Welcome to episode 355 of the Microsoft Cloud IT Pro Podcast recorded live on September 29th, 2023.
This is a show about Microsoft 365 and Azure from the perspective of IT pros and end users where we discuss the topic or recent news and how it relates to you after only a short time since having him on the show the last time, we welcome Andrew Connell back to discuss some discoveries he made in the 23 H two update for SharePoint server subscription edition related to S P F X, while he's a developer. And S P F X is the SharePoint dev platform. This discovery could also have a big impact on IT.
Pros that have deployed or purchased custom S P F X solutions to their on-prem environment. We have a voice that joined us. Again, we have Andrew Connell back on the podcast with us to have an interesting conversation. Before that though, ac, do you want to introduce yourself? If people are new, I would imagine you've been on the show enough that most people have heard you and know of you, but just in case this is their first time, hey, it's always.
Good to reach out and find new people that I haven't talked to before or haven't, haven't engaged with. Yeah, so thanks for having me. Again, I'm Andrew Connell. I am primarily a developer. I am a developer, I should say not primarily . I am a developer, specifically like a full stack developer focusing on the Microsoft 365 and Azure side. So long history with SharePoint teams development, Microsoft teams development, Azure development, all that kind of stuff.
I've been doing SharePoint for 20 some odd years. So that's my song and dance. And I guess you'll have like my contact info, easy to find me in the easy to find me online. You search for Andrew Connell and SharePoint, you'll have no problem finding me or just go to andrew connell.com or Andrew Connell on Twitter or on LinkedIn or whatever. I'm, I'm everywhere.
Yes, you are everywhere. But that SharePoint development, so this kind of all came about, I think it was like a week ago or so, two weeks ago as a developer, you were paying attention to some release notes on SharePoint, on premises and saw something that popped up at you and you sent me a message and said, Hey Ben, do you know anything about this? And through a bunch of dialogues, this whole topic came up that you discovered it from a developer perspective.
And I was like, you know, from an admin perspective, this is probably kind of important for admins to know as well, which is kind of how this show came to be. And Scott is completely in the dark because you and I colluded to completely catch Scott off guard on our topic for today. Can I just say though, like I'm really prepared. So I brought my ice tea today,
, it's in my SharePoint Saturday Cleveland Glass. So I'm already, I have a pint of iced tea and I'm ready to sit back and just listen to the two of you. I don't know, talk about SharePoint garbage. I should be way out of my element here because this is gonna be not only on-prem, which I don't touch. Mm-hmm. .
And it also has something to do that I, like you said, Ben, I think it's got, it's going to impact people who manage on-prem SharePoint farms, specifically SharePoint subscription edition farms, because an update shipped about two weeks ago. And if you don't know what's going on with this,
you very well do not want to install it right now. , you wanna wait and find out how one, once Microsoft figures out what the heck they're gonna do about this, because yeah, I mean I looked at it from a developer's point of view and we'll, I mean, we'll dive into it. It's gonna be a little hard. There's a lot of version numbers gonna be thrown around here,
but I will do my best. I will tell you that if you're sit, if you're not driving and you can get out a piece of paper and a pencil, I will give you the timeline and you'll be able to see why, how things are all kind of jacked up. But if you don't, don't worry. I'm gonna have a, I am gonna have an article on my site on my company site tonno.io, and I'm planning on doing a YouTube video for it as well that I'll publish. I guess this will, when the, when will this go out? Early October.
When will this. I don't know, how's that for a horrible answer? Good. I think it'll go out like a week and a half from today. October 12th. There. You go. Ask Scott. He knows what's going on. So this, I will have an article in a video that will be live by the time this goes out. So you'll, so yeah, so if you, if you're having trouble like tracking and all that kind of stuff and everything, you just, you get the big piece.
But I'll also have an article that'll, I reference all these things as well. So got my notes out of the article I have to write and that's what I was gonna talk about today. Alright, so yeah, this all started about, I'm trying, I'm looking back through our messages of when you first asked me, and I can't find it right now. It's like. Mid-September. Yeah. Was this really the very first? Oh yeah. So you sent me a message, this was on September 15th,
so it was like two weeks ago. You said you, you sent me a message and said, have you been picking through the SharePoint subscription edition 23 H two update? And I was like, no. Do I need to, and you said, well, there's a mention in the announcements and docs about bumping support for S P F X to, do you want me to start giving some version numbers?
Okay, so you start here. So then you said it was an S P F X, some changes to S P F X and you started throwing out a whole bunch of version numbers to me. So let me set some context first and because I think it helps to understand why this is a, well, this is potentially a B F D for for enterprises.
So a really big deal because you could install this if you're in a certain state, you very well meaning that like we are fully patched, we're fully updated, and we have either bought some stuff from a vendor that installed that we've installed into our, our SharePoint server subscription edition tenant and or we've
also got custom stuff that we've deployed. If you're in that scenario, this very well could, if you install this update, it could very well just break your form or break all of those components. And so that's why this is important. So yeah, like you said, I have a couple alerts and stuff that I track to see like, you know, any news that goes on like classic Google alerts for a bunch of different
phrases that I watch. And I saw this one pop up that there was a h, there was a second half update in 2023 for SharePoint server subscription edition. Well go back and think like when SharePoint ser, first of all, today in SharePoint online, all of this kind of goes down, goes is centers around the SharePoint framework, which is what we use to build custom solutions for SharePoint today is the
recommended way of doing it. While we have a bunch of other ways we could do it, this is the recommended approach and this is the way it's been also recommended on SharePoint on-prem for a couple years as well. And what Microsoft today, what we have in like SharePoint online is we're all the way up to version one point 18 of the SharePoint framework. But on-prem versions are way behind this. So like SharePoint Server 2019 and SharePoint server subscription edition, they're on version 1.4 0.1.
And earlier this year when Microsoft shipped the first half update for S P S E, so that I'm going to, instead of saying the whole thing out, I'll just do the shorthand way. So SharePoint server subscription edition, SS P S E, they ship the first update out for this year. So it's referred to as 23 for 2023 and then H one.
So for the first half of 2023. And that update, they kind of surprised people where they said previously they'd said, we're never gonna update the SharePoint framework on on-prem deployments. And in the update they ran, they did earlier this year, I think it was like March or April or May, they said we are updating the SharePoint framework to version 1.5 0.1. Okay. So that's a little number to write down there. So 2023 H one is SharePoint framework, 1.5 0.1.
And SharePoint Online you said was 1.8, right? 18 1.8. One point 18. All right. I'm throwing some of this, I'm throwing some of this in the chat too. Yeah. I'll actually, I mean, I meant to put the chat up, that's where we were like, say August. Oh, well, okay. But just say that's where we, that's where we are because one point 18 just came out,
so it's really like one 17, but whatever. So when I saw this new, when I saw the update drop for the blog posts from Microsoft saying that they released H 2 20 23, that update for S P S E, they said that they had updated the SharePoint framework, or specifically what they said was they added support for a new version of React and a new version of Office UI fabric allowing developers to utilize these newer components in their SharePoint framework solutions.
So that's really all they said in terms of what they did. Now, they did give a specific version of React and I'll come to in a minute, and a specific version of Office UI fabric that I'll come to in a minute. But they didn't mention what version of the SharePoint framework. And so the first thing that I went to, I was like, which version did you guys do? I'm surprised you didn't even, you didn't say this last time you did. So I started like poking around and I start, you know,
trying to figure it out on my own. I've kept, so I'm a, I'm a SharePoint framework guy as like my primary business or has been for the last couple years. And so what I did is I went back and I looked at the, the spreadsheet that I keep for every release of the SharePoint framework and what's new, what's changed, what's deprecated version dependencies, blah, blah blah. And I saw that when, so one of the things that that,
that this update did, is it update? They said that they had, they had updated the support for React Up to React version 16. Well, the SharePoint framework started to support React 16 in version 1.7 0.1 of the SharePoint framework, sorry, 1.7 0.0. So I'm like, okay, so at least the SharePoint framework probably got bumped up to 1.7 0.0, but then went back and looked at, well, that's okay, so I saw you put in the chat, it's not totally right because that's not what Office Fabric,
so just delete the office share fabric piece. And then I went and they said, well, the other part of their release was we also updated the office UI fabric to react version to Office UI fabric, react to version seven. Well, the SharePoint framework version that got that support, that version supported was the SharePoint framework, one point 12.1. So I looked at this and I'm like, well, that's interesting.
So we're in this range of, probably they've updated the SharePoint framework to one point 12.1 so that they could support both of these versions. But that's a big jump from like 1.4 0.1 to the first half update was 1.5 0.1, and then the next, and then saying like, then they jumped all the way to one point 12.1. I'm like, holy crap, people are gonna love this. That's a, that's a pretty big jump. So I went, and I'm still trying to pick it apart. couldn't figure it out.
So I sent a message to some friends over on the SharePoint framework engineering team, and I was like, Hey, so you guys know anything about this? What's up? And they came back and they're like, what? , we've never heard of that , that's paraphrasing. That's exactly what they said. , do it again. They're like, how did you, how did this happen? So I'm gonna be a little careful on what I say because I don't think that some
stuff is kind of public. So I'm gonna be, I don't know, I don't wanna throw too many people under the bus here. And the story is still kind of evolving, evolving. So I'm thinking like, okay, well this might make sense actually. The, the, when we create new SharePoint framework projects, use a thing called the yeoman generator to do that. And the last version of the yeoman generator that supported creating on-prem
projects was one point 12.1. So I'm thinking, okay, this tracks, so it probably is, this is probably one point 12.1. So when I asked the people on the engineering team about this, they weren't sure what I was talking about. And they, they were not familiar with this. And so I was like, okay, well I actually wor I worked with the guy that did the documentation, the, the SharePoint development documentation for the H one update earlier
this year. And so I reached back out to him. So he's on a team, I think he's on a team in China, I might be wrong with that, but I think he's, I, I believe he's from China. He's in China, or he worked some really terrible hours in in the United States, . And he, so he came back, he, he responded to me and he's like, yeah, so here's what we did, and I'm a little late on getting the PR to you,
but let me get the PR done. And so I was like, okay, because one of the things I do on, and it's part of my, my work for Microsoft, so I don't work for Microsoft, but I do some contract work for 'em. And one of those is that I review all of the updates to the developer docs and for SharePoint development, and I also write a lot of the docs. And so he's like, well, I didn't get you the pr. And I was like, well, okay.
So I go back and I look at the PR when the PR comes out, when he, he tells me it's, it's up there now. And suffice to say it didn't answer any questions and it created a lot more. So the PR is still public out there today. It's pub, it's pr uh, 92 15. It's in the SP dash dev docs. I'll grab a link to it and drop it in the chat for you guys. All right.
This PR is, is still, it's live today. And it was, there's so much stuff in it that is like, gives you, like, you basically drop a lot of WFS as a SharePoint framework developer when you read the details of this pr that it was so much so that I went to the guy who actually wrote the PR and I cloned his forked repo so that when this PR was deleted, I had a copy of it on my machine . He, I figured that this is gonna be, this is gonna be deleted at some point.
So the more I, the more I poked through it and the more I I, I saw what was going on, there's a lot of things that scares the heck outta you. Okay? And I'll, I'll get to what the, the, what my guidance would be for people today until Microsoft kind of steps up and clarifies what's going on. But I'll also tell you like what the implications are, uh, at least if things stay the way they are today. And the problem is that this isn't like a release candidate.
This is like ga out in the wild. People have already started to apply this. So one of the things that this does is that what they talked about, that they changed the version of the SharePoint framework that's included in 23 H two to version 1.5 0.0. Now, if you're keeping, if you're keeping score at home, I didn't say upgrade because that's actually a rollback . Yeah, it's, it's interesting like even the public docs today, 'cause some of this stuff is out there and already floating.
It's not like we're into a calendar year, 2024, any of that stuff yet. So they're very explicit that they come back down to things like V 1.5 or lower 1.5 0.1 to 1.5 0.0 or lower, which that's weird, doesn't comport, it's.
Not only weird, but that the thing that scared the heck outta me with that one right off the bat, when I saw that, I was like, well, hold on a minute, what about customers who have upgraded their projects or rolled out 1.5 0.1 projects and up, you know, upgraded new projects, whatever, that they did that off the H one update this year for S P S E that are now running a newer version of the SharePoint framework than what is even existing on the on in H two, right?
'Cause for the last six, six months, they could have been writing stuff against 1.5 0.1, right? Ever since that. They could have been writing stuff for it, updating it, they could updated their projects, they could have bought a project, they could have bought a solution from one of those intranet in a box companies like, uh, Velo or somebody, I'm not saying Velo did this, I'm just using them as example , right? But they could have bought something and deployed it to their environment.
Here's the thing, when you do this, 1.5 0.1 is no longer on the SharePoint, uh, S P S E. So without you changing your project, you have a reference in there in the, in the dependencies that say, go tells the SharePoint framework runtime on the page to go load this. And it goes out to go fetch that and pull it down from the on-prem server. If it doesn't exist, it's going to break, right? There's no way, there's,
there's no bones about it. So that's a, that right there, that's a huge concern right off the bat.
And so kinda the moral to that piece right there that is really confusing why they did this or what's going on is that if you just want, I wanted, like what I, I guess what I would tell admins on this, or it pros who are who are managing these farms, is if you have any customizations, if you have any custom SharePoint framework components, and that's not just the ones that you've built or you've contracted somebody
else to build. If you've bought a product that has any UX to it, SharePoint framework is the way to implement the UX changes inside, uh, SharePoint today. And so there's a pretty good chance that those tools are using the SharePoint framework and they may have been upgraded to 1.5 0.1, and if they did, and you do, you upgrade to one point, well, if you upgraded H two two, then you're kind of screwed, right? So that's one, but that's not the part that like,
that already raised like enough of like going what in the world? It's like, okay, you know, earthquake, everyone stop. Let's figure out what the heck's going on here, . But there's a couple other things that make this earthquake that make like the ca ca, California slide into the ocean that we're like, holy God, what in the world just happened?
So when you dig a little bit deeper in that pr it walks through some details about, now here's how you, we, well, oh, sorry, this raised the flag with me after, after you saw this and you kinda like took stock of it. I remember walking away from my, from my desk after like sending the message to some people over, over the engineering team, like, what's up with this? So I walked downstairs, go to get some more, go to let the dogs out, get some water.
And as I'm standing outside, while the dogs were, you know, walking in the grass for bed, it dawns on me. I'm like, wait a minute. They said that they upgraded to React 16 and to office UI fabric version, not version seven. They went backwards. How did they do this? Because the SharePoint framework, , you couldn't upgrade version of React. You couldn't upgrade the fluent UI in your projects because of these dependency
trees that they had. So I was like, how's that supposed to work? So of course, get the dogs back in. They were pretty ticked at me because they were only out for like two or three minutes, ran back upstairs, start digging into it.
And I read more about the PR and the PR says, walks you through all of these steps, how to surgically go in and to add new packages in for the office UI fabric into your SharePoint framework project to be able to use the newer version of the office UI fabric and on how you can manually go through and upgrade to use a newer version of React. Now, those two things, they're already kind of like as a, a SharePoint F as a SharePoint framework person,
I've known for a while and I've had the reaction when someone says they're doing that, I'm going, you're way off on the reservation and your mileage may vary. , Microsoft doesn't support this, so good luck. The fact that they're giving us guidance with this is like, are you guys aware that you're giving us guidance? But the part that really shocked me and shocked other people is that then they walk you through the way that they did this was that they have you, okay,
so let me take a really small tangent. In a all SharePoint framework, projects are, well really any kinda development project you do, you have two different kinds of dependencies. You've got dependencies you only use in development. So stuff like unit testing, build performance, whatever. And then you got dependencies that run in production, which is we need this stuff to be able to run that, run our app.
So we have the same thing as SharePoint framework. Well, what they did is they, in the production dependencies, those SharePoint framework packages were up, were not updated, changed to version 1.5 0.0. So they walk you through, here's all the steps you do to go to 1.5 0.0. So that's like, okay, that's what you said in the docs.
But then over in the dev over in the develop the development dependencies they have, you go modify a handful of those SharePoint framework packages to SharePoint framework version 1.9 0.1. So not only have they changed the version of React and the version of the office UI fabric that are, that is, that's being supported by 1.5 0.0 to a version that did that SharePoint framework was never tested to be able to work with.
But they've also gone in and they've mixed two versions of the SharePoint framework in the same project, which I can guarantee you has never been tested , it's never been designed to ever do this. I'm surprised that it even got projects working in this, in this scenario, much less all of the other potential effects that this could have. This was like. I mean, one question's how well they work in this area. Like I'm, I'm just reading through this PR and it's a mess.
