The panelists discuss The New York Times and JavaScript with Eitan Konigsburg, Alastair Coote and Reed Emmons.

JSJ 268 Building Microsoft Office Extensions with Javascript with Tristan Davis and Sean Laberee

This episode is live at the Microsoft Build 2017 with Charles Max Wood and AJ O’Neal. We have Tristan Davis and Sean Laberee from the Office Team at Microsoft. Tune in and learn more about what’s new with Microsoft Office Extensions!

[00:01:25] – Introduction to Tristan Davis and Sean Laberee

Tristan Davis and Sean Laberee are Program Managers on the Microsoft Office team, focused on Extensibility.

Questions for Tristan and Sean

[00:01:45] – Extending Office functionality with Javascript

Office isn’t just an application on Windows that runs on your PC. It is running on iPhone, iPad, Android tablet, and apps on the browser with Office Online. The team needs a new platform, add-ins, which allow you to build apps that run across all places. It’s HTML and Javascript. HTML for all the UI and a series of Javascript module calls for the document properties. Sometimes we call it OfficeJS.

[00:03:20] – This works on any version of Office?

It works on Office on Windows, Mac, Online and iPad.

[00:03:55] – HTML and CSS suck on mobile?

There are things that you’re going to want to do when you know you’re running on a mobile device. If you look at an add-in running on Outlook for iPhone, the developer does a lot of things to make that feel like part of the iPhone UI. Tristan believes that you could build a great add-in for Office using HTML and JavaScript.

[00:05:20] – Are these apps written with JavaScript or you have a Native with WebView?

Office itself is Native. All of it is Native code but the platform is very much web. The main piece of it is pointing at the URL. Just go load that URL. And then, you can also call functions in your JavaScript.

[00:06:35] – Why would you do this? How does it work?

The add-in platform is a way to help developers turn Word, Excel and PowerPoint into the apps that actually solve user’s business problems. The team will give you the tools with HTML and JavaScript to go and pop into the Word UI and the API’s that let you go manipulate the paragraph and texts inside of Word. Or in Excel, you might want to create custom formulas or visualizations. The team also let people use D3 to generate their own Excel charts.

And developers want to extend Office because it’s where a lot of business workers spend their days 0 in Outlook, Teams, Word, Excel.

[00:10:00] – How did this get delivered to them?

There are 2 ways to get this delivered. One, there’s an Office Store. Second, if you go into Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, there’s a store button and you can see tons of integrations with partners.

For enterprises, IT can deploy add-ins to the users’ desktops without having stress about deploying MSI’s and other software deployments that the web completely rids off. The add-ins make a whole lot of pain the past completely go away.

[00:11:00] – Everybody in the company can use a particular plug-in by distributing it with Office?

That’s right. You can go to Office 365 add-in experience. Here’s the add-in and you can to specific people or everyone who’s part of a group.

For the developer’s perspective, if you have the add-in deployed to your client, you could actually push updates to the web service and your users get the updates instantly. It’s a lot faster turn-around model.

[00:14:20] – What about conversations or bot integrations?

There’s the idea of connectors at Teams. You can subscribe to this web book and it’ll publish JSON. When the JSON is received, a new conversation inside of Teams or Outlook will be created. For example, every time someone posts on Stack Overflow with one of the tags that team cares about, it posts on Outlook.

It’s a great way to bring all the stuff. Rather than have 20 different apps that are shooting 20 different sets of notifications, it’s just all conversations in email, making do all the standard email things.

And in the connector case, it’s a push model. The user could choose what notifications they want.

You’d also learn things like bots. You can have bots in Teams and Skype. The users can interact with them with their natural language.

[00:18:40] – How about authentication?

As long as you’re signed into Office, you can call JavaScript API to give you an identity token for the sign in user and it will hand you a JWT back. That’s coming from Azure Active Directory or from whatever customer directory service. That’s standard.

If you want to do more, you can take that identity token and you can exchange that for a token that can call Microsoft graph. This app wants to get access to phone, are you okay with that? Assuming the user says yes, the user gets a token that can go and grab whatever data he wants from the back-end.

[00:20:00] – Where does it store the token?

That’s up to the developer to decide how they want to handle that but there are facilities that make sure you can pop up a dialog box and you can go to the LO-flow. You could theoretically cache it in the browser or a cookie. Or whatever people think is more appropriate for the scenario.

