Anyone have any experience with ““Napa” Office 365 Development Tools” yet? Interested in seeing the options and capabilities of such a thing.
http://ning.it/19Ligny (Link to content)
“The “Napa” Office 365 Development Tools make it easy to start building apps for Office and SharePoint without leaving your browser or installing software. Just add the “Napa” Office 365 Development Tools app to your SharePoint Online Developer Site, launch it, and you will be ready to create your first app for Office or SharePoint.”
Seems to be quite doubtful unless it might be well integrated with TFS/ALM/CI and most of the modern tooling including ReSharper. Until Napa doesn’t have these, it is just one more source of issues and pain.
Thanks for the thoughts David, I agree with your view on RT users.
I think I may also encourage the use of Napa as a way to teach beginner SP13 developers to get used to a simple SharePoint project and the App model before letting them touch VS.
I agree with you. In regards to your questions in issue #2, I could think of a couple I suppose.
1. RT devices. Perhaps the expectation was RT would have been a bigger hit and therefore would have provided RT users the ability to do just so.
2. Related to #1, even if your on a full windows tablet, perhaps you either can’t or don’t want to install any flavor of VS, be it the express editions or otherwise. Using NAPA, you could still do some rapid prototyping just as you have noted.
Those are my initial thoughts. 🙂
I’ve only had a little bit of experience with Napa so far. It is a neat way to start & rapid prototype SharePoint 2013 apps. However, without too much experience I’m left with a few open questions about its target audience and usefulness:
1. Are there users that do not have access to Visual Studio, that will start to use Napa to “get their feet wet” with SharePoint development? I have a hard time believing that these users exist.
2. What value does Napa provide for developers who will ultimately pop open the solution in Visual Studio to finish it? Does it provide a faster way to rapid prototype simple solutions? What sort of things are easier/faster to accomplish in the browser? Does it serve as a quick dev environment to test simple things out?
I found it amazingly powerful for being a Development App that lives solely on the browser. I have no doubt you could be creative in its use to output some rich SP Apps. That being said, after the first couple of tutorials, I followed the “Export to VS” option and haven’t looked back.
I personally see it as a great entry point to SP or Office App Development, but personally enjoy having more robust control that VS provides.
