Weekly Update 15 December 2025 – SPFx Tooling Changes, Git workflow with VS2026, Vibing a running dashboard, Claude Code step by step

This week:

General Availability of SharePoint Framework 1.22 – A Major Refresh of the Build & Tooling Experience

SharePoint Framework v1.22: What’s in the Latest SPFx Update

Streamlining your Git workflow with Visual Studio 2026

How to: build a runner’s training and progress dashboard

How to install and configure Claude Code, step by step

You can also listen to the audio-only version of this podcast: Thoughtstuff Podcast – Tom Morgan on Teams Dev: Weekly Update 15 December 2025.

Find all my videos at thoughtstuff.co.uk/videos. You can also subscribe to the audio-only version of these videos, either via iTunes, Spotify or your own podcasting tool.

Transcript (AI-generated)

Hello and welcome to another weekly update. I hope you’re doing well.

We’re heading into the quiet slide toward Christmas, but there’s still some important updates to talk through. This week’s highlight is a major release for SharePoint Framework (SPFx) version 1.22.

SPFx 1.22 Build Tooling Shift: Gulp → Heft

The biggest news is that SPFx has moved from Gulp to a new build tool – Heft. It’s worth paying attention, especially if you have projects still in development. Heft is a drop-in replacement with some key differences, and migrating early could help you avoid breaking changes down the line.

If you’re already in production, consider this update during your next version bump.

To explore this further, I’m referencing two blog posts—one is the official Microsoft announcement, and the other is by Andrew Connell, who has detailed insights including how to create custom Heft plugins.

Security Enhancements

Another big plus with v1.22 is the significant reduction in security audit warnings from npm packages. The SPFx team has worked to ensure the default scaffolding is now clean of those warnings, making it much easier to pass client audits and get into production.

Git Workflows in Visual Studio 2026

Mads Kristensen’s blog post revisits Git integration in VS 2026. It’s a “day in the life” style walkthrough, covering workflows like stashing, popping, and even AI-assisted commit messages. If you’re like me and don’t stash often enough, it’s a great reminder to use these capabilities more thoroughly.

The generate commit message button is especially game-changing – I don’t write any commit messages myself anymore!

Vibe Coding with GitHub Copilot and Claude Sonnet 4.5

Over the weekend, I built a running training dashboard using nothing but AI – specifically GitHub Copilot CLI and Claude Sonnet 4.5. The result? Data from Strava and a weather API presented on a terminal display. I didn’t manually write a single line of code. Perfect for those “someday” projects that usually never get built.

I shared a full blog post about it if you’re curious about using AI to build functional, minimal-code projects.

Reminder: Claude Code Integration Guide

Finally, I dropped in a high-level but useful ZDNet post on getting started with Claude Code. Sometimes a walkthrough is all you need to get a tool into your workflow. I’ll be playing with it over the holidays – we’ll see how it stacks up compared to Copilot.

That’s everything from me this week – have a great one, stay stress-free as we head toward year-end, and I’ll speak to you again soon.