[00:20:55] – What does the API actually look like from JavaScript?

If you’re familiar with Excel UI, you can look at Excel API. It’s workbook.worksheets.getItem() and you can pass the name of the worksheet. It can also pass the index of the worksheet.

[00:22:30] – What’s the process of getting setup?

There’s a variety of options. You can download Office, write XML manifest, and take a sample, and then, side loads it into Office. You can also do that through web apps. There’s no install required because you can go work against Office Online. In the Insert menu, there’s a way to configure your add-ins. There’s upload a manifest there and you can just upload the XML. That’s going to work against whatever web server you have set up.

So it’s either on your local machine or up in the cloud. It’s as much as like regular web development. Just bring your own tools.

[00:24:15] – How do you protect me as a plug-in developer?

There’s an access add-in that will ask your permission to access, say, a document. Assume, they say yes, pipes are opened and they can just go talk to those things. But the team also tries to sandbox it by iframes. It’s not one page that has everybody’s plug-ins intermingle that people can pole at other people’s stuff.

[00:27:20] – How do you support backward compatibility?

There are cases where we change the behavior of the API. Every API is gated by requirement set. So if a developer needs access to a requirement set, he gets an aggregate instead of API’s that he can work with but it isn’t fixed forever.

But it’s not at that point yet where we end up to remove things completely. In Office JS, we’ve talked about API’s as one JavaScript library but really, it’s a bootstrap that brings in a bunch of other pieces that you need.

[00:30:00] – How does that work on mobile? Do they have to approve download for all components?

You can download components by using the browser that the operating system gives. It’s another one of the virtues of being based on the web. Every platform that has a web browser can have JavaScript execution run-time. It allows for the way that their app guidelines are written.

[00:33:15] – How about testing?

It’s a place where there’s still have work to do. There’s a bunch of open-source projects that partners have started to do that. What they’ve done is they’ve built a testing library. Whatever the mock is, it's just a thing on Github. It is open-source friendly. So the team could be able to contribute to it. “Here’s an interesting test case for this API. I want to make sure that it behaves like this.

[00:35:50] – Could you write it with any version for JavaScript e.g. TypeScript?

A Huge chunk of the team is big TypeScript fans. They’ve done a lot of work to make sure that TypeScript experience is excellence.

Type is basically a collection of typing files for TypeScript. There’s a runtime process that parses your TypeScript, gives you feedback on your code, and checks for errors. You can also run it in the background.

There’s an add-in called Script Lab. Script Lab is literally, you hit the code button and you get a web IDE right there. You can go start typing JavaScript code, play with API’s, and uses TypeScript by default. It’ll just actually load your code in the browser, executes, and you can start watching.

[00:39:25] – Are there any limitations on which JavaScript libraries you can pull in?

There a no limitations in place right now. There are partners that use Angular. There are partners that are big React fans. If you’re a web dev, you can bring whatever preferences around frameworks, around tools, around TypeScript versus JavaScript.

[00:45:20] – What’s the craziest thing you’ve seen done with this API?

Battleship was pretty cool. There’s also Star Wars entering credits theme for PowerPoint.

[00:46:40] – If a developer is building a plug-in and get paid for it, does Microsoft take credit for that?

There are 2 ways that folks can do it. You can do paid add-ins to the store. Either you do the standard perpetual 99 cents or you can do subscriptions, where it’s $2.99/month. Tristan encourages that model because integrations are just a piece of some larger piece of software.

But Microsoft is not in the business of trying to get you to pay me a little bit of 10 cents a dollar. It’s really in the business of making sure that you can integrate with Office as quickly as possibly can.

When the users go to the store, they can use the same Microsoft account that you use to buy Xbox games or movies in the Xbox, Windows apps in the Windows store.

[00:52:00] – The App Model

If folks are interested in the app model, they should go to dev.office.com to learn more about it because that’s where all the documentation is. Check out our Github. Right there in the open, there’s the spec. Literally, the engineers who are coding the product are reading the same marked-down files in the same repo that you, as a developer, can come and look at. And you can comment. You can add issues like you could have a dialogue with that PM. Under the OfficeDev, you’ll find a tunnel repository that contains samples. Our docs are there.

