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.
Another day, another issue – this time with an on-premises environment with a ridiculously complicated architecture and an absolute ton of pipelines. There are plenty of ways to fix this particular issue (because there are plenty of reasons), and after ferocious googling (and very brief binging just to see if Microsoft had found something Google hadn’t), the trail ran cold and I felt like nobody had run into the same issue before. This is probably not true – just that the documentation wasn’t there. So,…Continue reading How to fix a 403.18 in a virtual application?
This article documents the quick and dirty fixes and patches I’ve found for Home Assistant. I’m trying to document all the things that are not complicated enough to warrant an actual blog post themselves somewhere, and this page is as good a place as any. Hopefully, these tips end up being helpful to someone else as well! Posts Related to “Home Assistant – Quick and dirty fixes”:Gotchas when configuring Home Assistant on Docker on WindowsNo way to renew a ClimaCell API subscription – what to…Continue reading Home Assistant – Quick and dirty fixes
Once again, I come to you with a surprisingly opaque problem and offer to share my bemusingly simple solution. That should be a dedicated series on my blog – although on second thought, perhaps lobbing 90% of my articles under one tag wouldn’t be helpful… 😁 Problem When running docker-compose up the command would fail, and instead, output a disgustingly long set of what looks like a whole pile of pythons engaging in quantum entanglement would angrily hiss at you if bothered. It’s not pretty.…Continue reading Docker-compose fails on Windows with “Error while fetching server API version: (2, ‘CreateFile’, ‘The system cannot find the file specified.’)”
Every now and then, you will 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 a partial data import from production, or perhaps you have a new developer coming in who needs 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. And it should be documented really well.…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. This is very useful if you have multiple printers and multiple computers that you use. 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.…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 How to resolve AADSTS90056 – “The endpoint only accepts POST requests. Received a GET request.”
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?
