List of all posts

This page contains a list of all published posts on my blog site. It’s a pretty long list, and chances are it’s just going to become longer! You may want to select some of the categories from the top navigation to get fewer results, go to the archive to browse by tag, or maybe even use search!

Actually, using search is a GREAT idea! Go ahead and do that. You can find it on the right-hand sidebar of the page. I’ve tried to tweak it in a way, that it’ll actually return relevant results. It’s not based on that annoying ad-littered custom Google engine anymore – but rather a tweaked version of what’s built-in to WordPress.

Or you can just do what I always do when I remember I have documented some weird workaround but can’t find it: Go ahead, and search for something like this.

All posts from newest to oldest

  • Evil triumphs when good men do nothing March 7, 2022
    I never thought that I would write an article on this site of mine about war, peace and a threat to not only an entire nation’s existence, but mine, too. But as this website has some reach (there’s around 75 000 of you each month), I feel that I have a responsibility to say and do something. On February 24th, 2022, the fascist oligarchy known as Russia attacked yet another one of its neighbors. That’s almost ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to fix annoying mouse/touch device input lag on Windows 11? March 5, 2024
    A couple of weeks ago I posted about a really annoying issue – persistent mouse/touch device input lag on Windows 10. It was driving me crazy for an afternoon before I found the right Windows Update package to uninstall, purge, cleanse in hellfire, ship right back to Microsoft (with an angry letter attached to it), and finally block said update from ever getting installed again. Then a very unfortunate chain of events happened, and long and ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to install the Classic Teams for Business client? February 27, 2024
    This article explains briefly and straightforwardly (and in a frustrated tone, the reasons of which you might already know) how to install the Classic Microsoft Teams for Business client, instead of the “new” client. I doubt the method will work for very long, but we’ll see. Background The new Microsoft Teams client is great. It’s shiny. It has some of the bells and whistles of the old one. And it’s faster (most of the time). You should probably ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • This simple registry key will make your Windows computer 11.5% faster! February 20, 2024
    A’ight, it’s a clickbait title, but it’s also almost true. See, if you’re like me, you’re also sick and tired of Windows shoving Edge and Bing down your throat every time you search for something on your PC or click a system link? Do you want to find your files and apps (and only YOUR files and apps, not someone else’s stuff) without having to wait for Windows to load a bunch of irrelevant web ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to remove files in a SharePoint library? February 18, 2024
    This article explains how you can remove a big batch of files from a library using either the UI or PnP PowerShell. And when I say “big”, I mean, roughly, “as many as possible”, without removing the library or touching the folders in it. I’m not trying to speedrun SharePoint, here, I’m just trying to get rid of some files without resorting to shortcuts. Please join me on this adventure! (This article was originally scheduled to be published ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to solve “error TS2354: This syntax requires an imported helper but module ‘tslib’ cannot be found.” when running npm build scripts? February 6, 2024
    This article explains a solution to another dumb issue I ran into when checking out someone else’s repository and trying to build and run the solution. I’m calling the issue “dumb” because it’s not like I’m practicing rocket surgery here. And the solution isn’t particularly high-flying either. Then again, neither am I – I’m just trying to add a couple of null checks to a widget that keeps crashing. But let’s get to it. Background Not a week ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to solve ‘Mountpoint must either be a directory or not exist’ in Google Colab workbook? January 30, 2024
    This article is about how to fix a common error in Google Colab notebooks when trying to mount a Google Drive, and you just get an error along the lines of ‘Mountpoint must either be a directory or not exist’. I’ll explain the reason for the error, and provide several solutions ranging from stupidly simple to normally simple. Yeah – no space surgery available in this article. Because sometimes simple solutions are the best 😉 Background So I ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to fix catastrophic mouse/touch device input lag on Windows 10? January 23, 2024
    Did you start experiencing weird input lag on your Windows 10 PC starting some time early 2024? This lag would take 1-6 seconds, during which your mouse and/or touch devices (touch screen or touch pad) would be completely unresponsive. Keyboard would work, though. Good. That means I wasn’t the only one. 😅 Don’t get me wrong! I’m sorry you have issues with your computer. But I’m just happy I have some co-sufferers – and I’m happy to ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to update RAM on Synology DS423+? January 16, 2024
    Time for something completely different: Hardware stuff. In this article, I’ll explain how to upgrade Synology DS423+ NAS’s RAM memory, which super-cheap RAM memory I used, and a little bit about how I ended up with this device in the first place. Anyway. Let’s get to it. Background A while back, I realized I need to update the machine hosting my Home Assistant Docker container. I was hosting it (and my other Docker containers) on an old Windows ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to work around Docker failing to access WSL on Windows? January 9, 2024
    So, I’m an occasional developer (and a frequent scripter), so I occasionally need to, well, develop stuff. And quite often I need Docker for packaging whatever I’m trying to push out there, or possibly to run someone else’s containers on my machine. But sometimes, Docker is more pain than gain. And this, dear reader, was definitely one of those times. So, what was wrong? Problem Alright, so my Docker was having some trouble with WSL. No biggie – except ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • 2023 Year Review January 2, 2024
    I’ve made it a tradition to post something about the last year just after the New Year’s, so here’s another look back at the last 12 months. Next Tuesday, we’ll be back to the regularly scheduled programming! In 2021 I promised a new article every Tuesday. In 2022 I managed that, and in 2023 too (although just about), but I have to admit I’ve pretty much used up my backlog of unfinished articles at this point… ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to make sure your pipelines run as scheduled in Azure DevOps? December 26, 2023
    This article explains in very brief terms – it is Christmas and I’m enjoying my 2-week-long European vacation, after all 😉 – how to make sure your Azure DevOps (YAML) pipelines fire on schedule. Because by default, they won’t. And I’ll explain to you why that (kind of) makes sense! Problem I’ve mentioned it before, but my employer is a pretty heavy user of Azure DevOps. You wouldn’t believe the amount of plumbing a global SaaS product ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to pick the cheapest hours of electricity using Home Assistant? December 19, 2023
    Time to write about Home Assistant for a change! I’ve been using the home automation platform for a couple of years now and while it’s immensely powerful, you also run into all kinds of issues. I could rant in length about one weather station or how difficult it is to get some stuff working on Docker on Windows (and maybe I already have!), but overall it’s incredible how many complex things you can do just like ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to fix “The term ‘winget’ is not recognized as a name of a cmdlet, function, script file, or executable program.” in Windows? December 12, 2023
    This article explains how I fixed Terminal / PowerShell being unable to locate my winget when I was trying to install something with it. This was quite unexpected as I knew for sure I had installed winget, and I had also used it before successfully. But alas, things break down and need fixing. And here’s how to fix this particular issue. Problem Let’s take a quick look at the actual problem first. Imagine this: You’re trying to install ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • Azure DevOps suddenly not letting you manage Environments ? Sorry, it’s for your own security! December 5, 2023
    This article explains how to get around new security limitations (did I say “limitations”? I meant “features”) in Azure DevOps to make it tolerable to configure your Azure DevOps Deployment Environments. Because the recent changes to Azure DevOps have made it, quite frankly, intolerable. But – let’s take a step back before we take the required 15 steps forward (or sidestep the whole issue – now that’s what I call a proper shortcut, and I’ll share ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to manually install Windows updates? November 28, 2023
    This article explains how to install Windows Update whenever your Windows Update service is broken. Which seems to occasionally happen. And while you can run a ton of scripts to fix it (and a lot of guides online just tell you to click “Check for updates” manually, which is kind of funny to me, but ok), the actual thing that worked for me was way simpler. Read on to find out more and possibly laugh at ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to restore an old version of a Trello card? November 21, 2023
    This article explains how to easily(?) restore the description (or any other field) of a Trello card. This might come in handy, and the UI for this isn’t exactly obvious (read: it’s nonexistent). Background If you’re like me, you’re a heavy (if a bit reluctant) Trello user. Using it all day long, you will before or later run into a situation where you mistakenly (or due to a technical glitch or stupid design) remove the contents of ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to fix winget when it’s throwing a “0x8a15000f : Data required by the source is missing”? November 14, 2023
    This article offers a couple of different ways to fix the “0x8a15000f” error that winget might throw at you in seemingly random situations. It’s a great tool especially for headless scenarios on Windows, but this was an odd one – and required an odd solution. Background Another day, another headache with a tool that usually “just works”. I was trying to install kubectl using winget on a machine where I didn’t have a convenient desktop environment (don’t question ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • Hacktoberfest 2023 – another year, another Hacktoberfest November 7, 2023
    This article is a quick one about my annual tradition – participating in Hacktoberfest, the “month-long celebration of open-source projects, their maintainers, and the entire community of contributors.” It’s a cheesy way to call an October-long event, where a private company tracks qualifying open-source contributions from everyone who signs up (and gives them their contact details for marketing purposes), but I like to think the event is net positive, and participating has become a tradition for me. ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to selectively remove items from an Azure blob storage container? October 31, 2023
    In this article, I’ll share a simple script for a simple use case: removing blobs from a virtual directory structure in a container in an Azure blob storage account. This should be useful for a case like ours; removing certain directories and subdirectories but not the whole container. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves! What was the problem we had? Background So a few days ago, the resident sysadmin (pictured below) came to me with a problem: He ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to update application settings for (all of your) App Services and Azure Functions on Azure using az cli? October 24, 2023
    Anyone still remember Log4Shell? The incredibly easy-to-exploit, zero-day vulnerability in Log4j, a popular Java logging framework, that made arbitrary code execution extremely simple and straightforward. The vulnerability had existed unnoticed since 2013 and was simply a side effect of a nifty new feature implemented way back when. But that’s enough of that. How serious was it? Well – Apache gave Log4Shell a CVSS severity rating of 10, the highest available score. The exploit is simple to execute ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • swa emulator throwing “✖ Could not connect to “http://localhost:7071″. Is the server up and running?”? October 17, 2023
    This article explains how to get around a weird quirk in Azure Static Web Apps local development story. Well – one of the quirks anyway. A real showstopper issue I ran into. One, that isn’t even that serious – it’s just that the error message doesn’t help you at all. But let’s take a step back – what was the issue we ran into, again? Problem When you’re running your project in Visual Studio Code, it fails to start ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to export an App Service Certificate from Azure? October 10, 2023
    Azure offers this great offering that is in my mind underutilized still – managed certificates that they’ll renew for you. While the offering is called Azure App Service Certificates, they are not only limited to being used in App Services. Their biggest strengths lie in their ease of use, automation, and integration with different Azure services. These certs are automatically renewed, eliminating the need for manual certificate management. And if the renewal fails, you’ll get a ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to export a certificate and a private key from a .pfx using OpenSSL? October 3, 2023
    Alright, so let’s make this a quick one. I’ve had to google this multiple times, since I have to do this a couple of times per year, which is NOT often enough for me to remember it by heart, or even for my Terminal to remember the commands properly. So, long story short – here’s how to export a PEM-formatted .cer -file and your private key (and optionally decrypt it as well!) from a .pfx -file ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to find out dependency versions in your .csproj files using PowerShell? September 26, 2023
    This article explains our solution to a very particular use case. We needed to go through .csproj files, find certain dependencies from them, and then figure out their versions. And all of this needed to happen in an Azure DevOps pipeline. But when would this be helpful? Well, hear me out, because boy do I have a case to describe! Background We wanted to have automatic versioning for our builds in Azure DevOps. We use the standard and ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • node build throwing “error:0308010C:digital envelope routines::unsupported”? Let’s fix it! September 19, 2023
    This article explains how to fix an annoying error – somewhat along the lines of “error:0308010C:digital envelope routines::unsupported” – you might encounter when running node scripts. This might happen in a pipeline or locally. And guess what: you can probably fix it. Alright. Let’s get to it, then! Problem So I still get to code something occasionally (despite being a part of the cursed middle management now), and not a week goes by without yours truly breaking the ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • “This app can’t run on your PC” dialog when you’re building your app in Visual Studio September 12, 2023
    This article explains a fix to an odd issue, where suddenly, mid-build, an error dialog pops up, complaining about your PC being unable to run “this app”. The fix is luckily straightforward, even if it’s a bit odd. Let me explain – but first, let’s define the issue a bit better. What went wrong? Problem So, when running a build that includes some steps executed by node (either defined in your .csproj for your normal build definition, or ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to “fix” Word removing tagged users from comments? September 5, 2023
    In this particular article, I’ll explain how to fix an issue where Microsoft Word (part of what used to be called “Microsoft Office”, but that’s now called “Microsoft 365”) decides to remove your name and everyone you tagged from any comments or conversations you might’ve had on the article. That’s pretty annoying – but let’s take a closer look at what was actually happening. Problem A picture speaks louder than a thousand words – so let’s take a ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to install Home Assistant on Synology NAS (DSM 7.2)? August 29, 2023
    This article explains how to install Home Assistant on your Synology NAS device using Container Manager and Web Station. This probably applies to DSM 7.2+ on any somewhat modern Synology DiskStation device. A lot of the steps also apply if you’re setting up ANY containers to run on your NAS, to be fair. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves! Background I’ve been running my Home Assistant, PiHole and occasionally other services on my local Docker host machine ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to configure a custom 404 page for a SharePoint site? August 22, 2023
    This article explains how to use some archaic PowerShell magic to configure a custom 404 page for your Modern SharePoint Online Communication site. If you’ve been working with SharePoint for a while, this property might be already familiar to you. A lot of settings for each site collection are stored in the root site’s property bag, and that’s where you’ll find the key “vti_filenotfoundpage” which should have the value “/sites/ContosoPublishing/Pages/PageNotFoundError.aspx”. Classic. Like, literally, Classic SharePoint. As in ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • Azure DevOps pipelines suddenly failing with “##[error]#0 building with default instance using docker driver” August 15, 2023
    Another (possibly?) timely and weird one here! This article explains how to work around Azure DevOps suddenly stopping to play nice with Docker and the rest of our tooling and causing all builds to fail with oddly non-descript error messages. Annoying to deal with but not the end of the world as we’ll see! Background Another odd one for the books! No idea what caused it, but suddenly our pipelines started looking like this, with no clear reason ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to fix Windows not recognizing your mouse clicks? August 8, 2023
    Since I ran into this annoying little issue again, I thought it might be a good time to document it for the next person who needs to google it on their phone, after frantically clicking every single button they have on their mouse, only to realize their computer really doesn’t care about any of that. None of the clicks do anything. I’ve only ever run into this on Windows 10, but I wouldn’t be surprised if ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • Outlook Search broken due to Windows Search acting up? Here’s 3 ways to fix it! August 1, 2023
    Well, this was kind of a dumb one. Search in Outlook suddenly stopped working completely. And I don’t mean the normal “Outlook Search can’t find anything” -kind of issues, I mean it literally found zero results with any search terms. Well, everything is buggy and nothing works. Not that unusual by itself, but something that should be fixed. This article explains how to fix it. Well, even a couple of different ways to fix it! Problem When searching for ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • “Failed to launch debug server process due to: TypeError: Cannot read properties of undefined….” when trying to debug Blazor WebAssembly July 25, 2023
    This article explains how to fix an annoying issue when trying to debug a Blazor WASM (WebAssembly) project. In my case, I had a Blazor WASM SWA (Static Web App), that built just fine and ran well in Azure, but refused to be debugged. What an annoying little problem. I mean – it’s not a problem until you have a problem to investigate. But when you can’t investigate a problem, then you do have a problem. So ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to clean up redundant .js, .jsx and .d.ts files from your repository? July 18, 2023
    Even if you have a 100% TypeScript project, it’ll still end up with a lot of .js (JavaScript) or .jsx (JavaScript with React extension) files. Unless you properly ignore them, they’ll end up cluttering your Visual Studio solution, and even git. As these are, in that case, generated files and essentially build artifacts, you will most likely not want to commit them to your code repository. They’ll get recreated during the build anyway and are more ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to fix jarringly jagged text in Windows? July 11, 2023
    This article explains one simple fix to all your text appearing wonky, with jagged and somehow oddly fuzzy edges in Windows. The guide is written for Windows 10 (because that’s the only modern OS that natively supports taskbar being docked on the side of the screen), but it probably applies for Windows 11 as well. Background As we all know, it’s not your computer. You might pay for the hardware, and might even have a subscription to ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to update the TTL for all A records in a zone at once in Azure? July 4, 2023
    Every now and then there comes a time when you need to fiddle with DNS. It’s not that you want to do it, but sometimes you just can’t avoid it. This article explains a convenient way of using PowerShell to apply a change for all A records (these are essentially host names) in a zone (which you could usually simply call a domain). Applying changes like this programmatically enables you to automate them as a ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to add AdditionalHeaders to Invoke-PnPGraphMethod? June 27, 2023
    This article explains how to easily add additional headers to the Graph API calls you make in PowerShell using Invoke-PnPGraphMethod commandlet. There’s a convenient sample for you to copy-paste and some basic explanations on what we’re doing below. Background Every now and then, I need to make some Graph API calls from PowerShell. And there’s a convenient PowerShell commandlet available to make it easy to do just that – Invoke-PnPGraphMethod. But to make some of the calls successful, ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to iterate through a collection of items in a Parallel Foreach loop in PowerShell? June 20, 2023
    That’s a mouthful, right? But yeah – this article shows and tells how to do a parallel foreach loop in PowerShell, and how to do it properly! Well, at least probably. This is how I did it anyway. But that’s enough chitchat, let’s get to it! Background In PowerShell, you can iterate through objects with a ForEach-Object loop like this: # Create an array of integers$items = 1..10# Iterate through the items in the array$items | ForEach-Object { ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to fix “yo : The term ‘yo’ is not recognized as the name of a cmdlet, function, script file, or operable program.” error? June 13, 2023
    This article explains what to do to get rid of an error that SEEMS simple to fix but might turn out to be elusive, namely, “The term ‘yo’ is not recognized as the name of a cmdlet, function, script file, or operable program. Check the spelling of the name, or if a path was included, verify that the path is correct and try again.” Sounds simple, right? It might be. Read on to find out how ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to re-enable Bluetooth on your Windows device June 6, 2023
    This article explains (one way) how to re-enable Bluetooth on your Windows laptop, in case Windows has just forgotten you have a Bluetooth adapter in your pc. Which would be weird because I don’t think any pcs ship without, anymore. Even Raspberry Pis have come with Bluetooth for years now. Anyway… What was the problem again? Problem So I first noticed something was off when my headset cut a Korean drama I was watching while hacking together ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • “Something happened on our end” on Microsoft Store May 30, 2023
    This article explains how to make your Microsoft Store (the app distribution channel on Windows – the one that’s supposed to distribute apps reliably and keep them up-to-date) work after it has suddenly stopped updating or installing any apps with a very non-descriptive error – “Something happened on our end”. Background The error message – “Something happened on our end” – is a typical error message. It doesn’t tell you much, and the little it does, it ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to fix OnePlus 10 Pro Bluetooth issues May 23, 2023
    In a bit different news, this time I’m sharing my preferred Bluetooth configuration that makes using headphones (or are they called “earpods” now?) bearable. It’s required some experimentation, but I did finally find a combination that doesn’t cause the audio to be laggy or janky. Problem For over a year, I had OnePlus 9 Pro. It always felt a bit sluggish, but the user experience was still something I could live with. It certainly did not feel ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to actually uninstall conflicting PowerShell modules? May 16, 2023
    This article explains how to resolve “Import-Module: Assembly with same name is already loaded” error in PowerShell (and a couple of related issues – old versions of the module being used, updating modules silently failing, uninstalling modules simply not doing anything…) Problem Different error messages you might get (obviously the same issue affects other modules and not just PnP PowerShell, but it’s the one I use often and the one that I ran into issues with. Obviously, you ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to enable Developer Mode on Android? May 9, 2023
