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SharePoint Framework v1.8.2 (and v1.8.1) - What's in the latest Update(s) of SPFx?

sharepoint sharepoint framework spfx May 09, 2019

Earlier this week, on Tuesday, May 7, 2019, Microsoft released v1.8.2 of the SharePoint Framework (SPFx). A little over a month ago, I wrote about the v1.8.0 release. Since then we had another minor release (v1.8.1) released on April 16, 2019.

In this post, I’ll summarize what you can find, and share some additional details I found after spending some time picking apart the last two minor releases.

» SharePoint Framework v1.8.2 official Release Notes

First, Explaining a little Snafu in v1.8.0 & v1.8.1

Before I get going, let me explain a snafu that happened in the last few versions. SPFx provides a way to use GA features & features only available under developer preview. The way they do this is by using different packages that include --plusbeta in the name of the NPM package & modifying what objects exposed in the TypeScript type declaration files.

When Microsoft released v1.8.0 they accidentally included everything in the type declaration files so it seemed like everything was pushed into GA. One notable API is the impacted by this was SPHttpClientBatch (Microsoft’s comment on the incident).

When they noticed this, they went back and fixed it in the v1.8.1 release. This confused some people as it seemed like some APIs were GA, but then disappeared from v1.8.0 to v1.8.1 (#3829). However, when they did this, they made a mistake moved a bit too back to developer preview, including the microsoftTeams property on the web part context (ref #3826).

This was all fixed up in v1.8.2 (as far as I can tell at this point). Everything that’s supposed to be GA & developer preview are in their respective packages.

What’s in SPFx v1.8.1 Release?

This update was mostly a “fix” release to address some “uh-oh’s” from the v1.8.0 release. That SPFx v1.8.0 release introduced a few regressions that forced users working with on-premises SharePoint deployments to make some updates.

The two issues were (ref #3621):

  • the supportedHosts property was added to the web part manifest for all projects (only supported in SharePoint Online)
  • web part property pane objects were refactored into their own package @microsoft/sp-property-pane, but only in the v1.8.x packages (SPFx on-prem tops out at v1.4.1 for SharePoint 2019 and v1.0.1 for SharePoint 2016)

There were also some nested dependency issues that were updated in this release.

You can get the full details on the release here: SharePoint Framework v1.8.1 official Release Notes

But now that v1.8.2 is out, there’s no need to install v1.8.1. So, let’s move onto that topic…

What’s in SPFx v1.8.2 Release?

This release is similar to the v1.8.1 release in that it mostly fixed a bunch of introduced in v1.8.0 & v1.8.1. Specifically:

Fixed

  • the v1.8.1 update summary above I mention that the microsoftTeams object was accidentally removed from the type declarations… this was fixed (ref #3826)

Updated

  • type declarations for the React & React-dom NPM packages were updated to match the versions included in the project - before they were using older type declaration packages which meant you couldn’t leverage the latest features in React v16 without some manual work on the project
  • the build tools now leverage webpack v3.12.0 (up from v3.6.0)… this will address an out-of-memory issue in most scenarios that showed up with the v1.8.0 release (ref #3679)
  • default projects now leverage TypeScript 2.9 using the @microsoft/[email protected]
  • updated the version of the build tools used in SPFx which should reduce the overall size of the node_modules folder from 50-150MB
    • That’s what Microsoft says, but in my test of an SPO React web part project using Node.js v10 on MacOS, my node_modules folder went from 816MB (with SPFx v1.8.1) to 599MB, a reduction of ~26% or 217MB!

Added / Introduced

  • projects that leverage React include an explicit reference to Fabric React v6 (specifically v6.143.0)
  • added support for Node.js LTS v10
    • Node.js v8 is still supported, but support for it will be dropped in a future SPFx release

You can get the full details on the release here: SharePoint Framework v1.8.2 official Release Notes