Like you are completely, like you said, uh, outside the bounds of normal world. Like let's take SharePoint framework outta the equation, right? Like, like and just getting into all the linkers, the yeomen generator, like all that stuff. Like you're effectively telling customers to go down the path of like, Hey, we have this supported way for you to get onboard the platform and by the way, go make a bunch of human-driven crappy decisions that are probably going to
break you. And like, let's forget about like just typos and you know, you're, you're s and you know, your your dependencies and your configuration let alone like, does this stuff run? How does it work? And then what does supportability look like and whose responsibility is
supportability? Like that's always very, very hard. Like I don't, I'm not as familiar with the way it works in SharePoint land, but I know just doing like storage SDKs for Azure, like we walk a very fine line between like, oh, that's an S D K problem or that's a your code problem and we really can't help you with your code kind of thing. And you see things like this and it's like, ooh, , that's rough. This is just customer reported incidents in whatever flavor they are.
It could be GitHub issues, could be support requests, could be incidents that are bubbled up to engineering teams from a support request. Like you don't want to do stuff like this that causes confusion and just becomes a C R I generator.
, I completely agree with you and it's, I, you know, you, if you poke through, when you look at the PR and if you look at like the files, there's a section there where you, where you, if you look through the pr, you can see where I've commented to the, the author of the PR where it's like going, this is, look, if this is what you want people to do, this is not the way to do it. It like, there's so many little pieces about the PR that are wrong with it.
Like he's saying to go, they're saying to go in and make changes to the package json file and change specific version numbers. Unfortunately, that's not going to, that's not gonna do everything because if you have an existing project, if you've already run MPM install on it, what what it does is it download, it creates a giant dependency tree based on the version numbers that are in package J ss o and it saves a snapshot of that dependency tree in a separate
file called a package lock file. And that's parallel to the package J ss o file. I think it's package lock, package dash lock J ss o. And every future time someone goes through an N P M install it checks to see is there a lock file because that's what I'm gonna use. Otherwise I'm gonna generate one based off package JSS O and that way I can do it on my pro, on my machine, give you a copy of my project and I can know that you're getting all the same
dependencies that I, that I had. The problem is, is that if you go do those things manually, all you're doing is changing the package j s o file and not the lock file. So the next time you're do an NPM install, you're gonna get all the stuff that you had before you did the package JSON updates. So it's, it's a moot point. Like the one way to fix that is just delete the lock file and regenerate it,
but he's doing it the wrong way. You should be doing it using like a script, which is what I had in the, in the PR release. But the other thing is is like Scott write to your point that you said now you know, cards on the table, this PR has not been merged, so it's still just a PR and it's not official docs yet, but it, it's a doc is so far as the stance on how do you deal with these changes for a product that's already out in, in GA and is released.
So it's kind of like straddling the line of like, is it done or not? The thing about it though that really got me with this PR is that it doesn't read like the changes they're having you do. This isn't the kind of thing that you would find in a poll, a poll request for official docs from a company like this. This is what you would find buried in a comment on Stack Overflow or in some YouTube video or like in some discord thing and saying, I figured out how to do it using this. And it's like,
you gave our c drive everyone right? Access. No, that's not how you fix your security problems, right? When I see these, these are things that live in like the GitHub wikis for this stuff and then occasionally you come across it or somebody does customer support person, they go, Hey, I followed this thing on this random wiki and you go like, oh yeah, that was wrong.
We'll fix it and we'll delete it and we'll bring it over here and it'll be the the right thing and, and and the right manifestation. I wasn't even thinking about like the whole like just M B M flow and package locks and I mean really like at that point you're again just down a weird path like you are modifying the, what, what is it? Package locks are considered the manifestation of the manifest I think is the way M p M documents them, which is like a good way to do it. Like that's what it is.
It's a semi durable record of all the things that were point in time generated for this project and, and all the various node modules and everything that came into it. And now you're just gonna go and trounce it and like you said, the next time you, you, you, you go and and do your M P M install and build it and push it out, it's different Again, good luck.
That's the thing is like I, as I went back when I saw this, I was picking through it more and more and I, I ra so I, I asked questions back to the guy that sent me the original stuff. I went asked questions back to Microsoft and well I guess it's both Microsoft and I, the way I believe it works is all of SharePoint and SharePoint framework engineering is based out of Redmond.
So it's based outta corporate and I believe the sustained engineering for on-prem is based on from a out of a team that's run, I don't know if it's really managed, but it's really run out of a team outside of Redmond. I believe it's in China, but this has nothing to do with the fact that something's in China, not in China, just it's like, I'm just saying it's two different, it looks like yep, they may be part of the same two different teams,
but I can see that they're not Yeah, lowercase T not uppercase. Yes. Lowercase. Teams. Team . We already have two different teams,
capital T we all need to . But yeah, so it just, it's a little weird and when I ask a couple more questions, kind of was told we're working on it, don't merge this pr and so that's why you saw it all of a sudden got the flag, like the in the end review and got it flipped over to the label of don't merge and everybody just kind of went quiet on me and it's like that's when you just kind like, oh, I think I might have just, the thing that surprised me, my impression is, is that they, the eng,
the SharePoint framework engineering team learned about all this from me asking the questions. Like they didn't know what this was going on beforehand. At least that's the reactions I got. So that's the part that was really surprising to me. So like what I'm telling people today that are doing SharePoint framework stuff is first of all, this is a mess and you really don't want to follow any of this guidance until Microsoft makes a statement about it.