Picks

AJ O'Neal

• Lithium

Charles Max Wood

• Miracle Morning by Hal Erod
• Clean Code by Uncle Bob Martin
• Ketogenic diet

Tristan Davis

• Amazon Echo
• Microbiome

Sean Laberee

• Running
• Garmin watch

Panel:

• Charles Max Wood
• Aimee Knight
• AJ ONeal

Special Guests: Dotan Nahum

In this episode, the JavaScript Jabber panelists discuss Hygen with Dotan Nahum. Dotan has worked within open source community, where he created Hygen. They talk about what Hygen is, how it came to be, and code generators in general. He was inspired by the Rails generator to create his own generator and took his inspiration from 12 years prior to creating Hygen. They also touch on how to share generators in separate packages and much more!

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

• Dotan intro
• What is Hygen?
• Code generators
• Rails in 2006
• Ruby on Rails 15-minute blog video
• PHP and Python
• Carried Rails wow moment with him into creating Hygen
• Wanted Rails generators everywhere
• Can you also modify files?
• Took the good things from Rails generator
• The fact that front-end apps have architecture is new
• Redux
• The solution of generating code
• A component is a ray of files and assets
• JavaScript gives you great freedom
• A standardized way of doing components
• GraphQL
• Everything lives in the “day job” project
• How the Hygen template is formatted
• Can have a shell action
• Is there a way to share generators in a separate package?
• Go
• And much, much more!

Links:

• Hygen
• Rails
• Ruby on Rails 15-minute blog video
• Python
• Redux
• JavaScript
• GraphQL
• Go
• @jondot
• Dotan’s GitHub
• Dotan’s Medium

Picks:

Charles

• Fluent Conf
• Hot Jar
• DevChat.tv
• Ethereum

Aimee

• Deep-copying in JavaScript

AJ

• Let’s Encrypt
• Nintendo Switch
• Breath of the Wild

Dotan

• asdf
• Brew Cask

Sponsors

• Triplebyte offers a $1000 signing bonus
• Sentry use the code “devchat” for $100 credit
• Linode
• CacheFly

Panel

• AJ O’Neal

Joined by special guest: Sam Selikoff

Episode Summary

In this episode of JavaScript Jabber, Sam Selikoff, Co-Founder at EmberMap, Inc. starts with giving a brief background about himself and his work followed by a discussion with AJ O’Neal about the Ember community. Sam mentions some of the biggest advantages in using Ember, and what it should and should not be used for. He explains the architecture of Ember apps, addresses some of the performance concerns and then dives into Octane in detail. He talks about a bunch of Ember components, compiler compatibility, relative weight of Ember apps compared to other frameworks, the underlying build system, and security considerations. Sam then helps listeners understand the usage of ES6 classes and decorators in Ember at length. At the end, they discuss component rendering and element modifiers and move onto picks.

Links

• Sam’s website
• Sam on Twitter
• Sam on GitHub

Follow JavaScript Jabber on Devchat.tv, Facebook and Twitter.

Picks

AJ O’Neal:

• Good Mythical Morning - YouTube

Sam Selikoff:

• The Man In the High Castle  
• Tailwind CSS

Tanmai is one of the founders at Hasura. Hasura gives you instant graphQL APIs on top of a Postgres database. The eventual idea is to make data access secure and easy. Tanmai explains the challenges of doing this in the cloud. He talks about some of the difficulties with the tooling around using GraphQL and its bias towards working well with a monolith. Since GraphQL is basically a shared type system that describes your API, that means all your types need to be in the same code base. This is at odds with the folks who want to do microservices and serverless functions, because since their API is split across multiple services they have different types, and forcing these types to work together defeats the purpose of using microservices. Also, storing state across requests doesn’t work well with serverless and cloud native stuff. In short, learning to live without state is one of the general challenges with going serverless. 

This is where Hasura comes into play, and Tanmai explains how it works. Hasura is metadata driven, and each instance of the server can leverage multiple calls and exhibit a high amount of concurrency. It’s designed to be a little more CPU bound than memory bound, which means that configuring auto scaling on it is very easy and allows you to utilize the elasticity of cloud native applications. Tanmai clarifies his usage of the word ‘cloud native’, by which he means microservices. He explains that when you have a metadata based engine, this metadata has a language that allows you to bring to bring in types from multiple upstream microservices, and create a coherent graphQL API on top of that. Hasura is a middle man between the microservices and the consumer that converts multiple types into a single coherent graphQL API.

