“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.
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. Please note, that I use Azure functions runtime 2.x (and so should you!) Another easy one, that I was unable to find much guidance on! But first, let’s start with the basics. Why would you want to have this setup? Why would you…Continue reading How to access EF’s DbContext in an Azure Function on V2 runtime?
Welp – another interesting error encountered while deploying Azure Functions to Azure. So, everything runs nicely locally, but when you deploy your well-tested, functional and pretty code to run them in the cloud, you’ll just get these ugly and unfriendly errors. Long story short, “Function compilation error” is what you’re faced with. Example error below: Function compilation error Microsoft.CodeAnalysis.Scripting.CompilationErrorException : Script compilation failed. at async Microsoft.Azure.WebJobs.Script.Description.DotNetFunctionInvoker.CreateFunctionTarget(CancellationToken cancellationToken) at C:\azure-webjobs-sdk-script\src\WebJobs.Script\Description\DotNet\DotNetFunctionInvoker.cs : 314 at System.Runtime.ExceptionServices.ExceptionDispatchInfo.Throw() at async Microsoft.Azure.WebJobs.Script.Description.FunctionLoader`1.GetFunctionTargetAsync[T](Int32 attemptCount) at C:\azure-webjobs-sdk-script\src\WebJobs.Script\Description\FunctionLoader.cs : 55 at System.Runtime.ExceptionServices.ExceptionDispatchInfo.Throw() at async…Continue reading Sudden “Function compilation error” for an Azure Function
Have you ever been struggling, 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 me (just 6 months earlier) or someone else. .NET Date/DateTime formatting is an endless bag of fun in general. So I thought I’d finally document the different ways one can set up the formatting of datetime fields in ASP.NET MVC projects specifically. Or at least all the ways I’ve found so far!…Continue reading How to format dates in ASP.NET?
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 Posts Related to “Problematic behavior of web.AddSupportedUILanguage(int lcid) in SharePoint 2013 and 2016”:5 ways to enable Custom Scripts for a SharePoint site collectionThe Scary Anatomy of a Microsoft License FraudSharePoint Localization – a (somewhat) comprehensive how-to!
This article explains how you can access an Azure Function’s Application/Environment settings/variables from your C# code. Different versions of Azure Functions have different ways to access the Azure Function settings. This has been another little thing, that I always forget – so better document it somewhere! How to get application settings in different runtime versions of Azure Functions? This has changed between different versions of Azure Functions runtime – so I’m describing what should work for v3 (the latest runtime version), v2 and v1. Note,…Continue reading How to access Azure Function App’s settings from C#?
Office 365 Planner is a neat tool for task management. However, when you, for whatever use case, need to form urls that point you towards a single task (or a bucket, or a plan for that matter), you might run into trouble with how the url is formed. Custom domains actually make it a bit complicated, but luckily there’s a workaround! Description of the issue If you have multiple domains in your Azure AD, your Planner might end up using your custom domain in its…Continue reading How to form links to Planner tasks
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 .NET Core – the same basic idea should work for both situations. The solution here shows you, how you can get a little bit more information out of the process, without attaching the debugger (there’s another blog post for that: How to launch the visual studio debugger from code/) Description Entity Framework’s…Continue reading Easiest way to debug Seed-method in Code-first migrations in Entity Framework
This post describes a quick solution to launching a new Visual Studio instance for debugging the code. There’s a lot of applications for this, but where I’ve found it exceptionally useful, has been in debugging the Entity Framework’s code-first migration’s (one of the ways for database initialization) Seed-method. It is by default undebuggable, as when you are running Update-Database you can’t really use a -debug switch or anything, and there’s really no way to launch the debugger. Hence the best you can do is using…Continue reading Launching a new debugger instance from code in Visual Studio
If you’re developing something like a WPF app and you’ll 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 SharePoint solution, but the basic principle is the same!), you’ll probably need to use Dispatcher, or otherwise you’ll run into issues with the GUI elements being owned by another thread, and therefore forbidding access to them. This can result in an…Continue reading Using Dispatcher to update values in GUI elements from a background thread
In this post I instruct a simple way to stop SharePoint (either on-premises installation or SharePoint Online) from redirecting to Delve or MySites (respectively). The normal behavior is, that this happens when users click any name of a user anywhere in SharePoint. This is often not desired, and sometimes just confusing or impractical. Problem If your customers are like mine, a lot of them hate Delve or MySite or both. Or maybe they just are’nt willing to yet adopt Delve. Or perhaps you’ve heard of…Continue reading Disabling Delve/MySite redirection from SharePoint Site Collections
Luckily, SharePoint Add-ins (or App Parts, like they were called earlier) are slowly getting killed and rooted out of all the sites they once were deployed to – and I don’t think anyone’s going to miss them. However, as so often happens with legacy implementations, there will still be thousands of sites, where SharePoint administrators and developers will be responsible for maintaining and developing the solutions further. This will occasionally require updating app parts, which is a process that kind of sucks. Here I’ll try to simplify…Continue reading Updating files in an App Part (SharePoint Add-in)
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 certain field / column? Then you’ll have to tell EF which one to use as a key column. Usually, it’s easy – you just add the following annotation to the columns you’ll be using: [Index(“OfficialIds”, 1)] public int AreaId { get; set; } [Index(“OfficialIds”, 2)] public string EstateId { get; set; } (example stripped of extra code and other columns for clarity) And after adding the migration (Add-Migration… commandlet) you get…Continue reading Fixing the error: “Column XX in table dbo.YY is of a type that is invalid for use as a key column in an index.”
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.. Well, since forever. I had made some quick and simple edits in String.cshtml display template (among quite a few other edits before building again and seeing what happened), as I added support for Enum values there. After that I started getting duplicate…Continue reading Duplicate object values in ASP.NET MVC Display Templates? Easy fix!
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. It’s more or less a prime example of a situation, where the error itself tells very little about the actual issue, and since debugging code-first migrations is kind of difficult (see the best tips for that here!), it’s cumbersome to investigate. Symptoms So what’s the error that we’re running into, exactly? Below, you can find the most…Continue reading Fixing “An error occurred while updating the entries” while running code-first migrations in MVC 5 app
This post describes the (probably) easiest and most straightforward way of creating a new Thread in your SharePoint (or any other .NET) server-side / desktop code. Solution: how to create a new Thread Let’s face it – one should not create new Threads lightly when developing SharePoint solutions, but sometimes it’s difficult to avoid. Or sometimes it’s just the simplest way to get around weird framework limitations. Posts Related to “Simplest way to create a thread on SharePoint”:5 ways to enable Custom Scripts for a…Continue reading Simplest way to create a thread on SharePoint
At times you may need to allow unsafe updates for SPWeb objects to get your code to run. This, in SharePoint’s C# full-trust code, is done by setting SPWeb.AllowUnsafeUpdates to true. However, as this is an exception to security settings, you should generally avoid it. When you can’t, it’s a good practice to limit the change to as small a scope as possible. This is true even though the setting is only persisted for the duration of the request (unless the SPWeb object was gotten…Continue reading How to properly use SPWeb.AllowUnsafeUpdates?
This post is about a small programmatic workaround to creating new SPFields for SPLists in SharePoint with human-readable internal names. This is mainly a usability improvement for your editors (and doesn’t change your life that much), but at the very least they will probably appreciate it! In short, I’ll show you how to avoid SharePoint’s dirty encoding (like replacing a space with “_x0020_”). This appliesto when you’re using server-side code to generate fields. Problem: non-readable internal names for SharePoint list fields When you create a…Continue reading Programmatically creating readable internal names for new SharePoint fields
