development

The era of free AI is over . But you can still choose between paying for GitHub Copilot AI Credits, paying for API consumption in Azure AI Foundry, or running local LLMs (large language models) on your own hardware.

A week ago, GitHub announced they've been hacked. A hacker group called TeamPCP had extracted roughly 4000 private repositories and who-knows-how-much more data from GitHub's internal systems. This sounds like a pretty big deal (and it is!

In this article, I'll share the least fun error I've recently had to deal with while building / deploying bots - I mean, agents - with Bot Framework, I mean, Microsoft 365 Agents SDK on macOS. And of course how to get around the issues.

A week ago I wrote about how the all-you-can-eat AI buffet is seemingly coming to an end, and how practically every major AI vendor has been tightening the screws.

In this article, I'm going to break the bad news for you: The all-you-can-eat AI buffet is closing. In the near future, we'll all get to pay by the pound.

In this article, I'll show you how to get notified by Graph API about the latest changes like file updates in your SharePoint document library.

In this article I'll explain a simple way to fix the "Filename too long" error when using Git on Windows, which can be especially frustrating when it works fine on other platforms like macOS.

SSL certificates - some days they'll give your end users that false sense of security that only a beautiful green lock icon can bring, and some other days they'll throw you in a world of pain because one randomly expired and hence the API you use to ...

Ever wondered if shelling out for a top-tier Windows laptop really delivers the bang for your buck in development speed, or if a budget Mac mini could punch above its weight? Stop wondering, and start reading, because I've got the answers for you.

Oh, Blazor Static - the dazzling, lightning-fast static site generator that turns your Blazor components into HTML gold. One of the rare pieces of tech that makes me happy day after day that I'm using it for my static sites.

Ever wished GitHub Copilot could read your mind (or at least your repository's README)? You're not alone - it's time to turn your AI assistant into a well-behaved coding partner, who actually does what you want. Say "NO!

This article explains how to obtain OAuth access tokens for SAP SuccessFactors OData endpoints using the SAML 2.0 Bearer Assertion flow. I wouldn't normally write about SAP.

This article explains some of the pros and cons of the M365 Agents SDK: The ambitious successor to Teams Toolkit, and why you should care about it. I'm also sharing some of my and my peers experiences developing with it.

There are a lot of ways SSO can break for your bot or agent on Teams/M365 Copilot/any other M365 app. I don't even know how to explain the extensibility in M365 now, so this word salad is what you get.

In this article, I will share some of my first experiences using GitHub Copilot Coding Agent (or "SWE Agent" as it was known before), and some quick tips for getting the most out of it.

This article explains why you might have some trouble uploading your custom Teams app on your dev tenant lately. Because, yes - there's an ongoing service disruption going on.

This article explains how to fix an issue where a BlazorStatic build job running on GitHub Actions never finishes. It's a puzzling case, but can't really blame GitHub for this one. Can't actually blame anyone but myself, now that I think about it.

This article explains a quick fix to FrontMatter fields in a solution not getting populated when using BlazorStatic. I ran into it after repeatedly exporting all of my stuff from my legacy WordPress site to my in-the-works BlazorStatic site.

If you’ve just tried to install a .NET tool and got smacked with the dreaded error message: “Settings file 'DotnetToolSettings.

This article explains how to refresh the Visual Studio credentials on your development machine to keep your application using some sort of an authentication implementation relying on DefaultAzureCredential working.

This article explains briefly what the different Microsoft Teams App templates in Visual Studio are for and what capabilities do they come with. It's a lot to wade through, but I hope this article is able to explain the basics.

This article explains a couple of easy fixes for an issue, where Visual Studio refuses to properly recognize the FluentUI components you might have used in your Blazor projects. Because apparently that can (kind of randomly) happen!

This article explains a couple of workarounds to a frustrating issue I had with vite and yet-another-weird-frontend-build-toolkit. Because every toolchain for frontend stuff is different, apparently. And they all fail in different ways.

This quick article explains how to clean up all dependencies installed with npm or yarn, and stored in folders called "node_modules" within your project and solution files.

This article explains one possibly reason why some C# code, powered by CSOM, suddenly stops working and can't access a SharePoint list anymore that it could before, throwing annoying and misleading exceptions like "The list is not DocumentLibrar...