Or at least like follow that pr what I would suggest you do if you really want to get on the latest and greatest stuff, subscribe to the PR and just wait for changes to happen because that's gonna end up being either, it's either gonna get closed and a new one's gonna take its place or there's gonna be some other guidance that comes along with it. But that's probably gonna be like the best like change log to kind of track where things are happening with it.
What I'm telling people now is that unless if you do any customizations with the SharePoint framework in your environment, or if you have, if you purchase any third party products that you're gonna put in your environment and you're on SharePoint service subscription edition, be very, very either don't or be very, very careful in considering to install H 2 20 23 H two for SharePoint server subscription edition because I mean,
as I've just gone through, you could totally wreck your, those customizations. It probably won't like make the, the farm isn't gonna go like belly up, but those customizations, that stuff isn't gonna work. It's. Just not gonna work. What do you do? 'cause like you said, this is already in 23 H two, if you've already installed 23 H two and you have a bunch of stuff that broke, are there any fixes at this point in time? Right. Now there's nothing official for Microsoft. They basically just,
everything kind of went quiet. And so it's usually like when stuff goes quiet, it usually means that we don't have a, we don't have any guidance yet. We're trying to figure out what the heck's going on and where and what the state is. At least that's my interpretation. They haven't said anything publicly about this. There is another PR that uh, I think what yeah, what someone just put in the chat that they, someone messed up and they're trying to figure it out.
That's kind of what my perception is on it. In fact, there's another PR like a two or three prs after this one that came in or that's still listed as open and it's flagged also as do Not merge where someone else was updating the docs around the h the 2023 H one update to put a version number in there and there. And it looks like Microsoft has just said, we're not making any changes to any developer docs about SS P S E for H
one or H 2 20 23 while we're trying to figure this out. That's what, that's how I'm interpreting this and I'm being conservative when I say that there's some other stuff, but I don't feel like it's really fair to, you know, if you don't know what's going on, don't, don't hypothesize too much. So the only thing I would say is that if, if I, if, if a customer came to me and said, oh crap, we did update our projects to 1.5 0.1, we, and we had H 1 20 23 installed, sorry, 2020, say it again.
23 H one H. Yep. And we did upgrade everything to 1.5 0.1 and we did install 23 H two. What would you do? And unfortunately there's no way, there's never been a scenario where we've looked at downgrading a project and for the SharePoint framework, I've never heard of someone doing that. It's always moving forward, not backwards, right?
So one of the things that I would consider is, I mean, you could try and go back to like a good state of 1.5 0.0 at least for now, because technically every version of the SharePoint framework, like when they did 1.5 0.1, it should have installed all prior versions. Like that's the way it works in SharePoint online, like every version of the SharePoint frame has ever been released is is all in
SharePoint online. So you can run any version of the SharePoint framework, you can build something with any version of the SharePoint framework and deploy it to SharePoint online and it works just fine. I believe it works. This, I I believe the same thing is true in SharePoint on-prem, it's just the, the upper limit is, is much lower. So I would think that if you get it down to 1.5 0.0, you should be good. Even if you know you're running in, well, yeah, you should be good.
The worst case scenario is that you've gotta rebuild it as a 1.5 0.0 project. I absolutely would not do any of the stuff that they're talking about right now about here's how you can use React 16 and here's how you can use Office UI fabric version seven. I'm like, look, modern day stuff we're on React 18 and in fluent UI is all the way up to version nine. SharePoint framework just started supporting version eight of Fluent ui. So I wouldn't, which is the, the successors of the office UI fabric.
I wouldn't do any of the stuff that that PR says about mixing and matching versions and all that kind of stuff. I would just, let me do exactly kinda like what we did the H two H one update, except we're gonna try and like standardize on SharePoint framework 1.5 0.0 and then any I S V that's out there, I mean if I were them I'd be leaning hard on Microsoft and being like, what the heck man, you guys gotta tell us what to do with this because I wouldn't upgrade my,
I would not want any of my customers to do it. And they, I mean they would be looking at an absolute nightmare to go back and to roll back all their stuff. Do you feel overwhelmed by trying to manage your Office 365 environment? Are you facing unexpected issues that disrupt your company's productivity?
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You're in, what's theoretically a, I'll put it in air quotes 'cause you know, documentation , but you are in a, you are in a supported state like, hey, at a point in time documents said go do this thing, you went and did the right thing. As you said, generally the principle is go forward, not go backward and even go forward is go forward without
breaking changes. Like, I don't know how it works over in E M P and, and everything they, they do like with SharePoint and Windows, but I can tell you like in Azure land, like I I, it's not upon impossible for me to introduce a breaking change in an S D K without like bending over backwards and doing the right thing to make it move forward. Like it really has to be the one and only path forward to get there.
So I imagine there's also like the internal politicking of that of just how do you corral like, oops, and then another oops behind it . Yeah. How do two oopses make a, oh yeah, you should go do this and be happy about it and, and, and feel good with that decision. I don't if if I was an ISV or a customer I'd be sitting back and going, oh I did the right thing. Like it's your problem Microsoft. Like figure it out. That's the way I would And.
Then once you figure it out, tell me Yeah and tell me better not involve me going backwards 'cause that's not acceptable. Well yeah, I mean if anything I would think that we're gonna see a 23 H two part D, right? It's like , right? Yep. H 2 22 do one three . There there's the problem with our updates now, right? It's like it is a, it is a 2023 second half update. We can't have like a third half update , right?
