Office 365/SharePoint 2013 – Enable Intellisense of OfficeDev PnP

In recent months I’ve really started to like the OfficeDev\PnP initiative on Github.

The following 4 projects give a great start for provisioning sites:

• https://github.com/OfficeDev/PnP-Provisioning-Schema
• https://github.com/OfficeDev/PnP-Sites-Core
• https://github.com/OfficeDev/PnP-PowerShell
• https://github.com/OfficeDev/PnP

It is now possible to export sites and import sites without the need for any features other than the out of the box features. No need to upgrade features, simply reapply the template after you have made updates and the changes are there.

It is possible to export sites, edit the exported file with any changes you might want to make. Personally I don’t like making many changes within the SharePoint interface and copying for example site collection fields and modifying them manually I find easier.

I use Visual Studio for this and I found that intellisense doesn’t work. How do I enable this?

I first found the following folder on my system ( I’m using Visual Studio 2015)

C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 14.0\Xml\Schemas

then created a file called pnp.xml with the following content:

<!--?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?-->

Depending on where you cloned the schema files from https://github.com/OfficeDev/PnP-Provisioning-Schema C:\Git may need to be adjusted in the above.

After the pnp.xml file is put in place I can now find all the parts of the template that aren’t exported with the Get-SPOProvisioningTemplate PowerShell command.

Pieter Veenstra

Is your business still running on paper trails, sprawling Excel files, or ageing Access databases? There's a better way — and I can show you exactly what it looks like. I'm the Technical Director of Vantage 365, a Microsoft solutions consultancy working with clients across the UK, the Netherlands, and worldwide. For over 30 years I've been turning messy, manual business processes into clean, automated systems that save time, reduce errors, and give teams the visibility they need to make better decisions. You can contact me using contact@sharepains.com