Reading Time: 2 minutes. Another exciting announcement to make – I’ll be speaking at SharePoint Saturday New England on 20. of October in Boston! My session about Microsoft Flow, Azure Functions and a bit of Cognitive Services was accepted for the developer track. I’ll be presenting at 9:00 – 10:15 AM in room Cranmore. There’s a lot of awesome sessions and other awesome speakers, and I’m honored to share with the community what I’ve learnt lately while playing with some of the latest and greatest of Microsoft’s tools! 🙂 Citizen developer tools are not just for citizen developers! It’s the same session I’ve had […]
Ignite 2018 recap: What’s new for Azure Functions?
Reading Time: 4 minutes. Ignite 2018 is done and dusted, and it’s a good time to quickly recap what’s new for Azure Functions in the coming months. They’ve certainly been getting a lot of love from Microsoft, which is GREAT! New features for Azure Functions There was a bunch of exciting new things announced! Not all of the things in this blog post are necessarily completely new – but rather reached General Availability. Let’s go through them one by one…
Problematic behavior of web.AddSupportedUILanguage(int lcid) in SharePoint 2013 and 2016
Reading Time: 4 minutes. Every now and then, an API or a method call comes along, that you need to be very careful with. “Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.Web.AddSupportedUILanguage()” seems to be one of them. In this post, I’ll try and document my findings and workarounds for said method! Issues and solutions
Fixing “The following functions are in error: Object reference not set to an instance of an object.” error in Azure Functions
Reading Time: 3 minutes. Let me start this article, by reminding everyone that Azure Functions are awesome, and you should use them despite some hiccups. Having said that, let’s fix some errors! In the beginning of September 2018, Microsoft started pushing out breaking changes to Azure Functions 2.x. They had announced this a full month in advance, so they expected everyone in the world to update their Azure Functions to avoid the functions from breaking. I guess, however, that in real life, a month is not that much. Me, and a bunch of other people on the internet, ran into some issues with our […]
How to access Azure Function App’s settings from C#?
Reading Time: 4 minutes. Different versions of Azure Functions have different ways to access the Azure Function settings. This is another little thing, that I always forget – so better document it somewhere! So, this post describes, how you can access the function’s Application/Environmental settings/variables from your C# code.
How to interpret SharePoint’s view count managed properties (like “ViewsLast1Days”)?
Reading Time: 6 minutes. Have you ever wondered, how SharePoint’s Managed Properties for Usage & Analytics info actually work? There are all these nice properties available for getting view counts for different items in SharePoint’s search index, but they all seem to act like crazy. And they are pretty nonsensical… And not very well documented! In this post I’ll try to make some sense on how you can use them in programmatic scenarios. Read on…
Properly checking if an item in a folder is a Directory or not in PowerShell
Reading Time: 4 minutes. Got a great tip from a colleague, on how to properly check if an item is a file or a directory. In one case, we weren’t really ever sure, if another script had finished its running and unzipped a certain zip package into a folder – and we had to verify it had, before continuing the execution. Our initial implementation worked most of the time… But not quite always. The purpose of this blog post is to explain how we found a pretty well working and elegant solution! Problem In this particular case, we were testing items for being directories […]
Disabling requests to WsaUpload.ashx (Customer Experience Improvement Program)
Reading Time: 7 minutes. So, I’ve gotten this question from a lot of customers and partners, and I thought it’s worth clarifying the case a bit. “I’m seeing a lot of requests these requests to WsaUpload.ashx. What do they matter? They seem to degrade the performance – so what can I do about them?” That’s a great question! Let’s see what it is, why it exists, and what we can do about it!
Create a new Alert to a SharePoint list
Reading Time: 4 minutes. Alerts. That magnificent functionality in SharePoint, that let’s you get a heads-up anytime someone touches your precious documents (so you can go and revert the changes), or changes files in Style Library (so you can go and remove that pink custom CSS they tried to add). They are ancient, quite cumbersome and CERTAINLY not pretty, but quite reliable (and despite my expectations – they were included in Modern SharePoint, too!), so there’s really no reason to still keep using them. However, every now and then, they’re quite hidden from the GUI. This post describes how to access them on pretty […]
Fastest way to verify your Client Id and Client Secret are valid with PowerShell
Reading Time: 3 minutes. So, you have a Client Id and a Client Secret, but don’t know if they work anymore? Maybe they are expired? Maybe someone removed them? No worries! We can use PowerShell to validate them easily! Solution By using PowerShell, it’s fairly straightforward to verify, that your Client Id and Client Secret work. See the snippets below for 2 different steps: First we validate, that the values work. If they don’t, let’s run another script to see if the Client Id exists but has expired. Validate your Client Id by trying to connect with it We can validate the Client Id […]
How to get the user count for Azure AD Enterprise Application
Reading Time: 3 minutes. Have you ever tried to find out the number of users of an enterprise application in your Office 365 tenant? This could be needed for multiple different reasons: maybe your organization is paying for the app and you want to know who’s actually using it, maybe the usage is required by a company policy and it’s useful to know if organization’s members are actually using it, or maybe you just want to know about the user adoption of an app. For apps with under 100 users it’s easy – just open Azure AD and check the user count. For more […]
Solving “Tenant app deployment is only supported in the app catalog site.” -error
Reading Time: 3 minutes. Got an error “Tenant app deployment is only supported in the app catalog site. The current site is not the app catalog site.”, even if the current site very much IS an app catalog site? There might be an easy fix! Problem Imagine this: you browse into your fresh SharePoint tenant, open the app catalog, click on an app, try to deploy it, and out comes this error. Tenant app deployment is only supported in the app catalog site. The current site is not the app catalog site. Yes, while trying to deploy an app from app catalog, you get […]
Solving “Sorry, your files couldn’t be uploaded. The upload might be too large or the server might be experiencing high network traffic.” in SharePoint
Reading Time: 4 minutes. This is one of the kind of weird issues that you don’t really run into in your own development environments, but that you more often run into when you actually have non-godlike permissions. Oh, the woes of trying to use SharePoint with anything less than farm/global administrator… 🙂 Anyway, in this post, I’ll describe a couple of solutions to an error: “Sorry, your files couldn’t be uploaded. The upload might be too large or the server might be experiencing high network traffic” You might encounter this issue, when uploading pretty much any files in any SharePoint document library. Typically, I […]
SharePoint Localization – a (somewhat) comprehensive how-to!