This article will explain how to fix an annoying situation, where Visual Studio fails to find any System types or other "basic" stuff you're pretty sure your project should have, automagically, out-of-the-box, without you doing anything.

This article explains a stupid workaround for fetching a GraphQL schema into Postman when Postman doesn't want to accept it. You might run into this issue if you: (a) use Postman, (b) on Windows and (c) need to import a GraphQL schema.

This article explains a solution to another dumb issue I ran into when checking out someone else's repository and trying to build and run the solution. I'm calling the issue "dumb" because it's not like I'm practicing rocket surgery here.

This article is about how to fix a common error in Google Colab notebooks when trying to mount a Google Drive, and you just get an error along the lines of 'Mountpoint must either be a directory or not exist'.

This article explains how I fixed Terminal / PowerShell being unable to locate my winget when I was trying to install something with it. This was quite unexpected as I knew for sure I had installed winget, and I had also used it before successfully.

This article offers a couple of different ways to fix the "0x8a15000f" error that winget might throw at you in seemingly random situations.

This article is a quick one about my annual tradition - participating in Hacktoberfest, the "month-long celebration of open-source projects, their maintainers, and the entire community of contributors.

This article explains how to fix an annoying error - somewhat along the lines of "error:0308010C:digital envelope routines::unsupported" - you might encounter when running node scripts. This might happen in a pipeline or locally.

This article explains a fix to an odd issue, where suddenly, mid-build, an error dialog pops up, complaining about your PC being unable to run "this app". The fix is luckily straightforward, even if it's a bit odd.

This article explains how to fix an annoying issue when trying to debug a Blazor WASM (WebAssembly) project. In my case, I had a Blazor WASM SWA (Static Web App), that built just fine and ran well in Azure, but refused to be debugged.

Even if you have a 100% TypeScript project, it'll still end up with a lot of .js (JavaScript) or .jsx (JavaScript with React extension) files. Unless you properly ignore them, they'll end up cluttering your Visual Studio solution, and even git.

This article explains how to easily add additional headers to the Graph API calls you make in PowerShell using Invoke-PnPGraphMethod commandlet. There's a convenient sample for you to copy-paste and some basic explanations on what we're doing below.

This article explains what to do to get rid of an error that SEEMS simple to fix but might turn out to be elusive, namely, "The term 'yo' is not recognized as the name of a cmdlet, function, script file, or operable program.

This article explains how to resolve "Import-Module: Assembly with same name is already loaded" error in PowerShell (and a couple of related issues - old versions of the module being used, updating modules silently failing, uninstalling mod...

Oof. What even is this title? Descriptive - sure, maybe - but also kinda long. Ah, okay. This article explains how to map complex data types to a SQL database when using Entity Framework. This time, I'm using Fluent API to do this.

This article explains how to fix your Blazor Hybrid MAUI application (built with Blazor Webassembly, using MAUI to build & publish for multiple different platforms like Windows, Android and iOS at once) not starting up, but throwing an unexpected...

Unlike most of my articles, this one isn't a description of an issue I had and the workaround or fix that I found.

... or "How to bang your head on a wall for hours on end when developing a MAUI application?" 😂 This article explains how to fix a surprising error you might get when trying to run a MAUI app in Windows.

This article explains how to read and write files in a MAUI application. No, not AppPackageFiles, nobody likes those, but actual NORMAL files. Real files. Dynamic files. Files that can change. Runtime files. I don't know what to call them.

This article offers a stupid workaround for a cryptic and seemingly unrecoverable problem that manifests itself after a Visual Studio / .NET update and causes the following error to be thrown: "There was no runtime pack for Microsoft.AspNetCore.

... And that's a wrap! This year I had the chance, and the privilege to once again participate in the month-long celebration of open-source, Hacktoberfest . And unlike last year, I took the time to write about the experience again!

This article explains one possible fix to an annoyingly generic exception thrown by the Microsoft Graph API (namely, "Unsupported or invalid query filter clause specified for property") or an even more generic exception thrown by PnP PowerS...

Today, I'm writing about a stupid error. Yeah, I do make those every now and then. After adding a for loop to my PowerShell script, I started to get annoying ParserErrors about my for loop missing a closing bracket.

