Long story short:
This way, the next time I encounter the same issue, I’ll be able to find the solution easier by googling.
This category contains assorted tips, tricks and solutions regarding all the different workarounds and solutions related to technology pretty much in general.
This article explains how to access the Site Collection App Catalog in SharePoint Online. I mean – yeah, I had to google it after getting back to SPFx dev stuff after a while, and realized the first few results were useless. Of course. So how did you do this now… Turned out to be pretty easy, and borderline obvious! Still, yet another thing to document. Solution So, back to basics – how do you access the Site Collection App Catalog on a SharePoint Online site?…Continue reading How to access the site collection app catalog in SharePoint?
This article explains how to fix an issue when updating a module in PowerShell. The error is something along the lines of: “System.InvalidOperationException: PowerShell Gallery is currently unavailable. Please try again later.” The whole error looks something like the one below, although you can probably get it for many different commandlets. Luckily, like usual, there are a few ways to fix this! Solution Posts Related to “How to fix “System.InvalidOperationException: PowerShell Gallery is currently unavailable.””:Worx Landroid L2000 (WR155E) – an honest reviewHow to solve errors…Continue reading How to fix “System.InvalidOperationException: PowerShell Gallery is currently unavailable.”
I recently started playing around with Microsoft Lists. What a fun and friendly tool – makes SharePoint lists far more approachable offering a great editing experience, easy sharing, and hopefully in just a bit, awesome integrations and great mobile app (I mean, there’s iOS… But who has an iPhone in this day and age? 😉 However, as is usual in my tech endeavors, I immediately ran into an issue. Problem Some background: I’ve selected either EN-US or EN-CA as my locale everywhere on my work…Continue reading How to change Microsoft Lists language?
This article explains how to fix your account, whenever it gets completely FUBAR due to your account being added as a guest in another AAD organization. And this might happen in multiple different situations – my most typical woe is Visual Studio’s Cloud Explorer, which stops showing me my subscriptions due to authentication against the other organizations failing. Add some extra difficulty by having someone in the other directory block your account from signing in, and you can’t even remove the account by any usual…Continue reading How to remove your account as a guest in another Azure AD tenant?
This article explains how to fix error with error code AADSTS50196. This issue usually comes up with an error message somewhat like “The server terminated an operation because it encountered a client request loop.” The error seems to be popping up more and more often. No worries – it wasn’t caused by you! It is, in fact, an unintended side effect of a security hardening feature in some browsers, and some outdated configuration on Microsoft’s end. Obviously, you could run into the issue on other…Continue reading How to fix error AADSTS50196 on Microsoft web properties?
This article explains how to restore any hidden windows in Visual Studio without resetting your whole window layout, by using a common keyboard shortcut. Problem We’ve all been there – you’re opening a new window in Visual Studio, but your keyboard shortcut or clicking the item in the menu simply seems to do nothing. The window doesn’t show up anywhere. Reason The reason for this (most of the time) is simple: you have the window popped-up and located outside your screen. This happens pretty much…Continue reading How to restore lost windows in Visual Studio?
What a nice headline, right? 😅 One day, I thought I’d give Home Assistant a try! And obviously, I couldn’t just make things easy and run it in a Linux virtual machine or my Raspberry Pi – instead, obviously I decided to run it on Windows 10! And obviously, I’d use Docker for it. And of course, not just Docker, but docker-compose. Whatever that is. I don’t know – it’s the first time I’m trying out Docker. Or Home Assistant! Another learning experience coming in,…Continue reading Gotchas when configuring Home Assistant on Docker on Windows
This article explains one easy way for you to improve the performance and uptime of your Azure App Service. I’ll explain a simple but kind-of-hidden and surprisingly badly documented feature – Azure App Service Local Cache, that is – which might make a huge difference. It sure did for me! Since it’s such a no-brainen, I’m kind of half expecting everyone else to already having known about this, but since nobody told me about it, I’m going to document it for future use. Background Let’s…Continue reading Enabling local cache for an Azure App Service
This article explains in extremely short way, how to fetch your Azure Active Directory tenant’s Directory ID. Let’s make it short and sweet, because quite frankly, it is really simple! Solution Option 1: Use whatismytenantid.com for finding your tenant/directory id: Quick solution – works (at least) for all standard tenants: Navigate to https://www.whatismytenantid.com/ Enter the domain associated with your Azure AD instance (often like contoso.onmicrosoft.com) Let ShareGate do their magic and find your tenant/directory id for you! Thanks to Thomas Vochten for pointing this out…Continue reading How to find out the Directory ID of your Azure AD tenant?
This article explains how to query and remove duplicate entries from a Microsoft SQL database using T-SQL. The same model works both for Azure Databases (in Azure SQL Query Editor) and databases on MS SQL Server (using SSMS – SQL Server Management Studio). I had to do this a while back due to a bug in an API creating multiple entities with the same content – save for the Identity field. Fun! Background Why bother? That’s a (somewhat) valid question. A table in a SQL…Continue reading How to clean up duplicates from MS SQL Database?