Reading Time: 14 minutes. Localization – or showing users with different language preferences content in their preferred language – is not SharePoint’s strongest suite. It never was, and probably will never be, unless Microsoft perfects Machine Translation at some point. And even then it would probably require extra subscription, as Cognitive Services APIs are not available (above the peasant-tier) for free now either. In this article I’ll go through a few survival strategies for multilingual organizations – and I’ll try to expand the content as more options pop up! Please note, that this article revolves mostly around Classic SharePoint. Microsoft’s current implementation of Modern […]
How to enable custom scripts for a SharePoint site collection?
Reading Time: 5 minutes. This article explains how to enable custom scripts for any SharePoint site. Different instructions apply to SharePoint Online, and on-premises scenarios (SharePoint 2013, 2016 and probably 2019). Different solutions resolve the issue for different target sites: Modern SharePoint Team Sites (attached to Office Groups) SharePoint MySites Personal OneDrive sites Any SharePoint site collection created based on self-service site creation SharePoint Online tenant root site collection Any Classic SharePoint site collection Errors and causes Most typically I run into this when trying to insert a script web part with custom JavaScript into a site, that has NoScript enabled. That’s annoying – […]
Fixing issue “AADSTS70005” by enabling the implicit authentication flow for your Azure AD app
Reading Time: 2 minutes. While either developing or just trying to use an application that authenticates against Azure AD, you might get an error message that contains error code “AADSTS70005“. This means that you’re trying to use implicit authentication flow, but it isn’t allowed for your app. If you have access to the Azure AD you’re authentication against, it’s easy to fix! See more below… Reason You might get an error, somewhat like this: AADSTS70005: response_type ‘token’ is not supported for the application Trace ID: <Guid_1> Correlation ID: <Guid_2> Timestamp… This is returned by your Azure AD instance, as it doesn’t allow the use of […]
How to show more than 30 categories in SharePoint blog/news sites?
Reading Time: 4 minutes. Imagine this: you’re using a good old SharePoint blog site, and have a bunch of categories in use. That’s nice and easy – SharePoint offers the categorization functionality natively, and it works decently. Problems arise when you have a lot of categories, though – not all of them will be shown. Even if you tweak the web part to show more items on a page, this isn’t reflected on the whole blog site! This post article explains how to fix this. Problem For background info – the category listing is actually an XSLT list view web part. It’s not obvious […]
Fixing the error “Web Deploy cannot modify the file on the Destination because it is locked by an external process.”
Reading Time: 4 minutes. This post describes how to fix the error, where when publishing Azure Functions or Azure App Services you get an error like this: “Web Deploy cannot modify the file on the Destination because it is locked by an external process.” This is luckily another straightforward fix! Problem Azure Function Publish fails with a message: “Web Deploy cannot modify the file on the Destination because it is locked by an external process.” It is, indeed, caused by some of your files at the target of your publishing being in use, so they cannot be overwritten. Great – an actually accurate error message! Much […]
How to fix AADSTS50011: Reply address did not match because of case sensitivity.
Reading Time: 3 minutes. So, you got an error with a code AADSTS50011? It’s just Azure AD’s authentication acting up because of invalid reply address! here’s a bunch of different reasons that lead to this error. This post describes the variant where the URL’s case sensitivity differns from what’s configured. For me, the most typical scenario where I run into this error is accessing the app from SharePoint. Problem So, you’re getting an error somewhat like this: AADSTS50011: The reply address <…> does not match the reply addresses configured for the application: ‘<guid>’. More details: Reply address did not match because of case sensitivity. […]
How to fix an Azure Function (v2) failing with error “The resource you are looking for has been removed, had its name changed, or is temporarily unavailable.”
Reading Time: 4 minutes. This post describes one way to resolve a problem, where you receive an error like “The resource you are looking for has been removed, had its name changed, or is temporarily unavailable.” when calling your Azure Functions. Problem Another day, another simple, yet kind of weird issue to solve! This time I was developing a simple Azure Function to access Microsoft Graph API. This particular issue was kind of bugging, since the error message actually had nothing to do with the actual issue and gave no pointers as to how to fix the issue! I was just developing a function, […]