This time, we're taking a look at an annoying situation where your previous debugging session, or perhaps your dotnet serve, somehow locks up your dlls or other important files that you kind of need to overwrite when rebuilding.

This article explains a curious workaround that I figured out. In case you need a way to force app setting changes to be reflected in some libraries you need in your application, even if they don't support any configuration after application startup.

This article explains how to "reactivate" all of your accounts stored in your az account by refreshing your sessions.

Okay - so that's a non-descriptive title if I've ever written one - I apologize for that! I just couldn't figure out a way to shorten the error when "Microsoft.AspNetCore.Diagnostics.EntityFrameworkCore" is referencing "Microsoft.

This one is something that I keep running into. Visual Studio just throws an error for a missing helper __spreadArray in a library that you didn't even know you had installed, and you're not sure if it should - or even can - be updated.

This article explains a (fairly) simple solution on how you can grab role claims - or any other claims with some tweaking - and use them as the basis for targeting your WebSocket messages.

Have you run into this puzzling error? It comes in a couple of flavors, but it boils down to you failing miserably when you run the create_hypertable() function on your PostgreSQL TimescaleDB database server!

This article explains a quick fix to a small but annoying issue: Microsoft Graph API SDK persistently returning null values for most properties of your Microsoft.Graph.User objects.

This is something that comes up pretty often - when you're building an application, or maybe a library you're sharing as a NuGet package to your friends: You'll need to share a dependency or two with your particular package, and you don't want your e...

This article will take a look at a neat authorization option for Blazor WebAssembly - utilizing group memberships when defining policies.

Here is another fun one for the books! In this article, I will explain how to fix a problem with the Azure IoT Edge dev simulator, when it fails to start due to an underlying problem with Docker not having access to your defined ports.

This article explains how to achieve that nice configuration where you can reuse your .NET EF Core (Entity Framework Core) entities in different projects - even being separate from the project holding your DbContexts!

So a while back I posted about testing your "vanilla" WebSockets connection directly in the browser - and while that's nice and easy, sometimes you need to class up a bit.

I tend to post a lot of articles about different gotchas and configuration tweaks, but this one goes back to the roots a bit - just me and a couple of other devs hacking some code together and being blocked by a bit of an obstacle, that's then fixed ...

Let's make this short and sweet. In this particular case, upgrading a Blazor WASM solution to .NET 6 broke the authentication when deployed to Azure. The same issue could probably happen to a fresh project, though.

Ah - this was a fun one. I needed to figure out how to purge, flush and clear your commit history on GitHub. Turns out it isn't as easy as clicking a button in the web user interface - the world is apparently not ready yet!

This article explains how to fix an issue where your Azure Functions function (yes, that's a capital F and a lowercase f to denote the difference between the product and the piece of compute) fails to fire when a POST request comes in, even though it...

Azure Key Vault is great. But when developing locally, it can be a bit of a pain.

This article explains how to fix an annoying issue with Microsoft's SDK for CosmosDb v3 - it comes with a Newtonsoft.Json dependency, that most of Microsoft's recent packages have let go of. With .NET Core 3.1 having shipped with System.Text.

Man, do I run into all kinds of issues with the smallest Azure Functions that I develop. And it's mostly my fault. The silver lining is that you're here to read this article, so you probably ran into this same stuff.

Another day, another issue. This time, I was absent-mindedly following the guidance for a project on how to generate .sql files for .NET EF Core code-first migrations. Don't ask why that was required, but it was. My migration was simple.

Another day, another thing that I am trying to do on GitHub (and partially failing), and another blog post! This time I was configuring a build and ran into trouble.

This article describes a simple fix to an issue (well... One or many possible issues), where git fails to pull anything from remote, throwing instead an error somewhat like this: fatal: no such branch: 'master' Bah.

So one day, I needed to quickly check if an identity field in a view in a Microsoft SQL Server was actually unique or not.

This article describes how to configure your .NET Core application to serialize objects in camelCase instead of PascalCase.

This article explains how to easily authenticate your WebSocket connections using .NET Core and vanilla JavaScript.

This article explains another simple fix to an annoying issue. I guess that's how I start most of my little tutorials, but hey, it's true!

