Tools that will support SPFx devs #5
Description
Awesome initiative.
In SPFx Toolkit VS Code extension we already started exploring some AI capabilities as well and we also already started experimenting with some LM Tools.
Technically it works similar as MCP server but it is just part of VS Code extension. We took this approach as at the time we started MCP did not had any auth support yet other than just passing token as plain text 😉 and this approach gives as more power also allowing us to reuse some parts of the VS Code extension as part of LM tools but anyway.
Our aim in SPFx Toolkit was to provide some AI Tools for GitHub Copilot Agent mode that will cover some typical scenarios a SPFx developer might have during their work. We may think of a few of those some related to the SPFx project itself but some to SharePoint Online which is like usually the primary target of every SPFx project at the moment right 🙂.
Sooo to sum, not sure if it is possible or part of your backlog but if it would be possible to have some in product MCP server as part of SPO (brainstorming here I guess 😜) it would be really great if it could expose tools that would allow to cover some typical SPFx dev scenarios (in that case SPFx Toolkit could just leverage and use them, instead of us reinventing the wheel now).
Some scenarios I had in mind for a SPFx dev use case:
- as an example many times developers experiment, hack around and try around new samples. Most of us have their dev tenants so a typical use case is when we get a sample from the PnP SPFx webparts/extensions/aces sample gallery and we want to quicky build it and deploy it and add it to a site to test it out. The problem is many times those samples require some resources right? We usually want a new site (best with site level app catalog) to test it out there, usually we need some lists with a few items, maybe some content types, ect. In the age of AI it would be really awesome if a dev could just open up a sample in VS Code and write to Copilot something like "check what I need to run this sample and setup everything that is required for it on my SharePoint tenant" and Copilot based on the SPFx sample code, readme, maybe some attached PowerShell provisioning script would create everything that is required for that sample.
- another typical use case is apps management. So usually us devs have a lot of apps and a couple of app catalogs and the typical use case where we are not sure if the app installed is from the site level app catalog or from tenant level app catalogs etc. So it would be awesome if AI would come to the rescue allowing us to solve scenarios like:
- clean up - remove all apps from a site, or uninstall and disable all apps from a site level app catalog so I would see only tenant level apps on the SP store on that particular site, or remove all apps from tenant level app catalog which are already present on some site level app catalog, or check on which sites this app exist and if there are no sites with this app remove it from the app catalog etc
- version handling - list or places I have this app installed and in which version and maybe take action and align the version so upgrade from tenant level app catalog
- moving apps - from site level to tenant level app catalog
- another typical scenario is that something is not working, we have a strange error in the debug console and we have no idea why 🙂. There are times this happens due to some service being down in M365 cloud or sometimes it is a strange conflict with some logic we have deployed as a tenant-wide extension that we were not aware of. What if AI could give a bit of context here. For example could help correlate the problem we have some with tenant health incident we currently have opened on our tenant. Or allow us to manage tenant-wide extensions
- documentation - I know.... this is going to be an MCP for SPO not for SPFx dev work 😁 and I totally get it but one of every developer favorite tasks that we all 'love' is writing use manuals (or am I the only person in the world that have to from time to time do that 🤔... anyway). What if AI could check the webpart property pane options on a page and base on all of the options and setting we have there create a file explaining the settings and possible things that could be set, so like a part of the manual) and save it as a file in SharePoint library. Wouldn't this be nice 😋? Like: "create a manual for every custom SPFx webpart you have on page aaa.aspx based on it's property pane settings and save them as a word document in a document library with tittle 'user manuals I have to write but I hate do to that'"
Those are only a few and I know it is impossible to just now expect AI will save every developer problem/world but we have to start with something right 😉
Let me know what you think of this feedback 🙂