    This article dives into Developer Mode on Android and explains how to actually enable it on your device. You might need to do this if your device’s factory defaults are stupid (like on my 2 last OnePlus phones), you need to debug an app on your phone or achieve some other somewhat advanced scenario. Background Enabling developer mode on Android is a straightforward process, but it’s essential to understand what you’re getting into. By activating it, you’re ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to include the whole certificate chain in your .cer, .crt or .pem certificate file? May 2, 2023
    Haha, another one of those “should’ve known it was this easy” in the books! This article explains how to include the whole certificate chain (so your “user certificate” with all the “intermediary certificates” and optionally, but not as recommended, the root certificate) in your PEM-formatted certificate. Because sometimes you just need to combine 5 certificates you’ve just successfully stolen from your own website using a script! Background You might have already guessed it, but yes, I’m still ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to avoid sed in GitHub Actions removing spaces from your script steps? April 25, 2023
    This article explains how to replace double quotes in string literal when replacing stuff in GitHub Actions using sed. Or rather, how to replace stuff with double quotes in it in GitHub Actions overall. Because it’s not as straightforward as one would think. Or maybe I’m missing something obvious here? Either way, here’s another thoughtful workaround! Background A while back I was setting up a pipeline to build my MAUI app, push it to the App Center and automatically ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to fix “MSB4044: The AndroidSignPackage task was not given a value for the required parameter KeyPass April 18, 2023
    This article explains a quick fix to an error along the lines of “AndroidSignPackage” task was not given a value for the required parameter “KeyPass”. In my case the issue occurred in a GitHub Actions pipeline, but you could get it in Azure DevOps or even when running the build command locally. Problem So when you’re trying to publish an Android package, either locally or in a pipeline, you’ll get an error like this: error MSB4044: The "AndroidSignPackage" ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to set Window size for your MAUI app in Windows? April 11, 2023
    This article shows you how to set a window size for a MAUI app on Windows. This is super useful for debugging – in my case, I wanted to retain a fast development cycle with lightweight debugging to work on my code quickly, but still see everything in roughly the right aspect ratio for my typical end-user device – an Android smartphone. But using the emulator for this was not usable, as it’s comparably slow. And of ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to fix “System.InvalidOperationException: The property ‘ItemBody.AdditionalData’ could not be mapped because it is of type ‘IDictionary’, which is not a supported primitive type or a valid entity type. Either explicitly map this property, or ignore it using the ‘[NotMapped]’ attribute or by using ‘EntityTypeBuilder.Ignore’ in ‘OnModelCreating’.” in .NET 7 and Entity Framework? April 4, 2023
    Oof. What even is this title? Descriptive – sure, maybe – but also kinda long. Ah, okay. This article explains how to map complex data types to a SQL database when using Entity Framework. This time, I’m using Fluent API to do this. In my case, I just needed to store entities that I got from external source, based on entities coming from a dependency, into my service’s database. That means I couldn’t do anything about ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • Automatically get version number from project dependencies in Azure DevOps March 28, 2023
    This article expands on my earlier article on automatically figuring out versioning in an Azure DevOps Pipeline. In the other article, you’d add Major and Minor versions as variables, and Patch (the last part of an x.y.z version scheme) would be incremented automatically. In this one, I’m describing how to get Major and Minor from the dependencies of your project – this will be incredibly convenient, if you’re, for example, publishing Docker images, NPM or NuGet ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • Solving “AADSTS90097: An error has occurred during admin consent processing.” issues in your app March 21, 2023
    This article explains how to fix “AADSTS90097: An error has occurred during admin consent processing.” (or like the error message is actually worded – “occurred”, which to me looks like a typo, but at least makes this easier to google. I mean – bing. Those are both verbs now until we all just start asking Tay our techy questions and get back definitely-not-hallucinated answers. Ah. Anyway. We should also be able to fix “AADSTS900971 – No ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to fix your MAUI Blazor app crashing on startup with “Failed to compare two elements in the array.” ? March 14, 2023
    This article explains how to fix your Blazor Hybrid MAUI application (built with Blazor Webassembly, using MAUI to build & publish for multiple different platforms like Windows, Android and iOS at once) not starting up, but throwing an unexpected error instead, an error message being somewhat along the lines of “Failed to compare two elements in the array.” What fun, right? Problem Okay, so it’s pretty frustrating: your app won’t start, no breakpoints will be hit, nothing ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to build a functional CI/CD pipeline for a MAUI app on GitHub in less than 1 hour? March 7, 2023
    Unlike most of my articles, this one isn’t a description of an issue I had and the workaround or fix that I found. This time, I’m writing about something I found fun and pretty impressive – a fully functional continuous integration and deployment pipeline from a git repository all the way to your Android handsets, set up in less than an hour, using GitHub Actions and App Visual Studio App Center. Background I suppose the title could’ve ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to solve “System.TypeInitializationException: ‘The type initializer for ‘WinRT.ActivationFactory`1’ threw an exception.'” in the MAUI application? February 28, 2023
    … or “How to bang your head on a wall for hours on end when developing a MAUI application?” 😂 This article explains how to fix a surprising error you might get when trying to run a MAUI app in Windows. For me, it was thrown when I was simply reading a file from the disk, but I suspect the same or similar error (“System.TypeInitializationException: ‘The type initializer for ‘WinRT.ActivationFactory`1′ threw an exception.’ – COMException: ClassFactory ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How do Airthings sensors work with Home Assistant? February 21, 2023
    This article describes some of my experiences with Airthings air quality sensors, especially when used with Home Assistant. I’m using a couple of sensors to keep an especially close eye on CO2, Radon and air pressure, in addition to temperature and humidity (which I already have plenty of Sonoff sensors for). As a nice bonus, both sensors I got also monitor VOCs. Background I have an older house, so I was fairly certain it has some air ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to read and write files in a MAUI application? February 14, 2023
    This article explains how to read and write files in a MAUI application. No, not AppPackageFiles, nobody likes those, but actual NORMAL files. Real files. Dynamic files. Files that can change. Runtime files. I don’t know what to call them. But I hope you get the idea. Someone needs to document this stuff for other people only now starting with MAUI, right? 😀 Background Lately, I’ve been playing around with MAUI a bit. You run into all kinds ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to fix “There was no runtime pack for Microsoft.AspNetCore.App available for the specified RuntimeIdentifier…” after a Visual Studio update? February 7, 2023
    This article offers a stupid workaround for a cryptic and seemingly unrecoverable problem that manifests itself after a Visual Studio / .NET update and causes the following error to be thrown: “There was no runtime pack for Microsoft.AspNetCore.App available for the specified RuntimeIdentifier ‘browser-wasm’.” Sorry, no real solution here – but at least I’ve got a way to recover from the issue. So read on if you stumbled into it as well! Problem The error I ran into ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • Fixing “Encountered error while fetching the list of EventHub PartitionIds.” with an IoTHub trigger in Azure Functions January 31, 2023
    This article explains how to (possibly) fix an error along the lines of “Encountered error while fetching the list of EventHub PartitionIds” which is thrown by your Azure Function (or other code) trying to trigger based on IoT Hub or Event Hub messages. Problem When trying to debug or run your Azure Function (or, theoretically, some other code attaching itself to an EventHub or IoTHub to listen to messages), you get an error somewhat like this: Microsoft.Azure.EventHubs.Processor: Encountered ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to fix disconnected Sonoff Zigbee sensors in Home Assistant? January 24, 2023
    This article explains how to fix and reconnect Sonoff Zigbee sensors in Home Assistant, after they have mystically disconnected themselves. The neatness of this solution is that while the eWelink app will assign your sensors a new device id any time you have to re-register them, this approach lets you use the same entity id you had for them before you had to reconfigure them. They don’t unfortunately retain their historical values (through the UI anyway), but ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to fix all UWP/WinUI apps being laggy in Windows 10/11? January 17, 2023
    This article explains one way to fix a horribly laggy desktop user experience in Windows 10 (and probably 11) when your laptop is beefy enough it should not lag and even has a dedicated NVIDIA Graphics card. At least applying this fix is going to be quite straightforward – but let me first explain the issue I experienced and what it was actually like. Background I have a Dell XPS 15 9510 – a pretty beefy ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to export the SSL (or TLS) certificate from a website using PowerShell? January 10, 2023
    Every now and then, you run into a situation where you might need an SSL (or TLS, as they nowadays usually actually are) certificate. You could always generate a self-signed one – but that won’t be trusted by anyone, so that’s no bueno. You could also order one online, even for free – but that’s kind of cumbersome, and might come with some weird verification steps. Sounds quite bothersome. Most of the time, it’s easiest to ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • 2022 Year Review – Stop Caring & Just Enjoy The Ride! January 3, 2023
    2022 is over, and it’s high time to write the annual Year Review again. The ongoing pandemic and the 3rd World War on my doorstep have made me a little bit cynical, but in all fairness, the year was not all bad. Last year, I promised a new article every Tuesday in 2022. I think I’ve just managed that, as long as this one actually goes out in time… But that’s enough of that, what was up ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to replace the default fake “ACME” certificate for Kubernetes/AKS? December 27, 2022
    A while back I got a request to change the default certificate for an AKS cluster. A customer didn’t like the “Kubernetes Fake Certificate” that’s shown when no other matching certificates can be found, and they wanted it changed. So yours truly started googling, and as a result, this article explains how to do just that! Background The customer didn’t invent this requirement out of thin air. The certificate does expose one important piece of information – that ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to export the private key from your Certificate Signing Request on Windows? December 20, 2022
    This article explains another small but significant gotcha you “just need to know” when working with certificates and certification authorities, and you – just like me – are for some reason still using Windows as your workhorse. I’ll go through how to export the private key that has been stored on your machine when you generated a Certificate Signing Request (or a “Certificate Enrollment Request” if you’re speaking Contosoan”) to get someone to issue you ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • Working YAML sample of a remote repository CI trigger in Azure DevOps December 13, 2022
    It took me something like 10 years of struggling to get remote triggers to finally fire in Azure DevOps, and in this article, I’ll share how I finally got the remote repository trigger to work for an actual Team Project in real production use (and that’s a first!) 😃 Okay, I know, that’s a bit rich – they’ve been supported for maybe a few years, so there’s no way I’ve been struggling with remote triggers for ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • winrm complaining “Error: Invalid use of command line.” – easy fix :) December 6, 2022