So, once again, I find myself wasting time trying to fix WordPress . Though it is a powerful platform, it's a never-ending source of grief when trying to maintain a site with a non-trivial number of plugins.

This article documents a neat and simple way to establish and test a WebSocket connection, using just vanilla JavaScript and your favorite browser's developer tools. Quick and easy - no external tools or libraries required!

So, you're running a PowerShell command that requires a connection to PowerShell gallery, but you run into an error message, somewhat like this: "Unable to find repository 'https://www.powershellgallery.com/api/v2'.

This article explains how to loop through all supported cultures on any given machine that's able to run .NET. The code sample is in C# and outputs an HTML table you can copy - but obviously you can adapt it to your needs!

This article describes how to fix and tweak your pre-build directives in Visual Studio - just in case they refuse to work properly. Because yeah, apparently that sometimes just randomly happens.

In this article, I'll do my best to explain how to list all loaded assemblies in a PowerShell session.

I'm using Entity Framework in most of the projects that I'm working on - and for the most part, it's a pleasure to work with. But as always, there are plenty of chances to run into issues...

This article explains one easy workaround to a lot of Visual Studio authentication issues. Personally, it's helped me multiple times when Cloud Explorer has gotten into a weird authentication loop or Visual Studio stops seeing my MSDN subscription.

This was a fun one! Suddenly, while running or debugging my ASP.NET Core 3.1 application, I started getting errors about missing assemblies, along the lines of "FileNotFoundException: Could not load file or assembly Microsoft.AspNetCore.

Hey, another funny case. "Funny" as in "the error message is misleading and googling didn't really help", but also as in "a colleague knew the answer right off the bat because he already fixed it in another project".

Another quick one - I'm sure this doesn't apply to all cases, but I'm still logging it in case someone (like myself) stumbles upon the issue and finds help here.

Another year, another Hacktoberfest, another haphazard participation, and - as usual - another blog post a little bit late. Still, better late than never!

This article explains how to fix a weird situation where your .NET application utilizing EF ( Entity Framework or Entity Framework Core ) simply crashes without any way to recover or catch the Exception.

Long story short, yes, I really did have to google this, and since top results seemed to give pretty unclear (or even wrong) answers, I decided to document it for myself. Maybe it'll be helpful to someone else too!

This article explains how to restore any hidden windows in Visual Studio without resetting your whole window layout, by using a common keyboard shortcut.

This article explains how to perform a very simple and lightweight database connection test for an existing database context.

Okay, okay - another super simple thing that I messed up, fixed, and decided to document :) This time I messed up a simple operation in Entity Framework Core operation on a simple entity, and hopefully I'll save someone else some trouble!

This time, I'm happy to present you perhaps the simplest way of fixing an annoying and persistent issue with a misleading error message! Wait, does that sound familiar? It's almost like that's what half of my articles are about...

This article offers yet another possible fix to an issue, where trying to call SaveChanges() in Entity Framework Core throws a pretty generic "An error occurred while updating the entries"-exception, and you're left wondering what in tarnat...

Recently, while building an app service to host a .NET Core API, I had to implement the logic for using both Read-Only and Read-Write Database Contexts for Entity Framework Core.

This article explains how to query and remove duplicate entries from a Microsoft SQL database using T-SQL.

This article describes how to access and extract the connection strings from your Entity Framework (Core) database context objects.

Yikes - ever ran into this error after deploying your ASP.NET Core web application to an Azure App Service? Yeah, me too. And when it's a production deployment, and the error didn't happen in test/QA environment, that's even more fun.

This article describes how to fix the error " There was an error running the selected code generator: 'Failed to load the dll from \bin\Debug\netcoreapp\win-x86\hostpolicy.

Sometimes you'll need the default identity for your ASP.NET Core application, but want to disable the registration of new users. Sounds pretty basic, right?

Every now and then comes the need to write your console output to a log file. There's a simple way to do this in .

I plugged Obfuscar into my build pipeline (the easiest configuration ever, by the way) because I needed to obfuscate a DLL I was going to push as a NuGet package.

This post details a practical fix for AADSTS90056, an annoying error I encountered while logging into SharePoint. You can also run into the same error after configuring Azure Active Directory authentication to a custom web application.

