client work artifacts into that one clients repo. It certainly addressed our requirements to work that way. The admin and samples repos would be for Sympraxis administrative stuff and demos or samples we used for speaking sessions, respectively.

This got us up and running. We were both storing our code in a central repository and we could use whatever code editor (or IDE, depending on what terminology you find acceptable) we wanted. I’m using WebStorm a lot these days, but I also use Sublime Text and SharePoint Designer, and… Yeah, whatever works. Julie came from using Visual Studio, but these days she’s mainly using Visual Studio Code.

One of the greatest things about this Brave New World is that what we use to edit code really doesn’t matter that much. I really started liking WebStorm when I realized that its tooling for Github actually made Github make sense to me. I love the ecosystem of plugins for Sublime Text. And no IDE understands SharePoint as well as SharePoint Designer does. So I get to use whatever I need for the task at hand, and so does Julie. We’re just putting the results of that work into the same place.

As we moved forward with this setup, we started to see a few flaws in our thinking. The great thing about being a learning organization (the learning group is YUGE at Sympraxis) is that we comfortably revisit our decisions whenever it makes sense. The clients repo quickly became unwieldy. (Some of you would say “Duh!” here, but we’re fine with the way this went.) We were still manually copying code into our clients’ environments or editing in place and taking copies to dump into Github. We were very happy with Github, but not the mechanics of how we were using it.  So all wasn’t rosy yet.

In my next post, I’ll talk about the next steps we took to tune things…