Writing this in a country under lockdown, it feels like every single conference in the world has either been cancelled or switched to being online-only. And right now, that’s definitely for the best! But it does pose quite a dilemma for those in charge of these events – how do you organize an event for potentially thousands of attendees, online? How do you foster great interaction between the audience and speakers? How do you encourage your attendees to mingle as well? How do you avoid…Continue reading Tips on organizing an online conference using Microsoft Teams
This article will describe a surprising issue with Microsoft Teams, and a simple workaround. 😊 Essentially, using the out-of-the-box “Attach” > “Recent” messaging extension in Teams has a couple of caveats or edge cases, that make it problematic to use. Instead, either move the file to the proper location using the “Files” tab, or share a link to your file (also available under “Attach” > “Browse Teams and Channels”). This post will describe the actual solution for moving the file safely, without data loss. Problem…Continue reading Why you shouldn’t attach files from other channels in Microsoft Teams?
Recently, I needed to find a way to import data from an old Excel-file to a custom-coded system that could import CSV files. However, the data was fairly non-sanitized – containing commas, semicolons and other weird characters. I could define the delimiter used in the imported data – however, that would be useless if I wasn’t also able to define it in the export. With Excel, it’s not that simple, though. Excel, just like other Microsoft Office applications loves trying its best to respect the…Continue reading How to change the delimiter when exporting CSV from Excel?
While this post will mostly be about the highly topical migration from Office 365 Video to Microsoft Stream, there’s also a fair amount of rambling about Microsoft’s partner strategy and a bit of history included. I’m starting with the main stuff and then proceeding to the ranty parts, so just skip the last 75% of the post if you don’t care about that kind of stuff! On to the content, then! Microsoft Stream is taking the world by storm There’s been a lot of buzz…Continue reading Office 365 video migration to Office Stream imminent – Get Ready!
Last Christmas holiday I was tasked by older relatives to fix an Android tablet they had bought. One of those absolutely useless, 100€ devices that can’t really run any apps, and struggle to even start. My first proposition was to return the device – but it was already past the return window. Lenovo‘s bloated nightmare-version of an Android was likely the biggest reason for slowness. My second course of action was to change the launcher and disable everything I could, but the device still couldn’t…Continue reading How to use TWRP to flash an Android device that refuses to boot to TWRP?
So the interesting news are not over – Microsoft recently announced that their personal blogging platform for Office 365, Delve Blogs, is getting retired. Now it turns out Classic SharePoint blogs are also getting cut. This leaves some organizations in a bit of a tough spot – what to use for blogging from now on? In this article, I’m taking a look at what brought us here, and thinking about our next steps from here on forward. Background Okay, then – what brought us here?…Continue reading Classic SharePoint blogs are going away – what next?
Last week, Microsoft sent a surprise email to a number of customers. Delve blogs – the hated & loved self-serve internal blogging platform on Office 365 is getting axed. It doesn’t really come as a surprise at this point – the service was first announced in 2014, launched to some hype and appreciation (especially due to the new CMS – authoring canvas – which was a lot of fun compared to Classic SharePoint!) but has pretty much faded away after that. Microsoft describes the feature…Continue reading Delve Blogs getting deprecated – what do?
This article explains the current terminology Microsoft uses around your different pages in SharePoint. Or at least tries to – and do that in a way that’s faithful to the current, flat & Modern world. Microsoft has been known for their less-than stellar track record of figuring out easy and descriptive names for their products. Let me introduce 2 cases in point: Microsoft® WinFX™ Software Development Kit for Microsoft® Pre-Release Windows Operating System Code-Named “Longhorn”, Beta 1 Web Setup” – that’s a mouthful! Or for…Continue reading SharePoint Home, Hub, Sites, Start… What?
This post describes a few different things that can (and will) go wrong when you’re trying to load DLLs in PowerShell, and a couple of ways you can try to fix them. Typically, you’d run into an error message like “Exception calling LoadFrom with 1 argument(s): Could not load file or assembly…. “ These issues most typically arise when you’re running a PowerShell script that depends on certain DLLs to be loaded (to then execute some of the methods from them). This could happen kind…Continue reading How to resolve issues when loading DLLs in PowerShell?
Okay – another simple one. When you’re creating a new Office Group (or “Unified Group”, like they’re called as well), you might get an error for the alias already being used. Pretty simple, but still – let’s see how to fix it. Problem So, this error pops up, while you’re trying to create a new Office Group: The alias is being used by another group in your organization. Please try a different alias. An example script & output is shown below: # Historically, Groups have…Continue reading How to resolve the error “The alias is being used by another group in your organization”