This is another, kind of a classic and simple solution to a fairly simple problem: How to fix it, when your DbContextOptionsBuilder fails to take in your connection string and complains about UseSqlServer missing or whatever?

Another case, where there's plenty of documentation, but it just doesn't seem to be comprehensive enough or just doesn't apply for any of the cases that I have - for whatever reason.

Welp - this was not a fun issue to run into! While nobody in this day and age should use Internet Explorer for any normal usage (occasional legacy scenarios aside), there are still some luddites who do (or whose IT department makes them to).

When you're in your .NET Core project, it's always easy: you just register your DbContext in ConfigureServices, and then inject it into whichever Page, View or Controller you might need it in.

As a lot of the more frequent readers of this blog know, I generally work on proprietary - that is, non-open-source - projects. Whenever I do have some time to dabble in OSS, it's usually for a hobby.

This article explains how to fix a weird and surprising error about GitHub Actions workflow file thrown at you when you try to push your changes using GitHub Desktop. The odd part is that you had no changes to the workflow file at all.

I have just resolved a random issue that's difficult enough to google so I thought it would be worth documenting! These seem to be popping up whenever you work with anything that's fairly fresh out of the oven...

Just a quick piece of documentation, as this piece of code, has changed in different versions of .NET Core 3.0 so far a few times. Need to have things like this written down somewhere! UriHelper / NavigationManager with .NET Core 3.

-_PublishedWebSites ------ArtifactName ------bin,content,scripts,views.... folders and ------Web.config, Web.Debug.config and Web.Release.config ----ArtifactName.zip ----NugetPackagedll1 ----NugetPackagedll2 ----NugetPackagedll3 ....

Blazor is a new (ish) framework for building web UIs with C#.

This post describes the easiest way to show description texts for properties in ASP.NET MVC 5. Sounds simple, right? We can use something like @Html.DescriptionFor(x => x.Property) , right? Alas, it's not that straightforward.

This is a tip that should often be the first thing you do in your projects with database backend, no matter which technology you use: Add some basic info about modified and created times, and the user information - so that if something happens, every...

This article describes how to fix a situation, where you can't use any of the navigation properties of your Entity Framework Core entities, since they are all null, despite data being in the database for sure. So, another day, another error.

Welp - just ran into this one, and as I expect others to encounter the same issue, I'd better document it right away! So in Blazor, I was crafting a simple component that'd display some data in a nice way.

This post describes how you can modify your SPFx webparts to make them compatible with usage in Microsoft Teams. I'm also showing some basic ideas of what you can do in the code to make the integration more useful! Why would we do this?

This article explains how to fix an issue where you're just minding your own business, trying to access the Microsoft Teams context in your SPFx webpart's WebPartContext via the built-in property microsoftTeams, but you run into an issue.

Whilst building a proof-of-concept on .NET Core 3.0 preview 7 I ran into issues when developing web APIs.

Instead of being stuck on whatever version your SPFx project was originally created with, it's possible and sometimes required to upgrade it afterward to gain access to newer functionalities like integration with Microsoft Teams.

Ha - another one, that ended up being a simple fix, but since nobody actually explains it well, took me an hour to figure out.

This is one of those "note to self" -kinds of entries.

SPFx development is a bottomless bag of funsies! This article describes yet another way how to fix the error with your SPFx webpart failing to load a module.

This article is something of a combination of a technology overview and an opinion piece, detailing my thoughts about extending Microsoft Teams. To me, extending Microsoft Teams has pretty much only now become relevant.

This article describes one way to fix the issue, where uploading and sideloading an SPFx webpart in Microsoft Teams just brickwalls you with a fairly non-descriptive error, and no way to proceed.

This post describes the typical reasons why one might encounter the following error, and the ways I've found to fix them: " Failed to load component.

This post describes how you can access your Entity Framework Core model classes and the database context in your Azure Functions. In my example I'm using EF Core 2.1, but the main principle should be the same for later versions as well.

This post describes how to get the currently logged-in user using ASP.NET Core. This is compared with how it's done in ASP.NET Framework. Background In ASP.NET Core (and .

Another weird, but simple issue I ran into when building a simple .NET Core application. The article should apply to pretty much any .NET Core version, but the version I was on was 2.2.

