Category: Programming

“Code Tips” or “Programming” (both aliases for this term in my site’s taxonomy) is my category for whatever posts I’m able to come up with, that handle programming, code quality and/or handy workarounds. Is code directly involved? Then the post should be filed under here!

This is meant to distinguish posts from different things, like configuration or user analytics -related posts. Even tips of fixing Azure DevOps pipelines go elsewhere, because that’s not programming.

Yes, metadata is TOUGH. Categories are TOUGH.

GitHub Octodex (octocat) from https://octodex.github.com/

GitHub Action fails with “The GITHUB_TOKEN environment variable was not set”

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 one possible fix to an issue where an error is thrown along the lines of “The GITHUB_TOKEN…Continue reading GitHub Action fails with “The GITHUB_TOKEN environment variable was not set”

How to fix “No database provider has been configured for this DbContext” in EF Core?

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… So obviously, I stumbled into all of the rare stuff that IS broken!…Continue reading How to fix “No database provider has been configured for this DbContext” in EF Core?

Backwards compatibility is a hell of a drug

How to recover the private key of a (.pfx) certificate?

Recently, I ran into a problem that I definitely caused myself. I had a certificate, that was created to authenticate an app against Azure AD. The encryption key for the .pfx file was, however, lost. I could just create a new certificate, configure the app service to use that, and…Continue reading How to recover the private key of a (.pfx) certificate?

“An assembly specified in the application dependencies manifest was not found” when running Add-Migration in Entity Framework Core?

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. I was building a solution with some Azure Functions fetching and populating data in a database, and was planning on…Continue reading “An assembly specified in the application dependencies manifest was not found” when running Add-Migration in Entity Framework Core?

“Conversion overflow” when reading numeric data from MS SQL database using Entity Framework

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. You only get errors somewhere along the lines of “conversion overflow”. Ah – what a fun little issue!…Continue reading “Conversion overflow” when reading numeric data from MS SQL database using Entity Framework

How to configure Azure Function’s startup

Azure Functions use dependency injection, and that allows us to define all kinds of prebuilt or custom-built services as being available for our functions really easily. This is a really easy way to initialize scoped resources to be used in your different functions… But how do you actually configure them…Continue reading How to configure Azure Function’s startup

SharePoint is not broken - it just does't work

App authentication woes on SharePoint (Token request failed. The remote server returned an error: (401) Unauthorized.)

This article explains how to get rid of sudden and unexplainable 401 Access Denied errors when trying to authenticate against a fairly fresh Microsoft 365 / SharePoint Online tenant. This issue seems to be caused by a long-ish project to finally retire ACS – Azure Access Control service) on SharePoint…Continue reading App authentication woes on SharePoint (Token request failed. The remote server returned an error: (401) Unauthorized.)

How to resolve “Microsoft.Data.SqlClient is not supported on this platform.” in an Azure Function App?

Hah – another interesting one. This article describes how to resolve an error along the lines of “Microsoft.Data.SqlClient: Microsoft.Data.SqlClient is not supported on this platform.“, thrown by the Azure Functions host. Apparently, you can run into this issue either on your local development machine or even in Azure. Problem For…Continue reading How to resolve “Microsoft.Data.SqlClient is not supported on this platform.” in an Azure Function App?

How to verify connection to the database in Entity Framework Core?

This article explains how to perform a very simple and lightweight database connection test for an existing database context. A while ago, I needed to develop a simple API that I can poll from a load balancer to see whether: This simple API would be used for monitoring purposes –…Continue reading How to verify connection to the database in Entity Framework Core?

How to resolve another “An error occurred while updating the entries” exception in Entity Framework Core

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 tarnation is wrong this time. And admittedly, that’s a really generic error, so it…Continue reading How to resolve another “An error occurred while updating the entries” exception in Entity Framework Core

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