By now TypeScript shouldn’t be something one has to introduce.

TypeScript is a typed superset of JavaScript that compiles to plain JavaScript.

If you haven’t already done it, go and see the intro video for TypeScript, check out a tutorial and visit the typescript playground. There are other javascript libraries which extend javascript and are compatible/compile to javascript: Dart and CoffeeScript. To be honest I had never time to try those. The fact that TypeScript is well integrated into Visual Studio which I happen to work within all the days (intellisense, compilation checks and more) did me curious. This post is actually not about TypeScript itself, but a test to use it in SharePoint. In this short “lab” I even had Web Essentials 2012 which automatically compile typescript files into plain javascript files on save. This is what I did: Install TypeScript and Web Essentials 2012 Create a SharePoint-hosted app: Create a new TypeScript file in the autogenerated “Scripts”-module and call it “Greeter.ts” Just save the file as it is. The new file is created: Greeter.js Now we don’t need to copy this file to the app, so remove Greeter.ts from the Elements.xml file (or comment it out): Open the Default.aspx from the Pages module and add the reference to the new javascript file:

I haven’t used TFS so much. But I like it so far. It works smoothly, both TFS 2012 (on premises) and TFS Preview (online). I really appreciate that Microsoft has been inspired from git - the world’s best VCS :). For example .tfignore which works exactly like the .gitignore file. It is nice that the non-classic Microsoft dot notation convention for naming the hidden files is chosen.  So if you have any files to ignore just do it like you did in your git projects. Here is a .tfignore which I use in my SharePoint project for now. I suppose it will be extended soon:

Today I encountered a weird issue, the classic Visual Web Part template was gone in Visual Studio 2012. When I created a Visual WebPart, a webpart was created with a generated .g.cs file, like the sandboxed visual webparts. I am not exactly sure why it happened. According to the MSDN guide Creating Web Parts for SharePoint, the structure of Visual Webparts should be the same as in Visual Studio 2010. It could have happened after I installed the power tools. However, if someone runs into the same issue, here is the solution: Copy this zip file from a computer with VS2010 installed:

Do you like Windows 8 user expirience, as me? Well than you want to try developing sharepoint solutions in Windows 8. Here I will show what I found out.

Environment

I installed Windows 8 Release Preview as a VMWare machine. Then I installed Visual Studio 2012 RC. Then I followed the steps for installing SharePoint on Windows 8 which are more or less the same as for Windows 7 client install. But then I encountered an error I haven’t found solution for yet. In my standalone sharepoint installation there were some permission problems: