All the undocumented weird configuration values that make stuff tick, even though they generally speaking likely shouldn’t. These articles mostly describe hacks you need to configure in the production environment directly.
Hopefully, there won’t be THAT many articles in this category… But I guess there will. I mean, what can you do?
Weird configuration hacks are there to stay, after all.
Every now and then, you run into a situation where you need to overwrite a database’s contents with those of another database. Maybe you’ll need to update a staging environment with partial data import from production, or perhaps you have a new developer coming in and they need some data – I don’t know. But this should be a run-of-the-mill action. Something you can do in a minute. The bottom line is – this shouldn’t be complicated. Background Backups are the obvious answer. I’m not…Continue reading How to (easily) move data between SQL databases?
This article explains (with conveniently copy-pasteable code samples) how you can query your printers using PowerShell and modify properties, such as paper size, for one or more of them. Very useful, if you have multiple printers and multiple computers you use them from, AND if you frequently move between continents, you might face the same, totally typical and widespread issue: Your favorite printer might default to using “Letter” paper size, but you’d really need to get it printed in that sweet, sweet “A4” instead. And…Continue reading How to change printer paper size using PowerShell?
This short article simply documents how to install the dependencies for running Robot Framework on Azure DevOps’ hosted agents. This simple tip comes in handy when you need to run any UI testing for your project after build, as Robot Framework is a great and widely used tool for that. Let’s quickly take a look at the background of the issue, after which I’m sharing a highly copy-pasteable piece of YAML for your convenience. Well – and mine. Background So I got a question about…Continue reading How to run Robot tests on an Azure DevOps hosted agent?
This article will go through different solutions for fixing issues with uploading pictures to your WordPress Media Library. There’s plenty of reasons that could cause this issue – and a couple of different ways to end up running into it. But fear not! I’ll be proposing a few different ways to fix the issue in your installation. Unlike some of the more aggravated users online suggest, this isn’t likely a bug in WordPress – rather, it’s a configuration / compatibility issue. Luckily, it’s usually something…Continue reading Fixing issues with uploading pictures to WordPress Media Library
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?
As Teams adoption grows (partially driven by the megatrend of digitalization, partially by the massive surge in working from home due to Covid-19), different problems managing Teams also become more obvious. The growth seems to have been largely organic. Teams and organizations are adopting the tools that best help them get their work done with little regard to how the tools are maintained and best used. Teams are often created as needed, and by whoever needs them. The creator also becomes the owner – often,…Continue reading How to fix a Teams team with no Owners?
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 a couple of ways to fix it, though. You wouldn’t believe these 3 solutions to fix the error “500.32”, and what they look like now! Oh heavens, what have I done with that subheading? All of that time watching Growth Hacking YouTube…Continue reading How to fix “HTTP Error 500.32 – ANCM Failed to Load dll”
This article explains one possible fix to a situation, where your pictures in WordPress fail to show up. In this particular case, uploading, editing and even selecting pictures for your articles works – just displaying them doesn’t work. Alternatively, programmatic access might fail as well: in my case ShortPixel reported an error “There was an error and your request was not processed: Could not download file (404 Not Found)”. This was peculiar, as I was pretty sure I had just uploaded the files and they…Continue reading WordPress media uploads failing after year/month change? Easy fix :)
This blog post describes a very specific fix to a very specific issue. In a software project that consisted of a desktop client application and some APIs hosted on Azure, we ran into an error where some connections to APIs would fail with an error like this: No connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it. What gives? Description Imagine this: You’re connecting to an API hosted by an Azure App Service (“Web App”, if you wish) using an application or a…Continue reading App Service refuses connections with error: “No connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it”
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. The DLL was obfuscated without changing any of the public APIs, Classes or Parameters – only internal stuff was scrambled. Simple stuff. Essentially, the article linked below describes what I was working towards: However, I wasn’t quite having the success I hoped for. Whilst the obfuscation was successful, and I could even reference the obfuscated…Continue reading Obfuscar 2.0 errors with loading types from assembly
This post describes a couple of useful solutions or workarounds for an awkward situation, where you can’t manage the metadata of your articles on WordPress. This hampers greatly your ability to organize your posts – and if you’re using WordPress like I’m using, also lowers the visibility of your new articles (I’m using the tags as hashtags when sharing to social channels)! We don’t want that. But what’s actually causing it? Description of the issue So you know that little panel on the right hand…Continue reading WordPress blog article edit mode: No Tags or Categories visible?