    Heh, this article is going to be another one of those “Drat, I should’ve known this” articles. But maybe it’ll be helpful for someone else as well! In this post I will explain how to get around the “Error: Invalid use of command line. Type “winrm -?” for help.” error being thrown at you. And if you’re like me (and your error is the same as mine), you’ll mostly get to blame yourself for ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to apply a .dotx template to your existing Word files (.docx)? November 29, 2022
    This article explains how you can apply formatting and styles from a Microsoft Office Word Document Template (.dotx) to your already existing Word Document (.docx). You might want to do this if you’ve got a file with plenty of content, especially if it’s stuff that might break when copy-pasting (embedded media, pictures with text around them, table of contents, references – actually, anything else than just normal paragraphs). Took me a while, but this article documents ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • Using openssl to verify a certificate matches a private key November 22, 2022
    This post explains how to verify a private key (possibly a .key file) that you somehow got your hands on, that matches a certificate file (.cer) you also somehow are in possession of. I have no idea where I got mine, but I had to figure out how to make sure a key and a certificate matched before I uploaded mine to AKS (Azure Kubernetes Service). Problem This is yet another article where I document how to ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to avoid global.json version conflicts in Azure DevOps November 15, 2022
    In Azure DevOps, you sometimes have a project that’s being built with a certain .NET version. It’ll require that particular SDK version, and most typically that is defined in the global.json file. However, if you also need to install a certain .NET tool, running dotnet tool install MyBuildTool will fail. And it’ll fail before it actually tries to install the version of the tool you wanted! This article explains how to work around the .NET version conflicts ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to fix Azure DevOps “Variable reference is not valid. ‘:’ was not followed by a valid variable name character. Consider using ${} to delimit the name” November 8, 2022
    This article explains one possible reason why you might run into an error like “Variable reference is not valid. ‘:’ was not followed by a valid variable name character. Consider using ${} to delimit the name” when using a PowerShell task in an Azure DevOps pipeline. But hey – at least Azure DevOps is helpful enough to point out the line that causes trouble, right? Not so fast. Confusingly, the offending line might be this: Write-Host ('##vso$LASTEXITCODE: ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • Hacktoberfest 2022 November 1, 2022
    … And that’s a wrap! This year I had the chance, and the privilege to once again participate in the month-long celebration of open-source, Hacktoberfest. And unlike last year, I took the time to write about the experience again! And for someone like me, who doesn’t really do much open-source stuff, it is a bit of an experience. And the event itself has come a long way! 2022: Hacktoberfest has matured A few years back, there was quite ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • Azure DevOps fails with “Error: The path ‘/home/vsts/work/1/s/your-repo’ does not exist” even though the repository is there for sure? October 25, 2022
    Eh, this was a weird one. This article explains how to get around an issue where your build tools fail due to weird “path does not exist” errors when you’re using bash to execute a restore to your project. The build would probably succeed nicely, but it fails due to missing dependencies – in my case, at least the whole node_modules folder was missing. And of course, it is – the restore failed, after ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • One way to fix “Unsupported or invalid query filter clause specified for property” for your Microsoft Graph API queries October 18, 2022
    This article explains one possible fix to an annoyingly generic exception thrown by the Microsoft Graph API (namely, “Unsupported or invalid query filter clause specified for property”) or an even more generic exception thrown by PnP PowerShell (“Exception of type ‘PnP.PowerShell.Commands.Model.Graph.GraphException’ was thrown.”) when you’re trying to query Graph API with what’s called “Advanced query capabilities” (operators like less than or equal, greater than or equal) instead of just checking if something is equal. I ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • Why do you get a “Missing closing ‘)’ in expression.” error when piping a collection to a for loop in PowerShell? October 11, 2022
    Today, I’m writing about a stupid error. Yeah, I do make those every now and then. After adding a for loop to my PowerShell script, I started to get annoying ParserErrors about my for loop missing a closing bracket. But it was NOT missing one – what gives? Problem So, what I was trying to do was to concatenate a kinda random collection of strings after the first few items. I was going to iterate through the strings ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to configure your Smart Home wifi devices that fail to connect due to a weak wifi signal? October 4, 2022
    This article describes a solution to a problem that I have had with pairing different Smart Home devices with my app or some cloud service using wifi. Weirdly, wifi can be strong enough to provide connectivity to any of the devices, but weak enough for the pairing to fail. Fun stuff. You can usually just move the devices closer to your router, but with some devices that might be a bit more complicated… But as usual, workarounds exist! Background First, ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to import an Azure DevOps Git repository… From another Azure DevOps organization? September 27, 2022
    A while ago, I needed to move an Azure DevOps Git repository from one organization to another. And that was far easier than I thought. For once, a nice surprise from Git _and_ Azure DevOps 😀 So, let me tell you how that’s done! Well, how it’s done if it goes well, anyway. And if still works as it used to when you’re reading this. We’ll see! Solution Time needed: 5 minutes. How to move an Azure DevOps repository ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to fix NU3028 and NU3037 errors in Azure DevOps builds? September 20, 2022
    This article explains a solution to a rather annoying issue, where certificate validation for builds trying to fetch NuGet packages published by Microsoft fails when using .NET 5. This happens at least with Docker build when you’re relying on some Microsoft-provided images… But probably also in a lot of other cases. Problem When running an Azure DevOps pipeline with any task that does any Docker stuff, your build fails. Or if you’ve configured your build differently, perhaps ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to kill the process causing the “MSB3021 Unable to copy file — The process cannot access the file because it is being used by another process.” error? September 13, 2022
    This time, we’re taking a look at an annoying situation where your previous debugging session, or perhaps your dotnet serve, somehow locks up your dlls or other important files that you kind of need to overwrite when rebuilding. And that, well, causes your build or debugging session to fail. So, let’s take a closer look at the actual errors we’ve run ourselves into! Problem Build complains about retrying something and failing afterward, and something like this is either in ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to replace and reload application settings changes in .NET? September 6, 2022
    This article explains a curious workaround that I figured out. In case you need a way to force app setting changes to be reflected in some libraries you need in your application, even if they don’t support any configuration after application startup. Problem Normally, a .NET application loads the configuration – environment variables, appsettings.json files, wherever your secrets come from, and all the other good stuff – when it’s started, and it’s good with that. If you’re ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to store a complex object as JSON in a PostgreSQL database using Entity Framework (Npgsql)? August 30, 2022
    Okay, that’s a title and a half. But let’s see – what are we actually doing and why? In my particular case, I had to store a Dictionary<string, string> in a Postgres database. By default, that’s not something Entity Framework handles. But as usual, there’s a way around that – and the same concept we’ll take a look at below should work for other complex data types or objects too! Solution Okay, so let’s jump into it! Here’s what ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to configure FQDN on a workgroup computer? August 23, 2022
    My ASUS AC-68U requires an external server with a Fully-Qualified Domain Name for any logging to be persisted beyond a reboot of the router. And since the router regularly needs rebooting (and will usually just automatically reboot if any errors are encountered), logging errors without them being persisted after a reboot is pretty useless. So, a computer with an FQDN I’ll need. But I don’t have a domain for my computers at home, so I don’t ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • ASUS AiMesh tips and tricks August 16, 2022
    This post is meant to gather my tips and tricks for surviving life with ASUS AiMesh wifi routers. Draw on my experience so that your life would be easier :) A quick word of advice before you proceed, though: you’ll save yourself from a lot of trouble by buying actual networking gear instead of this flea market discount garden-variety rubbish. I got my ASUS AiMesh routers (RT-AC68U, RT-AC66U B1, and RT-AC1750) at a deeply discounted price, ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to use Microsoft.Online.SharePoint.PowerShell with PowerShell 7? August 9, 2022
    This article explains an annoying extra step (or a really nifty trick – depending on how you choose to look at it!) that you can take to make sure your PowerShell 7 is able to import a module that was developed for .NET Framework, instead of .NET Core. This is super helpful when you run into weirdness with some of the more, let’s call them CLASSICAL, PowerShell modules. Such as Microsoft.Online.SharePoint.PowerShell. Problem I use PowerShell 7 as the ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to fix “The website does not support SharePoint Online credentials. The response status code is ‘Unauthorized'” August 4, 2022
    Whilst running some SharePoint Online PowerShell commandlets, or connecting to a SharePoint Online site from your app, you get the following (or similar) error about your SharePoint Online credentials being unauthorized for something you should definitely be authorized to do: Cannot contact web site ‘https://-admin.sharepoint.com/’ or the web site does not support SharePoint Online credentials. The response status code is ‘Unauthorized’. And that’s not all – by digging into the full error message, you find the ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to refresh all Az CLI subscriptions? August 2, 2022
    This article explains how to “reactivate” all of your accounts stored in your az account by refreshing your sessions. You might need this if you suddenly run into a script that needs to iterate all of your subscriptions without you being there to sign in to each one of them. Having a recently active session for each will help, and you can run your massive script unattended overnight or something like that :) But let’s take ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to fix another weird Entity Framework Core dependency issue? July 26, 2022
    Okay – so that’s a non-descriptive title if I’ve ever written one – I apologize for that! I just couldn’t figure out a way to shorten the error when “Microsoft.AspNetCore.Diagnostics.EntityFrameworkCore” is referencing “Microsoft.AspNetCore.Http.Abstractions”, and even though you’re not referencing that dependency directly, you get an error where you have both 3.x and 5.x or 6.x major versions of the assembly in use. Which, in layman’s terms, is no good. What a weird case – not something ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to CTRL+ALT+DEL into RDP? July 19, 2022
    This is going to be another one of those really quick and short reminders to myself. I don’t use remote desktop connections that much, when I occasionally need to – and the computer asks me to press Control, Alt, and Delete for whatever reason, I’ll just hit them and bring up the stupid system screen on my own laptop. Yes, apparently I’m that guy. Anyway, let’s… Uh.. Get to it, then? How to CTRL+ALT+DEL into your RDP window ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to roll back an Azure IoT Edge layered deployment? July 12, 2022
