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.
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 “AADSTS500113: no reply address is registered for the application” error. You typically get this error, when your app is trying to authenticate your users against Azure Active Directory. I have been posting about different versions of the 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, onto the issue! Problem Another day, another app, another address-related authentication issue…Continue reading How to fix an “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?
This article describes an error situation that you might run into in Modern SharePoint, where you cannot take a page into edit mode anymore. You only get a strangely generic error message with a kinda weird failed request in the console. But, of course, there’s a fix – and an easy one at that! Problem Huh – so here’s a weird one for you! Take a modern communication site, create a new beautiful page, produce some high quality content, and even go to great extents…Continue reading How to resolve “You cannot edit this page”-error in Modern SharePoint
This article explains how to add multiple aliases to one managed property in SharePoint Search Schema Management. Yes, it’s possible, just a bit unintuitive! I’ll explain the process below. Solution This seems to be another “gotcha”, that’s missing from the official documentation, but is super helpful to know when you happen to need it! The way I encountered it was in a dev/staging environment, where certain automatically created Managed Property, owstaxIdValoTags (I’ll leave it up to you to figure out what the name is all…Continue reading How to add multiple aliases to a Managed Property in SharePoint Search?
This article describes one way how to fix seemingly non-sensical “Access denied” errors, that you get when running Set-PnPAvailablePageLayouts. Problem While running the PnP cmdlet for enabling or selecting the available publishing page layouts for a web, you run into this, fairly generic error: Access denied. You do not have permission to perform this action or access this resource. PS C:\> Set-PnPAvailablePageLayouts -AllowAllPageLayouts Set-PnPAvailablePageLayouts : Access denied. You do not have permission to perform this action or access this resource. At line:1 char:1 + Set-PnPAvailablePageLayouts…Continue reading How to fix “Access denied” errors when running “Set-PnPAvailablePageLayouts”?
Modern SharePoint Online recently got a new, super useful and much-requested new feature: site footer. This little buddy now makes it possible to create informative, stylish and useful footer areas to your intranet sites. But what if you already implemented such a solution based on, say, SPFx extensions, and now you’ve got 2 footers? Well, you might want to disable one of those two. My guideline would be this: if you already have a custom/vendor solution for your footer, and it does what you need…Continue reading How to disable the footer in Modern SharePoint?
Have you ever run into a situation, where you just wanted to remove the currently standing function definitions from your app service without actually nuking the whole Functions app? I have! App Service configuration is usually easy to manage programmatically or by scripting, so even if you need to redo the deployment, it should be fairly straightforward. But what if you don’t have the setup scripted, and have already configured everything the way you like it – you’d really like to NOT nuke the whole…Continue reading How to remove Azure Functions without deleting the Functions App?
A couple of days ago, I got a comment asking how to fix error AADSTS90008 when developing an application using Azure Active Directory The error in question was this: AADSTS90008: The user or administrator has not consented to use the application with ID ‘[guid]’. This happened because application is misconfigured: it must require access to Windows Azure Active Directory by specifying at least ‘Sign in and read user profile’ permission. While the error itself is usually fairly simple, explaining what to do in a comment…Continue reading How to fix “AADSTS90008: The user or administrator has not consented to use the application”?
Microsoft is gathering all kinds of telemetric data out of the usage of SharePoint. I ran into an interesting JavaScript file, fp.js, on SharePoint Online doing just that. Gathering data. It loads on pretty much every single page request, so it’s something you’ll bump into anytime you open your developer tools! Your customer’s IT might even inquire about it – perhaps wanting to disable it for perfomance or information security gains? But what is fp.js and what does it do? Posts Related to “What is…Continue reading What is “fp.js” – and why is it snooping on your SharePoint usage?
Now for something totally different – for a change, I got to fix an issue with my own blog, so I had the chance to delve into PHP and WordPress configurations… :) PHP is an ever-evolving language – even if it might not always feel that way. The old workhorse has been powering most of the internet for a couple of decades, and weirdly enough, doesn’t really show signs of going anywhere. A huge part of the success story has been the fact that WordPress,…Continue reading “500 Internal Server Error” after updating a WordPress site to PHP 7.3
This post describes the status of an ongoing issue in SharePoint Online, where the Managed Property “PictureThumbnailURL” will return null no matter what you do. This Managed Property is used for a few different use cases – most notably, Delve blog post’s hero, or header photo’s URL is mapped to this property, as it’s meant to be used as a thumbnail picture in a number of rollups. In this article, I describe the investigation, mitigation, possible workarounds and of course the current status of the…Continue reading Bug: “PictureThumbnailURL” always null in SharePoint Online Search results
This post explains how to add new Owners to your Office Groups using PowerShell. If your group has ended up without any owners, PowerShell might even be the only option, since the graphical user interfaces for Office Groups management are not that good. Background The hype around Office Groups kind of died down a little bit a while back, since their role wasn’t that clear – they didn’t really do much, and were confusing for end users. Back then, I posted about them replacing Site…Continue reading How to fix an Office Group with no Owners
Let me start this article, by reminding everyone that Azure Functions are awesome, and you should use them despite some hiccups. Having said that, let’s fix some errors! In the beginning of September 2018, Microsoft started pushing out breaking changes to Azure Functions 2.x. They had announced this a full month in advance, so they expected everyone in the world to update their Azure Functions to avoid the functions from breaking. I guess, however, that in real life, a month is not that much. Me,…Continue reading Fixing “The following functions are in error: Object reference not set to an instance of an object.” error in Azure Functions
Have you ever wondered, how SharePoint’s Managed Properties for Usage & Analytics info actually work? There are all these nice properties available for getting view counts for different items in SharePoint’s search index, but they all seem to act like crazy. Plus they are sometimes pretty nonsensical… And not very well documented! In this post I’ll try to make some sense on how you can use them in programmatic scenarios. Read on… Update 12.3.2019: I’ve updated the post based on a lot of empirical research…Continue reading How to interpret SharePoint’s view count managed properties (like “ViewsLast1Days”)?
So, I’ve gotten this question from a lot of customers and partners, and I thought it’s worth clarifying the case a bit. “I’m seeing a lot of requests these requests to WsaUpload.ashx. What do they matter? They seem to degrade the performance – so what can I do about them?” That’s a great question! Let’s see what it is, why it exists, and what we can do about it! Posts Related to “Disabling requests to WsaUpload.ashx (Customer Experience Improvement Program)”:5 ways to enable Custom Scripts…Continue reading Disabling requests to WsaUpload.ashx (Customer Experience Improvement Program)
Have you ever tried to find out the number of users of an enterprise application in your Office 365 tenant? This could be needed for multiple different reasons: maybe your organization is paying for the app and you want to know who’s actually using it, maybe the usage is required by a company policy and it’s useful to know if organization’s members are actually using it, or maybe you just want to know about the user adoption of an app. For apps with under 100…Continue reading How to get the user count for Azure AD Enterprise Application
Got an error “Tenant app deployment is only supported in the app catalog site. The current site is not the app catalog site.”, even if the current site very much IS an app catalog site? There might be an easy fix! Problem Imagine this: you browse into your fresh SharePoint tenant, open the app catalog, click on an app, try to deploy it, and out comes this error. Tenant app deployment is only supported in the app catalog site. The current site is not the…Continue reading Solving “Tenant app deployment is only supported in the app catalog site.” -error