Right. So is there any indication, I don't know that if we talked about this why they went back from 1.5 0.1 to 1.5 0.0, like is there things in h So let's say a customer's hasn't upgraded to 1.5 0.1, they still have all their solutions on 1.5 0.0 and they're on 23 H one, they're obviously safe to upgrade to 23 H two because they're on 1.5 0.0. But why did they regress? Are there issues with 1.5 0.1 in 23 H one that are corrected in H three or 23 H
two by going back to 1.5 0.0 if that all made sense. . This is the part where like this gets to be, this is, this is hard. I get if you're driving and you're trying to focus on like directions and the numbers we're gonna start throwing around here this, you're gonna get lost quick or at least I would get lost pretty quick. So there's, so one, let me, before I answer that question and the spirit of politics, let me answer a different question that I feel more comfortable answering. . .
You must've been on a big debate stage this week. . ? No, if I was, I'd be screaming at you , first of all, no one would've upgraded their for let's just think just about one, about H one. About H one, okay. Okay. Yep. No one would've upgraded their projects to 1.5 0.0 because prior to that it was 1.4 0.1. So that was the highest we could go to is 1.4 0.1. And then they, when they shipped H one, we jumped all the way to 1.5 0.0.
So you skipped 1.5 0.0 Yes. When you went from between those updates. Got it. Okay. And. In fact, the SharePoint release like chronology, it went from 1.4 0.1 to 1.5 0.0 to 1.5 0.1 on-prem. There was never a 1.5 0.0 until until the last month. So there was never a state where someone already had a 1.5 point project on it. They either had a 1.4 0.1 or earlier. Or a 1.5 0.1. Or they would've had a 1.5 0.1. So that was, that was one thing. What was your other question?
So it was kind of that, and it was was like why did they go back to 1.5 0.0 from 1.5 0.1? Are there issues in 1.5 0.1 that they should actually, and that was the one you said in the spirit of politics. We can forego that one if we need to. I've seen some stuff on a thread, but I really, and it's was not technically they didn't tell me it was under N D A, I don't feel comfortable saying it because I'm not entirely sure if it was or
was not. That's fine. And so I'm not gonna say it. However, what I can say is that I went back and I looked and my gut said there wasn't much in 1.5 0.1 compared to 1.5 0.0 back when this whole happened. And again, like I have this Google sheet where I keep a list of all, like this giant list, it's a, it's a terrible work worksheet to try and like consume, but I went back and looked at it to try and see what the differences were
between the two. And they're very, very small things and the things that were different were very cloud specific like Microsoft Graph or Azure AD or something like that. So they're really is nothing that was different between the two versions that you're gonna feel like, oh we had a loss of this. Got it.
The only thing you're gonna feel like if you had a loss of is if you updated 1.5 0.1, then you updated to H two and you're like, where did the whole framework, not that it works is it's not there anymore. . The one thing that I would say to it though is that we always assume that they would never go through and update the SharePoint framework on-prem.
We always assume that they've told us that for, what was it, 2017 is when it shipped and then it was 2017, February, 2017 is when the SharePoint framework V one shipped late that year is when a feature pack was released to let us to be able to install a SharePoint framework on SharePoint server 2016. So that would've been late 2017.
And so all the way from late 2017 all the way up to March or April of this year, so what, six, seven years we've always been under, we've always been told there will be no updates to on-prem when they came out on on-prem and they said we're gonna start updating the SharePoint framework and we're gonna do this small release first. And it's like, well that's a surprise.
That's, that's some good news. But with this one I get the impression, so I'm not, I'm gonna kind of paraphrase, kind of read between the lines. So this could be right, this could be wrong, but it's like kind of like based on what I know, I think, I think it's along the, the rights, the spirit of what's going on is that they realize that this is gonna be harder to do than they thought it was.
And there's something about 1.5 0.1 that I think that they thought, hey, let's give people a newer version of React and a newer version of Office UI fabric and we can't do that with 1.5 0.1, but we can do it with 1.5 0.0 and I think that's why they did it. Or at least that's kind of what my hunch is because everything in 1.5 0.1 compared to 1.5 0.0, there's nothing there. There's not much there. When you look at the release notes, there really isn't a whole lot there. There.
Wasn't. Got. It. So it's just a, it's really confusing. In fact, I'll pull the release notes up for 1.5 0.1. Wait, no, that's the wrong one.
And while you put up, the other other thing that you and I had kind of talked about too is even with this pr, we talked about how they gave all the, that guidance for updating React and the UI fabric, but then the other thing you would have to be careful about is if you're on SharePoint subscription edition and you built a solution on 1.5 0.0, 1.5 0.1 and tried to upgrade and leverage React and Office UI and then tried to deploy that same solution into SharePoint online,
you could have massive mismatches because now the version of the SharePoint framework and the version of React and Office UI don't line up between what's on-prem and what's online. So you, you really, even if there comes out a workaround to kind of shove these into the on-prem 1.5 0.0, 1.5 0.1, whatever, it may mean vastly different experiences if you tried to deploy the same solution, if you ever did go through a migration to SharePoint online. Yeah.
I don't, and that's one of the big reasons why I tell people just don't, don't do this. Like if you've got customizations right now, don't rush to install H two because you don't know what this is gonna do to you going forward. And it's, I don't think, I mean if there's, if there's any kind of a silver lining that's good about this, it's not like it's a destructive change.
And what I mean by that is that it's not like it's a feature pack or something or a service pack that you install that has changed like something in the registry or some database thing, right? This is just like, it is a non-persistent kind of a thing. It's just that stuff is broken and when they release an update,
all of a sudden stuff will start working again. It's kinda like, like earlier this week we had issues with teams where guest users were losing, couldn't see channels and couldn't, were losing access to posting in in different teams and they finally fixed it. But the fix was all done on the team's client. So it's like once you shut down the team's client and restart it and it updates, you'll have all the fixes and it's like nothing ever happened.