    Have you ever wondered how you could roll back the latest layered Azure IoT Edge deployment? I have – it’s actually pretty useful. But what for? Well, perhaps it’s useful as the last step or whatever interesting Azure DevOps pipelines you have to deploy changes to an Edge device, run tests, and then remove the deployment. You could possibly have it as an optional parameter in case you want to do a dry run for the ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to get a free Office 365 Developer tenant? July 5, 2022
    In this article, I am pretty much just sharing one link – the one, where you can request a new free Office 365 Developer subscription. And while I’m not sure if anyone else ever needs to google for this, I am actually quite comfortable just documenting it for myself. Just like all of the other blog posts, really :) See, this is a thing I struggle with, because: I tend to need it often enough that I ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • Azure IoT Edge order of deployment operations June 28, 2022
    This article tries to bridge a gap in Microsoft’s documentation for the Azure IoT Edge deployment model. Namely – all different ways to deploy modules or module configurations to your Azure IoT Edge devices, and which takes precedence over which. Problem The documentation for Azure IoT Edge is surprisingly immature. As you go about your first projects, you will run into all kinds of gaps. One of the things I ran into that definitely required some clarification ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to configure Azure IoT Edge deployments in Azure DevOps pipeline? June 21, 2022
    So some time ago, I needed to configure my first Azure DevOps pipeline for an Azure IoT Edge project. I needed to figure out which tasks to use, how to handle variables – all that good stuff. And let’s call it a learning experience. Pro tip: AzureIoTEdge task is not the way to go :) This article has actually been more than a year in the making, but as usual, it takes me a while to get ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to fix “This file does not have an app associated with it for performing this action” in Windows 10/11? June 14, 2022
    Another fun Windows-related debugging article! This time, I had to dive in to find a fix to an error along the lines of “This file does not have an app associated with it for performing this action.” constantly popping up on my Windows 10 workstation. While I had this error constantly popping up, the same fixes should apply to the situation when the error only comes up when you’re actually trying to open a file. Problem The error ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to fix Visual Studio throwing a “This syntax requires an imported helper named ‘__spreadArray’ which does not exist in ‘tslib’. Consider upgrading your version of ‘tslib’. June 7, 2022
    This one is something that I keep running into. Visual Studio just throws an error for a missing helper __spreadArray in a library that you didn’t even know you had installed, and you’re not sure if it should – or even can – be updated. I guess Visual Studio just refuses to give me a break :) But like with so many different issues, there are multiple fixes available! Problem So when trying to build your solution or ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to fix “The listener for function was unable to start. Out of retries creating lease for partition 0” May 31, 2022
    Here is another pretty quick one – trying to debug Azure Functions fails with a confusing error message about failing to create a lease for a partition. But as usual, the fix is (probably) simple, and this article explains what to do :) So, hey future me, finding this article on Google! 🙋‍♂️ Let’s get to it, then! Problem When trying to debug your Azure Function, you get an error somewhat like this: The listener for function was ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • Using role claims to target WebSockets May 24, 2022
    This article explains a (fairly) simple solution on how you can grab role claims – or any other claims with some tweaking – and use them as the basis for targeting your WebSocket messages. Very nifty, if you ask me, without all the enterprisiness of SignalR. Talking about SignalR, another way to implement pretty much the same thing, but with all of the enterprisey goodness of SignalR, is described in this blog post: How to access claims ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • The simplest fixes to “500 (Internal Server Error)” from Azurite May 17, 2022
    This quick blog post explains a couple of very simple fixes – essentially, user errors – to a simple problem that you might run into with Visual Studio when developing the latest of your cool Azure bits. Well, to be fair, a few simple fixes and one heavyweight. A final ditch effort to learn to live with Azurite. But we’ll get to it. So, let’s embark on a journey, to try and make some sense ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to solve “Npgsql: 42883: function create_hypertable(…) does not exist”? May 10, 2022
    Have you run into this puzzling error? It comes in a couple of flavors, but it boils down to you failing miserably when you run the create_hypertable() function on your PostgreSQL TimescaleDB database server! Annoyingly, it might mean that the whole function is missing (extension is not installed or loaded) or that your parameters are not properly parsed (an issue with your command). I know, that it sucks. I have been there. That’s why I wrote ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to configure Azure PostgreSQL to allow Cloud Shell connections? May 3, 2022
    I was setting up a PostgreSQL database in Azure, to be used by a cutesy little Azure Function storing telemetry from a bunch of Azure IoT Edge Devices. But when everything was (supposed to be) configured successfully, my Azure Function failed to store anything anywhere because of a missing database… Oh, right. Entity Framework can’t create PostgreSQL databases, as the connection is made to an existing database – so it can’t be instantiated if the database ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • Solving “invalid reference format.” when trying to run almost any docker commands April 26, 2022
    So another simple one. (I just seem to run into all of the issues whenever I try to do the simplest thing with Docker!) Or with anything, I guess – but yeah, that’s another article then. This time about any docker commands failing (no matter what command and with what arguments!) Problem I was trying to run a Docker container called Syslog-ng, and had to add quite a few parameters in order to map the volumes and ports ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • Joining the Omnia team! April 19, 2022
    Exciting news right after the Easter break (and a bit of a change from the usual flow of technical stuff) – I’ve joined the Omnia team at Precio Fishbone. Over the last 12 months, I have been working mostly on Azure IoT projects and was already debating renaming the blog. The title #SharePointProblems matches the content poorly when most of my new posts are about Docker, Azure DevOps, or Entity Framework. But to those of you worrying ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • Upgrade from WSL 1 to WSL 2 in Windows 10 to fix Docker April 12, 2022
    Okay – another one of the topics that I’m explaining probably more to myself than whoever’s reading this later. But that’s why I write this blog, so please bear with me. 🙂 Anyway, onto the actual issue at hand! I was configuring Docker on WSL on my Windows laptop for development purposes. That’s supposed to be easy – install WSL, install a distribution, install Docker, switch it to using WSL, fire up your WSL command prompt and ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • Azure DevOps incoming webhook just won’t fire? Easy (stupid) fix! April 5, 2022
    This article documents a simple but annoying fix to an issue with Azure DevOps. In this particular case, an incoming webhook (configured as a service connection) would fail to fire, no matter what. It turns out that it’s a bug in Azure DevOps – who would have thought :) Luckily, there’s a fairly simple workaround available! Problem A colleague was configuring a new pipeline in Azure DevOps. It was supposed to fire based on an external webhook that ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to fix Graph API returning null properties for Users? March 29, 2022
    This article explains a quick fix to a small but annoying issue: Microsoft Graph API SDK persistently returning null values for most properties of your Microsoft.Graph.User objects. The issue might happen when using either the Graph API SDK or just calling the REST API directly. Both options are entirely acceptable, and in both cases, you’re not getting the properties you wanted. Well, I wasn’t, anyway. Problem The other day, I was developing a thingie that needed to fetch ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to get your Azure IoT Edge runtime to use port 443 instead of using 5671 and 8883? March 22, 2022
    Are you struggling with your Azure IoT Edge modules not receiving your Direct Method calls? Is EdgeHub reporting transient network issues? Are you seeing “Could not connect to your IoT hub: could not complete TLS handshake” errors? Are your modules experiencing constant 104 errors (connection reset by peer)? Fear not! This article explains how to fix them. Kind of. Problem We were experiencing some major issues with our customer’s Edge devices. Direct Method calls would mostly not go ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to copy dependent assemblies to the bin folder on build? March 15, 2022
    This is something that comes up pretty often – when you’re building an application, or maybe a library you’re sharing as a NuGet package to your friends: You’ll need to share a dependency or two with your particular package, and you don’t want your end users having to reference those libraries, too. Sounds easy, right? But alas, it’s not as simple as one would like :) (Well, unless you’re happy running dotnet publish every time – that ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • “Unable to retrieve IoT Edge informationIoT Edge configuration uses an unsupported schema and cannot be displayed.” after deploying from VS Code. What do? March 15, 2022
    This article explains a couple of steps you might need to take when executing a Single-Device deployment from Visual Studio Code to an Azure IoT Edge device. Through a bit of trial and error, I learned quite a few things that might go wrong when VSCode is building your deployment manifest (the one that’ll be hosted under “config” folder and used for the deployment – that is). Background So a while ago, I was updating the base ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • Azure Functions suddenly throwing CORS errors when ran locally? Easy fix(es)! March 1, 2022
    In this article, I’m listing the quick fixes to your Azure Functions suddenly throwing seemingly random and very unexpected CORS errors. I have run into this so many times that I had to list these (admittedly simple) fixes in order of importance purely for myself – but perhaps some of these will help you as well! 😁 CORS issues can be frustrating but the issue is usually, simple to fix – as long as you know ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to install IIS (Internet Information Services) on Windows 10? February 27, 2022
    It’s the roaring twenties again, cloud is the hot stuff, and nobody needs a server anymore. Right? Nope! I’ve been involved in more on-prem or hybrid projects in the last 12 months than in the last 3-4 years combined. There are plenty of industries and valid uses for still setting up on-prem servers. And quite often, that includes setting up IIS (Internet Information Services) on said machines. And of course, there’s the classic use case – local ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to move the Home Assistant SQLite database in Docker on Windows? February 22, 2022
    This article explains how you can move your Home Assistant’s SQLite database files to another location by mapping them to another volume in Docker. Using Docker on Windows. Which might not be a smart move, but it’s one I went with anyway. The article will explain how to do this with docker-compose, but the steps pretty much apply to vanilla docker as well. With that said – let’s move on! Background Like so many times before, I was ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • Groups-based authorization in Blazor WebAssembly February 15, 2022
    This article will take a look at a neat authorization option for Blazor WebAssembly – utilizing group memberships when defining policies. This isn’t a tutorial or an overview of Blazor – rather, we start from you already having your Blazor WebAssembly project set up, and we’ll be taking a look into modifying it to use group membership claims with policy-based authorization. This is a bit trickier than using roles, which Blazor WebAssembly already supports quite ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • Azure IoT Edge gotchas – and how to overcome them! February 8, 2022
