Don Kirkham
Microsoft MVP & MCT | Enterprise Architect, DMI
Arlington, Texas, United States
Don is a Microsoft MVP in M365 Development. He has spent the last 17 years working with companies of all sizes, helping them maximize their productivity in SharePoint, Teams, Viva, Office 365, Power Platform, and Azure. With over 30 years of programming experience, Don's passion for coding is centered around the complete Microsoft ecosystem of cloud technologies. Prior to working full-time in the IT world, Don spent 20 years as a pilot in the Air Force, accumulating over 4500 hours in various aircraft, including the T-1A, E-3B/C, and T-38.
Links
Awards
Area of Expertise
Topics
Modern Development using the SharePoint Framework (SPFx)
Level 100-200. SPFx is now a mature Framework for building solutions for Office 365, Microsoft Teams and the newest product, Microsoft Viva. This workshop will cover how to get started in SPFx by configuring a very flexible development environment and creating our first SPFx solution.
We will then expand our sample solution to interact with data in SharePoint. Our solution will use the latest development acceleration tools from the Microsoft-led Patterns and Practices (PnP) community effort to build modern solutions in webparts, extensions, and adaptive cards for SharePoint Teams and Viva.
The workshop has been updated to include the latest versions available of SPFx, PnPJS, React, Microsoft Graph Toolkit, and Adaptive Card Extensions.
Microsoft Patterns & Practices, the key to flattening your development learning curve
Level 100. The Patterns & Practices (PnP) program is the largest open community in the Microsoft ecosystem. While it is a haven for developers of all levels to learn from MVPs and Microsoft engineers, the real magic happens when you get involved. Learn how to become an active contributor in the technologies that interest you most. From creating or correcting official online documentation to providing sample applications to building cutting edge tools like the Microsoft 365 CLI, everything is available to community, with plenty of help from the PnP Team to other community contributors. Learn how you can get involved and take your skills to the next level.
This covers the various areas of the PnP program and will include demos on how to become a contributor.
PowerApps that display beautifully on all devices
Level 200. While Power Apps are able to scale to devices of different sizes, the techniques to accomplish this can be confusing. In this session, we will explore how to design your app to be responsive to all devices, eliminating the requirement to build screens for specific sizes. Once you see how this works, you'll never go back to the multi-screen approach to scaling.
Most of this session will be showing the techniques of using scalable containers to build a complex form.
Getting Started with the SharePoint Framework (SPFx)
Level 100. The SharePoint Framework (SPFx) is now the established future for modern, client-side development in the Microsoft ecosystem. SPFx is used for SharePoint webparts and extensions, Teams apps, Adaptive Card Extensions (ACEs) and Microsoft Viva.
The first step in SPFx development is understanding the model and building the appropriate development environment. We will cover these topics, configure a flexible developer environment and then build, debug, and deploy our first SPFx webpart.
Demos will cover NodeJS and how to manage with Node Version Manager. We will use the latest version of SPFx to build, debug and deploy a webpart and, time permitting, how to use that webpart in MS Teams
Developing with containers for SPFx and beyond
Level 200. The Microsoft 365 development space is continuing change at a rapid pace, including SharePoint web parts & extensions, Teams apps, MS Graph, PowerShell and so much more. One of the challenges of this rapid pace is that API and Framework versions are constantly being updated, so working on projects written against previous versions means a scramble to keep multiple environments available.
Containers allow developers to include the environment configuration in the project files, ensuring the environment is correct for the project. These containers can be used as part of GitHub Codespaces, Docker Desktop, and more.
This session will introduce container configurations for SharePoint development and how to make containers work with just a few files.
We will cover what containers are, and build multiple samples using Docker containers and GitHub Codespaces. We'll also show the pattern to simplify customizing a container for a specific set of environment variables, like NodeJS version and SPFX version.
Creating PowerApps for a global multilingual audience
Level 200. As more companies expand into markets around the globe, it is critical that your apps are able to easily handle multiple languages. We will discuss some options, then build a PowerApp that enables multiple languages using a simple Excel-like data source.
The session will leverage a PowerApp with connectors to O365 Users, Excel, and SharePoint, demonstrating a pattern that allows clients to easily add additional languages in the future,
Creating Branded Power Apps
Creating a Power App with custom colors, logos, font's etc., can be a real challenge. We will look at how controls can be customized and the limitations of some controls when it comes to branding. We will then discuss several strategies to simplify updating all of the properties needed to standardize the look and feel of controls without having to update each property individually.
This session covers several options for using branded controls in an application to eliminate the need for updating every property on every control.
Supercharge your modern lists with custom list formatting
Level 200. Modern lists in SharePoint have seen a complete overhaul. While the Lists app in Office 365 is new addition, it uses the same modern SharePoint lists as Office 365. These lists have a lot of customization available natively, but the real power comes from custom list formatting. We'll start with some simple tips and them level up to making list views one of the most powerful no-code solutions in your toolbelt.
This session will cover simple tweaks to complete replacement of the list rendering template. It will also cover some customization of the modern forms used by lists.
Connecting SharePoint Framework (SPFx) projects to your data
Level 200. SPFx can be used to build beautiful, modern solutions for Office 365, Microsoft Teams and Viva, but the usefulness of these solutions is limited if not connected to live data.
We will cover how to connect to SharePoint and Microsoft Graph directly using the REST APIs for each data source. We will then explore how to use PnPJs and the Microsoft Graph toolkit (MGT) to simplify and accelerate both the development and performance of our SPFx solutions.
The goal of this session is to expose the attendees to several ways to connect thier projects to the data in Office 365. We'll start with basic REST API calls to build a good foundation on how modern data interaction works and then show how to simply development while improving performance by leveraging existing advanced solutions.
Thrive Conference
Session: Supercharge your modern lists with custom list formatting
European Collaboration Summit
Session: Simplify SharePoint Development with Containers
Don Kirkham
Microsoft MVP & MCT | Enterprise Architect, DMI
Arlington, Texas, United States