Have you ever struggled to make your ASP.NET MVC views format your properties of type DateTime correctly? I have. And I've been shot in the leg by weird hacks made by both myself (just 6 months earlier) and someone else. .

I ran into compatibility issues with .NET Core 2.2 on my Azure Functions projects, so I downgraded my whole solution (an Azure Functions project, a helpers library, and a web application project) to 2.1, and got rid of that particular nuisance.

This post describes one no-brainer fix to the error "An assembly specified in the application dependencies manifest [projectname].deps.json was not found." I ran into this while running Update-Database for my ASP.

Google is shutting down their Facebook killer, Google+. While I'm sure there are at least 10 end-users that are sad to see the ill-fated not-that-social-medium go, the implications for Software Developers actually could be far more far-reaching.

This post is about the Hacktoberfest event in 2018. I contributed to Microsoft's repositories and a couple of other ones - and it was a lot of fun! Wow - I'm quite behind on this post, but thought it's worthwhile to give credit where credit is due.

I got a great tip from a colleague on how to properly check if an item is a file or a directory.

Okay - yet another weird issue, and a hacky workaround. I was developing an app that was calling a SharePoint site through Graph API, using jQuery $.ajax call (developed in TypeScript), and ran into surprising 401 errors.

Are you getting an error like "The SPListItem being updated was not retrieved with all taxonomy fields" when you try adding or modifying values in a TaxonomyField of a list item in SharePoint, either using the GUI or with PowerShell or even...

There's now a new version of the assembly Microsoft.IdentityModel.Clients.ActiveDirectory available - plenty of reasons to update right away! Let me offer you one hot take on the matter since the earlier 3.x -versions of the package had some issues.

Visual Studio failing to copy a referenced assembly to a project in build might lead to surprising runtime errors. This post will explain one method of fixing these issues, using Microsoft.IdentityModel.Clients.

This blog post briefly describes how to solve some of the most typical errors about missing PnP Cmdlets when using Windows Powershell (or SharePoint Online Management Shell).

This post describes the easiest way to debug the issues that may stop your Seed-method in Configuration.cs from going through. This problem concerns typically your ASP.NET MVC projects, either on .NET Framework or .

This post describes how to fix the " Could not load file or assembly '[assemblyname]' or one of its dependencies. An attempt was made to load a program with an incorrect format. " error.

This post describes a quick solution to launching a new Visual Studio instance for debugging the code.

This post describes the fix to THE " No Entity Framework provider found for the ADO.NET provider with invariant name 'System.Data.

If you're developing something like a WPF app and you need to update values on the User Interface based on a long-running operation that runs in a background thread (like depicted in my other blog post right here - that post is for a full-trust Share...

This post describes one of the more no-brainerish ways of fixing a 'System.OutOfMemoryException' exception being thrown in your ASP.Net MVC application using C# and Entity Framework. Problem While developing a web project, for example, an ASP.

This blog post is about fixing issues related to building a project with TypeScript files.

This quick post describes how to get the Solution Explorer to actually track your currently open file. For some reason, this extremely useful feature is disabled by default in Visual Studio.

This page describes multiple ways to fix the ' Spatial types and functions are not available for this provider because the assembly ‘Microsoft.SqlServer.Types’ version 10 or higher could not be found.

While using Entity Framework and code-first migrations, Entity Framework (EF) creates the indexes for you - but what if you need to create a custom one, explicitly based on a certain field/column?

Are you getting duplicate object values (or whatever those Objects output in .ToString())? Eh, so was I, after I edited the display template for String. Found a fix, though. Description Okay - I just ran into one of my more stupid mistakes since..

This post describes an issue with EF's code-first migrations, when mapping between DB's DateTime (datetime2) and C#'s DateTime simply fails, and results in the Update-Database cmdlet failing, too.

This post is about solving the issue with Visual Studio 2010 failing to show the design view of an .aspx-page. Luckily, it's an easy and pretty classical fix.

This post describes a few different ways of fixing the "The specified path, file name, or both are too long. The fully qualified file name must be less than 260 characters, and the directory name must be less than 248 characters." error.

Every now and then comes the time when you'd actually need to debug something, and then you'll likely be using your Visual Studio to attach the debugger to one or more processes. Using CKSDev to attach to all IIS worker processes (w3wp.