Welcome Experience and Walkthrough

Welcome Experience

The extension automatically detects if your VS Code is opened in the context of SharePoint Framework project. If it is not, then SPFx Toolkit will present a welcome experience that will allow you to sign in and manage your SPFx solutions as well as it will guide you through the process of setting up your local environment for SharePoint Framework development and creating your very first project.

Directly from this view, using actions pane, you may create a new project either from scratch or based on one of the available samples from the sample gallery.

To ensure you are ready for SharePoint Framework development, the toolkit may check your local workspace for the needed global dependencies, like the correct Node version, gulp cli, or yeoman generator, and install them if needed with a single click.

You may also kick off your work with AI by using the ‘Use @spfx in GitHub Copilot’ action which will transfer you to GitHub Copilot Chat using SPFx dedicated chat participant.

The extension also allows you to sign in to your Microsoft 365 tenant to gain access to the extension management capabilities allowing you to manage apps on your tenant and site level app catalogs as well as manage your tenant-wide extensions. Check out more about SPFx Toolkit management capabilities.

Last but not least, directly in the welcome experience, you may find helpful links to additional resources, tools and documentation to help you get started with SharePoint Framework development.

Walkthrough

When running the extension for the first time, it will open up a step-by-step walkthrough that will provide guidance on how to get started with SharePoint Framework development and will go over the main functionalities of SharePoint Framework (SPFx) Toolkit.