So it's kind of a thing like that. Like when they get this sorted, we'll be in better shape for it. My guess is that I've got to, I assume that we're gonna see another release of the H two, the H two, yeah. That's going to address these things because I don't see, even if you just told people don't upgrade React and, and obviously I fabric and we just deleted that part of the pr, that doesn't fix the problem that you're still doing a rollback.
And if you're doing the rollback, I would just say like why can't you guys just go back to exactly the way it was in with uh, H one, right? Well I'll keep it clean, but it's a, it's a poop show . Well, and it's not like they haven't done that before. Like I, we've all been SharePoint guys forever. I remember versions of 2013 and some of those cumulative updates where they would push an update and like a month later they'd pull it and rerelease it
because of stuff similar to this. Not the exact same thing, but inevitably something went out that should have been done differently or caused some issues and they have, they at least have a history of doing that, pulling an update and re-releasing it. They. Really do. I mean it's, it's really disappointing but it's like I get that it happens that you make an you, you introduce a regression. No, all good. Number one to recommend people to downgrade projects in order to go through and
move forward. I've never seen that. Yeah, . Yeah, that's totally. Wrong. It is an anti-pattern on top of another anti-pattern, on top of another anti-pattern and it should not be there. That part's not right. And I, I think really what you face here is, and it's a little bit like how the sausage is made for these products, but you kind of alluded to it earlier, there's SharePoint online, the platform, there's this thing SharePoint framework which has a dependency on SharePoint
online, but actually like, is it SharePoint? Well no, it's a SharePoint framework. It's this disconnected thing. Different team. And then there's this thing called SharePoint server subscription edition, which is, well you think it's all SharePoint, right? It's the same team that builds it kinda sorta of organizationally, sure. But really not so much. Like it's got a different roadmap, it's got a different set of priorities and it's got a different set of folks that are building it.
And now you've got the whole SharePoint framework in the middle. Like how does the actual team that maintains the SharePoint framework, like is their priority SharePoint server subscription edition, I would hazard to guess and say no, they probably don't care. And mostly considered an on rails experience, right? Like, hey, we told on-prem customers that it was gonna be in this state for a long time. Like, oops, S P S E folks, you broke that promise. Go fix it and figure it out.
And making customers bear the brunt of that. Like that's not right. Like somebody's gotta come up with an answer there, what, whatever that answer is, but it can't be downgrade. I completely agree with everything you said, Scott. I mean it was like, we started off as like number one, the big red flag here was a downgrade of a project. That's really bad.
Number two. Then there was the whole thing of just the reaction that I got, the reaction I had that was thankfully I was, I felt, you know when you, you hear something and you're like going, the sky is not red, the sky's not red, but someone tells you and you're like, should I go check? I'm gonna go check. I'm gonna go check. And so it was like when I saw this whole thing of like, hey look, there's two different versions of the SharePoint framework that you can put in
the same project. One for building and one for actually running stuff. And I'm like, I've been doing this like seven years. I'd never seen that. I'm like, I always thought that, like I've seen some of my students like say, Hey I'm, here's my, here's my package that j ss o file. I'm like, well I found the problem. Let's get this part fixed. No, I'm not having a problem with that. I'm like, well I don't care, but this is,
this is very, very wrong and this could be the problem. Your car won't start. Well let's make sure you have wheels on it and like the gas is full and that may not be the problem, but you're gonna need that. So let's take care of that and make sure that that's not the problem first . Because that one's pretty obvious. So I, when I asked the the product group that, and they were like, what? And I was like, okay, yeah, okay, so I apparently I brought this to y'all's attention. So , somebody,
lemme know what's going on. . That's part of it, right? Like, like the disconnected things team. The disconnected teams thing. It, it is hard. I take a lot of flack in my role for not knowing like the way every other Azure service consumes us. And I'm like, I can't, like that's not my job. . So there's all these dependent consumer things out there.
The best is when other folks, and, and it sounds like it's a little bit like this in in SharePoint land as well, when other folks don't own your A P I and they kind of ape it and copy it and try their best, but they can never keep up with the service and the actual like service owner side of it. And that's where you end up in these like sticky situations. 'cause somebody went down a path at some point and now they wanna pivot and change direction. It's like too late.
Like that's not the way to do it. A new release or a new product is the way to do it. Don't mess and break with all this stuff that's already there. It's an interesting thing, like somebody should write a book about like the politics of multi service development, multi-product development at Microsoft. Like, like a good like tell all someday. 'cause it is kind of crazy, like the internal politicking of it. And I imagine other, other companies probably have the same constraints, but Oh sure.
Microsoft is fairly unique from my experience at other companies with the way we build and release software. . I would love to see, like you read the book, the Phoenix project. Mm-hmm. . Mm-hmm . Yeah. So I would love to have see someone like write, you know, that's more or less, it's a novel, but it's really based on like, as you're reading as a dev, you're like, oh my God, this is so true. I'm glad it's written in like this.
And it's not written like a documentary, but like, this is such a good story. This isn't like watching a movie about hackers. Like this is really like the real stuff. So I agree with you. I'd love to see someone write something about, you know, rolling out Platform Cloud, you know, enterprise Public clouds at scale, places like G C P A W SS, Azure and then, or like even a company, like let's see what meta, how meta does it and let's see how like what all the stuff that OpenAI is trying
to manage as well. Like let's, I love to see all that, the behind the scenes of it. Mm-hmm. , I've said that for a long time. Like especially from an IT pro perspective, like to see the behind the scenes of any of these companies. The data centers, the networking, the rolling out different versions, the updating, the patching. I remember one session like,
and this just gave me a glimpse at it. There was one session at Ignite, like years ago that I was sitting in and it was the exchange online team. And they were like, yeah, we never patch an exchange server. And I'm like, huh, you never patch an exchange server? And they're like, no. Like every two weeks we deploy brand new ones and rip out the old ones. We don't actually make any changes to existing servers.