    This article describes the gotchas and weird one-offs that I’ve encountered with Azure IoT Edge so far. Consider them not-too-thoroughly tested quick fixes that aren’t significant enough to warrant an actual blog post themselves :) Okay – let’s get to them gotchas, then! Random learnings from Azure IoT Edge projects How do you define a Target Condition for your layered deployments? See the sample below:az iot edge deployment create -d 'unique-deployment-name' -n 'iot-hub-name' --content 'path-to-your-layered-deployment-manifest-file.json' --layered --target-condition "tags.location='stockholm'" ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to fix “Cannot start service edgeHubDev: Ports are not available: listen tcp 0.0.0.0:8883” February 1, 2022
    Here is another fun one for the books! In this article, I will explain how to fix a problem with the Azure IoT Edge dev simulator, when it fails to start due to an underlying problem with Docker not having access to your defined ports. This will probably happen to one of the ports used by the Edge Hub system module by default – 5671, 8883, or 443. Problem So, when you’re trying to run an Azure ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to fix “exec user process caused: no such file or directory” in Docker on Windows? January 27, 2022
    Another one in the series of “random things that break when you try to run Docker on Windows”! I was just minding my own business, trying to run an Azure IoT Edge custom module – a Docker container, really – locally, when suddenly everything broke and one of my Docker containers wouldn’t run anymore, which broke the rest of my stuff pretty badly. Instead, it failed with a cryptic and surprising error “exec user process caused: ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to run EF Core commands when your entities are in a different project from your dbcontext? January 25, 2022
    This article explains how to achieve that nice configuration where you can reuse your .NET EF Core (Entity Framework Core) entities in different projects – even being separate from the project holding your DbContexts! You might want to do this if you have a common data model between a number of very different projects – but you will still need to have a way to add new migrations, apply the current ones to a database ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to run SQL commands in a Postgre SQL Docker container? January 18, 2022
    This article will explain how to run your arbitrary SQL commands against a Postgre SQL database running in a Docker container in Windows. That should be super simple, but since I never remember anything like this by heart, I had to google it – and turns out, either I didn’t know how to google this properly or people haven’t bothered to document this. So, let’s fix that. But first, why did I need to do this, ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to modify CORS settings using a .htaccess file January 11, 2022
    Recently, I needed to host a web-based thingamajiggy in WordPress and needed to include a couple of custom libraries. For the sake of quick iteration, I decided to use a public FTP folder that I already had on the same server in order to host this. So I had configured a subdomain to host the files, and wanted to reference them from my WordPress site. Not quite a CDN, but something a little bit like that. Well, ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to solve Vmmem consuming ungodly amounts of RAM when running WSL? January 4, 2022
    This was another (luckily pretty shallow) rabbit hole down some corporate IT and weird default configurations by our favorite tech-daddy Microsoft. In this article, I will describe one possible reason for a process called Vmmem.exe consuming enough RAM to crash pretty much everything else running on your machine. But let’s take a step back first – what happened? Problem I was developing some Azure IoT Edge modules (as one does), when my dev laptop was starting to feel ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • 2021 – Year Review! December 31, 2021
    Well, it’s been a year. It certainly does not feel like it has been a whole 12 months since I last wrote one of these, you know? I failed every single one of the goals I set for 2021, but I’m not going to lie, family takes (and deserves) so much time that it is no wonder that our hobbies suffer a bit. But still – writing these year reviews has become a tradition, so without ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to fix “Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Storage: Server encountered an internal error. Please try again after some time.” when using IoTHub trigger for Azure Functions? December 20, 2021
    One more article before Christmas! 😁 This time, I’ll be fixing a function that’s triggering based on new messages received through my IoT Hub in my Azure Functions project. Technically speaking, this is super simple to implement – your function needs to define an IoTHubTrigger, with an Event Hub name and usually a Connection String (I don’t know why I’m Sentence Casing that, too, but I’ll stick to it!) You can tap a practically unlimited number ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to authenticate against npm registries in Azure DevOps? December 15, 2021
    Another one in the series of “this should’ve been easy, but alas, you’re the edge case”. “You” being “me”, and the “edge case” being our internal npm feed (registry), for whatever reason. Ah, well – life would be extremely boring if everything always went according to documentation, right? So, instead of the built-in ways to access npm feeds, this solution includes some PowerShell. Ah – that’s when you know it’s going to be good, right? When ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to test SignalR-connection in the browser? December 10, 2021
    So a while back I posted about testing your “vanilla” WebSockets connection directly in the browser – and while that’s nice and easy, sometimes you need to class up a bit. In my case that meant upgrading to SignalR (for some corporate and enterprisey reasons as usual). It makes sense to leave behind the easy, simple, lightweight and somewhat transparent WebSockets to “upgrade” to the enterprise-ready (and arguably quite a lot less transparent) SignalR? Well ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to access claims of a SignalR user in ASP.NET Core? December 7, 2021
    I tend to post a lot of articles about different gotchas and configuration tweaks, but this one goes back to the roots a bit – just me and a couple of other devs hacking some code together and being blocked by a bit of an obstacle, that’s then fixed by – you guessed it – writing niftier code. Or actually, I suppose it was more about removing some and adding some of the right stuff… But ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • Azure Function build fails with “Mono.Cecil.AssemblyResolutionException: Failed to resolve assembly: Microsoft.AspNetCore.Mvc.Core” December 1, 2021
    Another fun one with Azure Functions! At least it’s a simple one: this time, I ran into a weird issue while doing some code reusing – well, copy-pasting – between a couple of different projects. I was lovingly hand-crafting some Azure Functions, while suddenly the Azure Functions host would throw this in ugly red letters: Mono.Cecil.AssemblyResolutionException: Failed to resolve assembly: 'Microsoft.AspNetCore.Mvc.Core, Version=3.1.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=adb9793829ddae60' at Mono.Cecil.BaseAssemblyResolver.Resolve(AssemblyNameReference name, ReaderParameters parameters) at Mono.Cecil.BaseAssemblyResolver.Resolve(AssemblyNameReference name) ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to update from deprecated Microsoft.Azure.Services.AppAuthentication to new and shiny Azure.Security.KeyVaults.Secrets? November 23, 2021
    So, a while ago I posted about a fairly simple way to write your code for fetching secrets (and other confidential stuff) from Azure Key Vault in such a way, that it would work the same way both in Azure and on your local dev box. I find this pretty important, as it reduces the need for weird workarounds and fallbacks in your code, and at the same time enables you to harness the Azure ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • Fixing Blazor WebAssembly .NET 6 MSAL authorization bug November 16, 2021
    Let’s make this short and sweet. In this particular case, upgrading a Blazor WASM solution to .NET 6 broke the authentication when deployed to Azure. The same issue could probably happen to a fresh project, though. This is what you’re running into: If you open your browser console, you’ll see 2 interesting errors – first: dotnet.6.0.0.o2we6pverp.js:1 mono_wasm_runtime_ready login.microsoftonline.com/common/oauth2/v2.0/token:1 Failed to load resource: the server responded with a status of 400 (Bad Request) And a moment later, an error ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to nuke your Git(Hub) commit history? November 9, 2021
    Ah – this was a fun one. I needed to figure out how to purge, flush and clear your commit history on GitHub. Turns out it isn’t as easy as clicking a button in the web user interface – the world is apparently not ready yet! 😁 Luckily, it wasn’t that complicated either – and the steps should work for other flavors of git as well. Background Always remember to .gitignore your secrets, folks! And if you ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to fix “Unable to cast object of type ‘System.Net.Http.HttpRequestMessage’ to type ‘Microsoft.AspNetCore.Http.HttpRequest’.” November 2, 2021
    This article explains how to fix an issue where your Azure Functions function (yes, that’s a capital F and a lowercase f to denote the difference between the product and the piece of compute) fails to fire when a POST request comes in, even though it’s configured to do so, and instead throws a somewhat confusing error message about HttpRequestMessage not being castable to HttpRequest – even though you KNOW HttpRequestMessage works just fine for ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to authenticate against Azure Key Vault both in Azure and local development environment? October 26, 2021
    Azure Key Vault is great. But when developing locally, it can be a bit of a pain. You can always circumvent it and create some classical solution, such as simply wrapping all of your key/secret assignments in if-else-clauses that will use local configuration if you’re running locally and only call the Azure Key Vault if you’re in the cloud… But that feels so incredibly early-2000-ish. Isn’t there a better option available? I mean – obviously, there ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • System.Text.Json.JsonPropertyName not working for CosmosDb in .NET Core/5/6? October 19, 2021
    This article explains how to fix an annoying issue with Microsoft’s SDK for CosmosDb v3 – it comes with a Newtonsoft.Json dependency, that most of Microsoft’s recent packages have let go of. With .NET Core 3.1 having shipped with System.Text.Json included, and (mostly) replacing Newtonsoft.Json, it’s kind of the preferred option. However, CosmosDb v3 SDK doesn’t support it and by default requires you to use Newtonsoft.Json to override the property names, if you want to – ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • Errors loading an assembly that’s using Microsoft Graph API October 12, 2021
    Man, do I run into all kinds of issues with the smallest Azure Functions that I develop. And it’s mostly my fault. The silver lining is that you’re here to read this article, so you probably ran into this same stuff. Well – you should be happy to hear that this article describes fixes to a couple of issues – let’s see if they help you out as well! The article probably largely applies to any situation ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • ILogger binding suddenly failing for Azure Functions – what to do? October 5, 2021
    This article explains another fun issue that you might run into when developing Azure Functions in your local environment. It was weird how unclear the few results were that I could find. And the issue is just… very hazy in general. But I was able to track the issue down, and thought I’d document the solution :) It’s for myself, really, because I’m pretty sure I’ll run into this one again. But if you find it ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • “dotnet ef script” or “Script-Migration” producing empty .sql files? September 28, 2021
    Another day, another issue. This time, I was absent-mindedly following the guidance for a project on how to generate .sql files for .NET EF Core code-first migrations. Don’t ask why that was required, but it was. My migration was simple. Adding an entity with just a few properties. And Entity Framework created my programmatic migration just fine. But when generating the SQL file, I got nothing but an empty file. No matter what my startup project was, ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to fix a 403.18 in a virtual application? September 20, 2021