Next, Tanmai explains how Hasura handles data fetching and a high volume of requests. They also invented PostgresQL, RLS-like semantics within Hasura. He explains the process for merging your microservices into a single graphQL interface. Back on data fetching, Tanmai explains that when the product is an app, preventing an overabundance of queries becomes easier because during one of the staging processes that they have, they extract all of the queries that the app is actually making, and in the production version it only allows the queries that it has seen before. Hasura is focused on both the public interface and private use cases, though private is slightly better supported. 

Tanmai talks about the customizations available with Hasura. Hasura supports two layers. One is an aliasing layer that lets you rename tables, columns, etc as exposed by PostgresQL. The other is a computer column, so that you can add computer columns so you can extend the type that you get from a data model, and then you can point that to something that you derive. 

The panelist discusses the common conception of why it is a bad idea to expose the data models to the frontend folks directly. They discuss the trend of ‘dumbing down’ available tooling to appeal to junior developers, at the cost of making the backend more complicated. They talk about some of the issues that come from this, and the importance of tooling to solve this concern. 

Finally, Tanmai talks about the reasons to use Hasura over other products. There are 2 technologies that help with integrating arbitrary data sources. First is authorization grammar, their version of RLS that can extend to any system of types and relationships, The second is the data wrapper, part of the compiler that compiles from the graphQL metadata AST to the actual SQL AST. That is a generic interface, so anyone can come in and plug in a Haskell module that has that interface and implement a backend compiler for a native query language. This allows us to plug in other sources and stitch microservices together. The show concludes with Tanmai talking about their choice to use Haskell to make Hasura. 

Panelists

• AJ O’Neal

• Dan Shapir

• Steve Edwards

• Charles Max Wood

With special guest: Tanmai Gopal

Sponsors

• Adventures in DevOps

• Sentry use the code “devchat” for 2 months free on Sentry’s small plan

• The Dev Ed Podcast

Links

• Hasura

• Haskell

• Node.js

• Cloud Native

• Microservices 

• PostGraphile 

• Postgres 

• PostgresQL RLS

• Swagger

• JAMstack

• Soap

• Rest

Follow DevChatTV on Facebook and Twitter

Picks

AJ O’Neal:

• The Economic Singularity

• Capital Cities

• GameCube Homebrew

Dan Shapir:

• Romania

• JSCamp

Steve Edwards:

• Cold Blooded: The Clutter Family Murders

Charles Max Wood:

• Maxcoders.io

• TripIt

• St. George Marathon

• VO2 Max app

Tanmai Gopal: 

• Follow Tanmai on Twitter @tanmaigo

• Broken Earth Trilogy

• The Three-Body Problem

• graphQL Asia

Rado Stankov is the Head of Engineering at Product Hunt. He's based in Sofia Bulgaria. He walks us through learning Pascal and PHP and Flash. We then dive into Ruby and JavaScript and what he's working on now at Product Hunt.

Host: Charles Max Wood

Joined By Special Guest: Radoslav Stankov

Sponsors

• G2i | Enjoy the luxuries of freelancing

• CacheFly

______________________________________

"The MaxCoders Guide to Finding Your Dream Developer Job" by Charles Max Wood is now available on Amazon. Get Your Copy Today!

______________________________________

Links

• MRS 077: Radoslav Stankov

• RR 396: GrapQL at Product Hunt with Radoslav Stankov

• RRU 042: React at Product Hunt with Radoslav Stankov

• React Native at Product Hunt feat. Radoslav Stankov and Vlad Vladimirov

• Prototypejs

• jQuery

Picks

Radoslav Stankov:

• Dependency cruiser

• The Unicorn Project

Charles Max Wood:

• The Name of the Wind

• LinkedIn

• Clean Coders Podcast

• Devchat.tv Workshops

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Khan, Shahnaz

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Going by a letter written by Nawaz Sharif to Narendra Modi, that he was 'much satisfied' with their meeting in New Delhi, the two prime ministers have succeeded in striking up a working relationship.

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