We just get rid of them and put in new ones. And the type of stuff that, I mean, you would never do that at a small company. I've never worked for a client that's like, no, we don't patch our shirt servers, we just deploy new ones, add 'em to the farm and kill off the old ones. That transition from like, I mean, even enterprise to like these massive clouds is, it is and it would, I'm with you.
I would love to see a book or a documentary that gives a really good behind the scenes look, which we'll never get 'cause it's all proprietary ip. Or come work with me for a year, just come. Work with you. . Yeah, just sign an em, sign an employment recruitment at N D A . We'll, like we will chat, but come, come work with me for a year. .
Uh, even the, even the, even the stories that I hear, like the public stories, but then the ones that are also under N D A, like one of my favorite ones, I'm not disclosing anything, but like when Markovich does this, one of his N D A talks like at M V P summit stuff that he'll share and like, even though it's in under N D A, there's stuff that's shared that I'm just like, wow, if this ever got out, like I can understand why you would not want this to get out.
But the stuff that, just seeing the way that he talks about stuff and you're just like, I don't care what it's about, I'm gonna tune into one of his talks because it's always gonna be something where he's like kinda sharing the thinking and I'm like, I know that this is just the tip of the iceberg, but man, I would love to, I'd love to just sit in the back in the corner of your office during a couple meetings just to kind of just to, just to listen in and just be like, wow.
I think you can bid on that as part of the gift campaign. So yeah, again, come on, come, come on. We'll, we'll, we'll give you the opportunity to spend some money to try and win that opportunity. And. , I'm sorry, I can't afford it. I'm, look, I'm trying, I'm saving up for copilot licenses. Same. I can't do it either. . , I appreciate you guys letting me, you know, having,
let me join you guys. I thought that this would be a, even though it affects developers, it impacts developers, but I thought it would really affect it pros and more your audience, specifically people who are working on managing on on-Prem farms and SharePoint subscription, SharePoint server subscription edition, because this could really wreck somebody's weekend, month, whatever.
So Yeah. Well, and even hearing the version numbers and all of it from a dev perspective too, like there's, there's too many times I don't think the IT pros and the devs talk to each other about this type of stuff. The IT pros are like, how are we gonna go patch the server and something breaks they don't think to go ask the dev about, Hey, what's going on with these SharePoint framework web parts? And yeah, it's, it's one of those times where it's a fascinating overlap kind of between the two
and how one can have a big impact on another one. Do. You guys mind if I throw like a little plug in there real quick? No. No, go for. It. So I have like, I have a hourly coaching that I do as well. So if you're an admin and you're looking like, oh my God, is this gonna affect us? You can go to vos.ao, scroll to the bottom. There's one-on-one book, a one-on-one call. I can, we can talk through it and I can kinda be like, yeah, don't do it. Wait. You give folks free consulting sometimes.
So I would actually recommend that you were on a couple weeks ago, months ago. I, I, I forget the timelines for how we publish things, but I'll put a link in the show notes. So everybody should go back and listen to episode 3 44 where we had a C on and we talked through and tried to rationalize the right way to approach development in the cloud around some of these Microsoft properties.
And one of the fundamental questions we were kind of toying with was, should you be building SharePoint framework or teams apps or M 360 fives apps in the first place? So maybe go back and listen to that. Like if you've gotta go through this rationalization exercise anyway, and then once you've answered that question, come back and see if you need some more time with ac. It's interesting. We do, we're, I'm, I'm teaching a class right now on teams Zap dev and, and it's like,
do I build a web app or do I build a teams app? And I'm like, well, it's a big topic. We, we haven't, it's an eight week long class and we've been tackling it every single week that someone's like, , but what if? And I'm like, okay, we're gonna just dedicate a whole week to this one time. But yeah, it. Depends, you know, if you go this way, this. , oh, it totally does. It totally does.
That's why everybody's usually this comes up in like a normal like workshop or something that I'll do and I'm just glad that I've got like two months to go through with this, with this group of students. And so it's like, don't worry, we'll get to that one again. Just keep, you know, put a feather in it by the end of the eight weeks. We should have a good idea of what we're gonna do. And they're like, so what's the easy answer? I'm like, oh, it's, it depends. I mean, yeah.
That's always the easy answer. I answered a question today with that completely non dev related, but I was like, ask a question. Well, the easy answer is it depends. The consultants always say that depends. It's. Never, well so many times it seems like a cap out, a cop out, but it's not. It's like it really does. It's like I can talk about stuff. Mm-hmm and you're like, oh I didn't think about this. And it's like, yep, sorry, I'm just like everything else.
I feel like a lawyer sometimes, but the more you uncover it's like oh, we got deeper into that onion like, oh look, that's on now I'm crying. . Yes. Well thanks, thanks for joining us again. That was fascinating. And we'll put all the links to a whole bunch of stuff we referenced to in the show notes. And if you do need to listen to it a couple times to keep all your version numbers straight, we understand.
, I'll make sure I get you guys the link to the YouTube video and the YouTube and we'll put the article that'll really like detail and stuff. I'll put that in there as well and for you guys putting the show notes as well. So I appreciate you having me and I hope your listeners got a lot out of this. Anytime it's a pleasure. Well thanks and hope you all enjoy your weekend. Thanks. A lot man. If you enjoyed the podcast, go leave us a five star rating in iTunes.
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