    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 a 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 ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • GitHub Action fails with “The GITHUB_TOKEN environment variable was not set” September 15, 2021
    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 environment variable was not set”. As a backstory: I have a long history with Azure DevOps, and have maintained a kind of a love-hate -relationship (that ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to download audio files from Vidyard September 7, 2021
    Today, I’m documenting a simple way to download audio files from Vidyard. This approach only works for files that aren’t password-protected or behind authentication – I don’t think you can use it easily for nefarious stuff, but just in case you’re trying to commit some kind of IP theft (intellectual property), please don’t. And definitely do not ask for instructions in the comments section :) Anyway – why did I take up this task? What did ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • Visual Studio Code fails when running “git pull” for a new project August 31, 2021
    This article describes a simple fix to an issue (well… One or many possible issues), where git fails to pull anything from remote, throwing instead an error somewhat like this: fatal: no such branch: 'master' Bah. This stops you from pulling any new changes from remote, and likewise, it will stop you from pushing your new stuff out there. Always something going wrong with git, right? But what is the reason this time exactly? Problem So there I was, just ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to form a parameterized SQL query to find duplicates in a table. August 24, 2021
    So one day, I needed to quickly check if an identity field in a view in a Microsoft SQL Server was actually unique or not. I was running into weird issues with Entity Framework throwing an error somewhat like this: Store update, insert, or delete statement affected an unexpected number of rows (2) Or somewhat like this: Type: DbUpdateConcurrencyExceptionStore update, insert, or delete statement affected an unexpected number of rows (). Entities may have been modified or ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to serialize to JSON in camelCase using .NET Core? August 17, 2021
    This article describes how to configure your .NET Core application to serialize objects in camelCase instead of PascalCase. I guess this is another quick note – something that should be simple, but I couldn’t remember how to do it from the top of my head, and the solution turned out to be a bit unintuitive. I guess that makes it worth documenting because I’ll definitely run into this again. Anyway – let’s take a closer look ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • Home Assistant – Quick and dirty fixes August 12, 2021
    This article documents the quick and dirty fixes and patches that I have 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! My favorite thoughtful workarounds to fix Home Assistant 🤠 What if my lovelace-weather-card-chart suddenly misses all charts? First, make ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to secure your WebSocket connection using .NET Core? August 10, 2021
    This article explains how to easily authenticate your WebSocket connections using .NET Core and vanilla JavaScript. The same concept probably applies to all sorts of front-end libraries, although some of them might offer some syntactic sugar on top of it. But it’s simple, and keeping your implementation simple is generally speaking a good idea. So – this one came up when developing a simple API that’d expose a WebSocket endpoint for seamless notifications to the Web ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • No way to renew a ClimaCell API subscription – what to do? August 5, 2021
    One day I suddenly realized that my Home Assistant’s ClimaCell integration had stopped working. That was weird – it had been running just fine for a while. I had signed up for a ClimaCell developer account at developer.tomorrow.io (or whatever the address was before rebranding from ClimaCell to Tomorrow.io – but this is the portal that I used) on the 28th of July, perhaps in 2020, or perhaps 2019. And it had worked brilliantly so far, but ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • HttpContext.WebSockets.IsWebSocketRequest always null in .NET Core? July 27, 2021
    This article explains another simple fix to an annoying issue. I guess that’s how I start most of my little tutorials, but hey, it’s true! I suppose I just have a knack for running into issues that come with poorly documented fixes or workarounds that are obvious but only in hindsight… Right? Anyway, this time my WebSocket requests were not being handled as such by my ASP.NET Controllers. “IsWebSocketRequest” was suggested by IntelliSense, but it would ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • Docker-compose fails on Windows with “Error while fetching server API version: (2, ‘CreateFile’, ‘The system cannot find the file specified.’)” July 20, 2021
    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, that would ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • Azure DevOps suddenly 404s for your project? Easy fix! July 13, 2021
    This article explains a quick solution to a pretty common Azure DevOps problem. Namely – random and annoying 404 (or sometimes 401) errors when trying to access your dear team projects. I forgot to take screenshots of the errors and couldn’t figure out how to reproduce them, but hey, the fix is the main point, right? 😀 If you’ve ended up on this page, you’ve probably encountered the issue already, so why would you care about ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to fix “Cannot read property ‘map’ of undefined (structured-data-blocks)” July 5, 2021
    So, once again, I find myself wasting time trying to fix WordPress. Though it is a powerful platform, it’s a never-ending source of grief when trying to maintain a site with a non-trivial number of plugins. Working with a static website creator would be much more fun, and there is a good chance that the site would stay up far more, but it would take considerable effort to set up Hugo or Gatsby – but ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to update application settings of an Azure Functions App in Azure DevOps Pipeline June 29, 2021
    This article aims to patch one annoying gap in Microsoft’s documentation: how, exactly, do you update Azure Function App’s application settings using an Azure DevOps build/release pipeline? It sounds easy, and something that should happen almost automatically – and for Azure Web Apps (or App Services, as they are often called) it IS practically automatic. But for Azure Functions, it isn’t. And the docs aren’t perfect. Let me try and fix that. Problem Azure Functions won’t take your ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to test a WebSocket connection in browser? June 22, 2021
    This article documents a neat and simple way to establish and test a WebSocket connection, using just vanilla JavaScript and your favorite browser’s developer tools. Quick and easy – no external tools or libraries required! This is neat because you don’t want to have your information (credentials, hostnames, or even test data) leaking to outsiders hosting the tools – and using any external tools can be a bit of a drag anyway! In the sample found ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • Azure DevOps throwing “Unexpected token < in JSON at position 4" June 17, 2021
    This article documents one of the simplest solutions to one of the simplest issues you might ever encounter with Azure DevOps. Still: it’s a pretty annoying one, and the solution – as simple as it is – seems worth documenting for the next time I’m googling this fervently as I’m afraid of losing my unsaved changes again… :) Essentially, your editor view in Azure DevOps times out and you risk losing any changes that you’ve made, ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to copy a table in Microsoft Word (Office app)? June 15, 2021
    This article will document a super simple solution to an infuriating and stupid issue you might run into in Microsoft Office Word. Or maybe you might not, but I did. Can you tell I’m just sharing my own pains and whatever I needed to google and didn’t find a solution for? Yeah, another one of these. But hey – maybe that’ll be useful to someone else, too! Problem Long story short – copy-pasting this: Becomes this: WHAT – that’s not ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to (easily) move data between SQL databases June 8, 2021
    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 ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to fix a Logic App deployment that failed with error “UsageConfigurationNotSupportedInSubscription”? May 31, 2021
    This article explains a quick and dirty fix when you get an error somewhat like this: “UsageConfigurationNotSupportedInSubscription” when you’re deploying an Azure Logic App from a template. The same fix will probably apply to a number of other issues – but don’t hold me accountable for this :) Anyway – on to the topic of the day! Problem Can you tell by some of my recent blog posts that I’ve been deploying a few Logic Apps recently? :) Today, ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to add an user or group to multiple Azure resources at once? May 25, 2021
    This article describes a solution to an age-old question of mine: how can I add an Azure Active Directory object – like a security group – to multiple resource groups at once? I’ve had to do this multiple times, and manual work takes quite a while. And who likes multiple manual steps? To be fair, this article could also be called something like: “Using Azure CLI to spend a lot of time unnecessarily complicating a mind-numbingly ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • Solving “Unable to find repository ‘https://www.powershellgallery.com/api/v2’.” May 17, 2021
    So, you’re running a PowerShell command that requires a connection to PowerShell gallery, but you run into an error message, somewhat like this: “Unable to find repository ‘https://www.powershellgallery.com/api/v2’. This can happen when you’re running something like Install-Module or Update-Module. This pretty much blocks you from doing anything that would require the use of new modules – so, quite a lot. Worth fixing, then. 😁 Problem The whole error message might be somewhat like this: PackageManagement\Install-Package : Unable to find ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to move your Microsoft PowerAutomate Flow to Logic Apps? May 10, 2021
    This article explains how you can export a Microsoft Power Automate Flow from, well, Microsoft Power Automate, and nicely and easily import it to Azure Logic Apps. I’ll explain the process step-by-step, and also explain solutions to a few hurdles you might run into! But first, let’s take a look at why you might want to consider taking this step in the first place, shall we? Why move to Logic Apps? Ah, a valid question. There are plenty ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • Resolving an incredibly pointless struggle with RCC May 4, 2021
    Okay, this might be my least general, and overall most pointless article ever, but I felt the need to document it anyway. Maybe it’ll help someone with a similar gadget, despite being a bit off-topic on this blog. Apologies to any regular visitors! So, what am I talking about, then? Recently I bought a radio-controlled projector clock as a gift for my wife. I reasoned that such a device would never require any fiddling with (due ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to force an outdated .NET project to use TLS 1.2? April 29, 2021
    This article explains a kind of weird fix to a pretty annoying issue with a legacy service. And I’m not just calling it legacy because it’s WCF – I’m calling it legacy because it’s old. The particular piece of software was developed about 7 years ago (2014-ish)! It had worked for quite a while – but now it was down. I know, I know – 2014 is not THAT old. There’s surely COBOL that’s been running ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to fix a Logic App deployment that failed with the error “ApiNotFound”? April 22, 2021
    This article explains a quick and dirty fix when you get an error somewhat like “ApiNotFound” when you’re deploying an Azure Logic App from a template. This seems to be a very typical hurdle to run into when you’re trying to deploy a PowerAutomate Flow you’ve exported. I guess despite being built on the same platform, Flow developers took some liberties and the migration is not quite as painless as one would hope… :) Anyway – ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • Experiment: DateTime formats April 21, 2021
    This article explains how to loop through all supported cultures on any given machine that’s able to run .NET. The code sample is in C# and outputs an HTML table you can copy – but obviously you can adapt it to your needs! This was something I needed to support some weird documentation task way back when – and it took me like a year to finish this blog post and push it out from ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to fix “LinkedAuthorizationFailed” when deploying an Azure Logic App? April 15, 2021
