Antti K. Koskela is a Finnish Software Developer Entrepreneur living as a hermit in the beautiful Finnish countryside. Koskila.net is his personal professional (i.e. professional, but definitely personal) website.
More about me here: https://www.koskila.net/antti-koskela/
On this site, I’m blogging about all kinds of exciting and/or tricky topics. Mostly just to write them down for myself. See a few of my latest blog articles below:
- How to verify a private key matches a x509 (.cer) certificate?
This post explains how to verify a private key (possibly a .key file) you somehow got your hands on matches a certificate file (.cer) you also somehow are in possession of. Don’t ask me where I got mine, but I had to figure out how to make sure a key and a certificate matched before I uploaded mine to AKS (Azure Kubernetes Service). Problem This is yet another article where…Continue reading How to verify a private key matches a x509 (.cer) certificate? - How to avoid global.json version conflicts in Azure DevOps
Sometimes in Azure DevOps, you have a project that’s being built with certain .NET version. It’ll require that particular SDK version, and most typically that is defined in global.json file. However, if you also need to install a certain .NET tool, running dotnet tool install MyBuildTool will fail. And it’ll fail before it actually tries to install the version of the tool you wanted to! This article explains how to…Continue reading How to avoid global.json version conflicts in Azure DevOps - How to fix Azure DevOps “Variable reference is not valid. ‘:’ was not followed by a valid variable name character. Consider using ${} to delimit the name”
This article explains one possible reason why you might run into an error like “Variable reference is not valid. ‘:’ was not followed by a valid variable name character. Consider using ${} to delimit the name” when using a PowerShell task in an Azure DevOps pipeline. Confusingly, the offending line might be this: Write-Host (‘##vso[task.debug]$LASTEXITCODE: {0}’ -f $LASTEXITCOD … Not something you even have in your script! What gives? Problem…Continue reading How to fix Azure DevOps “Variable reference is not valid. ‘:’ was not followed by a valid variable name character. Consider using ${} to delimit the name”
What’s koskila.net about?
The tagline for my blogging efforts has been Solutions are worthless unless shared for quite a while already. That’s to say, since I’ve gotten a lot of help from the community whenever I’ve had issues getting something to work, I like to give something back. This blog is my way of doing that.
Blogging has been a great, lightweight way to sort my thoughts and document weird fixes and findings along the way. And boy, has there been a lot of them! Microsoft’s stack always keeps surprising me – mostly in a positive way, but there’s an occasional bump on the way too.
These are some of the topics I often write about: Azure Active Directory errors, Azure PowerShell errors, terrifying examples about how to open a modal dialog in SharePoint using JavaScript, all kinds of weird new Microsoft Azure -related tidbits of information, a bunch of Visual Studio -related (and other) tips and tricks, and of course the blog’s namesake – SharePoint Problems.
A lot of people seem to struggle with the same issues, as the blog nowadays has around 70 000 visitors monthly. May you find my thoughtful workarounds as useful as I have!
In addition to more technical posts, sometimes I might post about my sessions at different community events, or experiences as an expat living in a foreign country (in 2017, that country was the USA, in 2018 & 2019 Canada). Right before the pandemic, I moved back to Finland to live in the middle of a forest. Quite literally, as I need to somewhat regularly scare moose away or they’ll eat our apples. Our pests are large.
Speaking Gigs
Back in the olden days, when the world was not on fire, I used to travel to different events. Now it’s all digital, which is… Not quite the same.
You can also see a list of all my sessions and session materials.
No upcoming engagements. I’ve cut down traveling due to the pandemic.
Want to learn more? Check out the about me -page, page/post archive, the list of my blog posts (latest first) or contact me! :)