This post details my very simple solution to an extremely unnecessary and kind of a simple error I encountered when logging into SharePoint. However, you could run into the same error after configuring Azure Active Directory authentication to a custom web application. The error message comes in at least 2 variants. These are shown below: AADSTS90056: This endpoint only accepts POST, OPTIONS requests. Received a GET request. The other one I’ve seen doesn’t even mention OPTIONS, just POST: AADSTS900561: The endpoint only accepts POST requests.…Continue reading Resolving error AADSTS90056
Uh, okay, well. So this is where you should just RTFM (that’s along the lines of “check the documentation” for those uninitiated in the world of unnecessary abbreviations). But as we’ve found out before, Microsoft’s documentation on the agent’s installed software isn’t always up-to-date. That’s why I added this simple snippet on my pipeline to figure out which version of the browser AND the webdriver are installed on the machine. The snippets below can be combined with logic to install different versions of Chrome and…Continue reading How to find out which WebDriver version is installed on an Azure DevOps build machine using YAML?
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. Maybe my cases are wrong, or I’m just bad at googling, but I’ve struggled to find a good page documenting this. Perfect case for another blog post about the topic, then – perhaps someone else will find it useful! This post answers the question: How to get Claims for a user in .NET…Continue reading Iterating Group memberships using Claims in .NET Core
We were working on getting our Robot Framework tests running during our builds on Azure DevOps. However, using hosted agents, it was quite a struggle to get all of the dependencies on the agent and make sure the tests can access the browser on the build machine. In our case, we were running the tests in Chrome. For this, we needed Robot Framework and some of its dependencies to be installed on the machine. Luckily, that wasn’t too complicated – however, getting the WebDriver that…Continue reading How to use the right version of the WebDriver on hosted agents in Azure DevOps?
Okay – a quick piece of documentation that was a bit lackluster, so it’s again a good idea to log somewhere. How to package a simple DLL that’s a result of your Azure DevOps Pipeline? In my particular case, I have configured a post-build step to obfuscate the DLL, that’s first built by MSBuild. That works nicely. However, the default way to create a NuGet package, where you select a project (usually you pass the same variable to NuGet pack command that you used earlier…Continue reading Azure DevOps – how to package a single DLL?
This article describes the Azure regions, where Azure Monitor Application Insights is available. Azure regions A region is a set of datacenters deployed within a latency-defined perimeter and connected through a dedicated regional low-latency network. Depending on who’s talking, regions are sometimes called locations, geolocations or just geos. Azure regions give customers the flexibility to deploy their applications where they need to. Azure is generally available in 44 regions around the world, with plans announced for 10 additional regions. However, not all features are available…Continue reading List of Azure Regions, where Application Insights is available
This article describes how to fix the error “AADSTS500113: no reply address is registered for the application”. You typically get this error, when your app is trying to authenticate your users against Azure Active Directory. I’ve been posting about different versions of Azure Active Directory authentication errors (different errors with AADSTS -codes) a lot – I’ll need to find a better way to categorize them in the future. But, for now, on to the issue! Problem Another day, another app, another reply address -related authentication…Continue reading How to fix “AADSTS500113: No reply address is registered for the application” error?
This post describes how you can easily enable debug/verbose information for your Azure Functions for a lightweight and built-in way to extract just a bit more information out of your Azure Function executions. There’s different methods available for Azure and your local development environment. Problem Azure Functions are awesome. But by default, your tools on gathering information without some additional configuration are not that great. The “monitor” view of the function doesn’t give you more than an excerpt of the console. This applies not only…Continue reading How to enable verbose logging for Azure Functions?