    This article explains one possible fix to “LinkedAuthorizationFailed” when you’re deploying a Logic App from an Azure Automation template. Maybe it’ll apply to other cases, too – but in my case, it helped me fix a broken template I had exported from Power Automate and was bringing into Logic Apps. Problem So, another fun issue to solve! The actual error you run into might be something along these lines: The client has permission to perform action 'Microsoft.Logic/integrationAccounts/join/action' on scope ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to fix a build configuration that’s not available as a build directive in Visual Studio? April 14, 2021
    This article describes how to fix and tweak your pre-build directives in Visual Studio – just in case they refuse to work properly. Because yeah, apparently that sometimes just randomly happens. But fear not – there’s a stupid and ugly, but definitely thoughtful workaround available! Also, sorry for the confusing title. I’m taking suggestions for a more descriptive one – but this one was kind of difficult to word clearly. Anyway – on to the topic of ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to access invisible packages in Azure DevOps artifact feed? April 8, 2021
    Let’s go with a very simple “note-to-self” kind of a blog post today. Plenty of those to go around on this blog, and I am sure that there will be plenty more! This one is another case that should be really obvious, but isn’t, and should just work, but doesn’t. Namely, when you have run a pipeline in Azure DevOps expecting it to publish a package in your internal NuGet feed so that all of your ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to change printer paper size using PowerShell? March 31, 2021
    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 ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • Guide: How to take over and kill a viral AAD tenant? March 24, 2021
    Rogue Azure Active Directories don’t sound like a huge and widespread problem, but Microsoft’s approach of generating unmanaged, viral AAD tenants whenever they encounter the tiniest reason to do so MUST be driven by some weird internal scorecard where “number of tenants” has a lot of weight, because you do get an Azure AD tenant really easily, and getting rid of one is surprisingly laborious. This guide aims to explain what’s the quickest way to ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • Listing all of the assemblies loaded in a PowerShell session? March 18, 2021
    In this article, I’ll do my best to explain how to list all loaded assemblies in a PowerShell session. You see, PowerShell is great at caching assemblies in the weirdest possible way, so ending up with all kinds of mismatches in loaded DLL versions is pretty common. Or just being plainly blocked from loading a new one as you already have a cached reference. I mean, I’ve run into all kinds of issues even if ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • Of Course I Still #ValoLove You March 15, 2021
    Long story short: My 6-year career with Valo is now coming to an end. Today was my last day at Valo. This is the longest I’ve ever worked at a company, and I’ve had the time of my life in the many positions I’ve held within Valo / Blue Meteorite. Rarely does a company offer you so many different possibilities and options – and let you grow into the role that you’re looking to fill, with ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to fix “No database provider has been configured for this DbContext” in EF Core? March 8, 2021
    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! This one I hadn’t really seen before: “No database provider has been configured for this DbContext”. This time I encountered the issue while setting up a ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to run Robot tests on an Azure DevOps hosted agent? March 4, 2021
    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 ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • “Missing value for AzureWebJobsStorage in local.settings.json” when debugging Azure Functions locally? March 3, 2021
    Another day, another issue with Azure Functions! For such a simple and powerful tool, it sure does produce a lot of topics for blog articles! 😁 So, in this article, I’m explaining a couple of possible reasons why you might get an error along the lines of “Missing value for AzureWebJobsStorage” when debugging Azure Functions locally. But before jumping into the solution(s), let’s take a closer look at the issue at hand, shall we? Problem When firing up ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to copy-paste a table from Excel to WordPress without using plug-ins? February 24, 2021
    So, I tried to paste a table from Excel into WordPress, and I failed. Annoying – but not a big problem. I can just paste it into an existing table and it’ll “sort itself out”, right? Well, no. Exporting the Excel sheet as a html page and copy-pasting the table from there didn’t work either. Actually, copy-pasting a table just didn’t work at all. So… WordPress is unable to understand HTML tables. Is that really it? Well, no, ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to create a new SharePoint list based on a List template (.stp)? February 17, 2021
    New Microsoft Lists are here!. They are awesome, and a great move by Microsoft to reap even more value from the old warhorse. Wait – old warhorse? Well, behind the scenes, they’re actually “just” normal SharePoint lists with a bit of added sparkles and gizmos – namely, an app, a few automations to make users’ lives easier, and an application page to display the lists. Great move by Microsoft, launch quite well done, and a pretty ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to enable saving a list as a template on SharePoint Online? February 9, 2021
    Another day, another fun little task in SharePoint Online… :) This time, I needed to be able to migrate 10 or so lists with some very specific fields and plenty of content from one site to another one. What’s the best way to do that now? While PnP templates have supported exporting contents for a while now, you can still run into some issues with them – namely, fields of type “person” (or rather, “user”) are ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to change Azure Functions from Consumption to Premium Elastic plan? February 2, 2021
    Sometimes, you need to change the hosting model (or tier) for your resources on Azure. Maybe you’ve outgrown whatever you’ve originally selected, maybe you’ve got too much cash on your hands, or maybe you’re like me, and you get absolutely and completely fed up with the cold starts for your Azure Function apps on the Consumption plan and want to use the Premium Elastic plan instead. For these situations, you have the possibility of changing the ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • Azure DevOps Pipelines Caching January 26, 2021
    Azure DevOps pipelines have a pretty handy feature called Pipeline Caching. It’ll help you avoid annoyingly long NuGet package restores in your builds. And that makes sense – why would you restore packages again and again and again, if you’re not updating your dependencies meanwhile? And especially in the case of CI or CD pipeline, you’ll end up having a pipeline running constantly without packages actually getting bumped up – so your NuGet task is ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to recover the private key of a (.pfx) certificate? January 20, 2021
    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 replace the old certificate… But that’s manual labor and where’s the fun in that? I prefer a solution that included a bit more coding! After a bit of ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to fix “System.IO.FileSystem: Could not find a part of the path \AppData\Local\AzureFunctionsTools\Releases\3.17.0\workers. Value cannot be null. (Parameter ‘provider’)” when running Azure Functions locally? January 12, 2021
    Well, that title is a mouthful. But it’s the topic for today, so what can you do? That said, this article should be pretty topical, as the issue started popping up only a few days ago. Chances are it’ll be patched soon enough, but in the meantime, it’s always useful to document the fix! Problem When running or debugging Azure Functions locally, your runtime just blurts our this error and fails to compile your functions: A host error ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to nuke the Identity Cache in Visual Studio? January 11, 2021
    This article explains one easy workaround to a lot of Visual Studio authentication issues. Personally, it’s helped me multiple times when Cloud Explorer has gotten into a weird authentication loop or Visual Studio stops seeing my MSDN subscription. And it also helps you clean up any old and unused credentials – such as the ones you only used once in 2018 to log into a customer’s Azure environment to debug an issue they had with ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • Fixing unexpected Microsoft.AspNetCore package errors after a dependency update January 6, 2021
    This was a fun one! Suddenly, while running or debugging my ASP.NET Core 3.1 application, I started getting errors about missing assemblies, along the lines of “FileNotFoundException: Could not load file or assembly Microsoft.AspNetCore.Components.Forms”. These DLL files were not required a minute earlier – nor did requiring them really make much sense in my mind – but there was a nonsensical, easy fix, so in the end, it was all good! But let’s go through this ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • 2020 – Year Review December 31, 2020
    Like is almost customary at this point in the year, I decided to take a look at 2020 – which goals I had set for myself if I hit them, and what happened on koskila.net during the year. And like last year, I thought I’d set myself a few new goals! In my last year review post, I commented on 2019: 2019 was borderline tumultuous – in 2020, I hope it’ll be slightly smoother sailing. Me, in my 2019 ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • Graph API throws “$count is not currently supported.” when you KNOW it’s supported? December 30, 2020
    Hey, another funny case. “Funny” as in “the error message is misleading and googling didn’t really help”, but also as in “a colleague knew the answer right off the bat because he already fixed it in another project”. This time the documentation was in fact there, it just wasn’t there to be found. Anyway – what have I broken this time? Problem When you’re calling Graph API with both $filter and $count, for example: https://graph.microsoft.com/v1.0/users/$count?$filter=assignedLicenses/any(x:x/skuId eq 189a915c-fe4f-4ffa-bde4-85b9628d07a0) Instead of the ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • “An assembly specified in the application dependencies manifest was not found” when running Add-Migration in Entity Framework Core? December 8, 2020
    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 building a UI for browsing the data at some point later on – but I actually got stuck on the second step already :) While adding the ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to fix Visual Studio Cloud Explorer being unable to access your subscriptions December 1, 2020
    This article will describe a number of fixes to a situation, where your Visual Studio Cloud Explorer fails to show you the Azure Subscriptions you (should) have access to. Problem Your Cloud explorer might load for a long while, and finally, fail to display anything meaningful. Instead, you might see an error like the below: “Subscriptions could not be loaded. Please try re-entering credentials or removing and reading the account.” on Visual Studio Cloud Explorer. Solution This one was ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • Pulumi task on Azure DevOps fails with error “azureblob.OpenBucket: accountName is required” November 24, 2020
    This article explains how to fix one of the many issues you might face when configuring Pulumi deployments for your Azure DevOps Pipelines! The particular error you may run into was “azureblob.OpenBucket: accountName is required” – what a descriptive one, when there’s no accountName to be specified anywhere! But first – let’s get through the basics. Namely… “Pulumi?”, you ask – “What’s that?” Well, let me give you a 1-line response to that. What is Pulumi? Pulumi is ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • Hacktoberfest 2020 November 17, 2020
    Another year, another Hacktoberfest, another haphazard participation, and – as usual – another blog post a little bit late. Still, better late than never! And the event has become such a phenomenon that I am happy that I did finish the challenge (or like DigitalOcean calls it – the celebration)! The event has a special place in my heart, as it did (in 2017, I think?) encourage me to contribute more to the community – ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to access the site collection app catalog in SharePoint November 11, 2020
    This article explains how to access the Site Collection App Catalog in SharePoint Online. I mean – yeah, I had to google it after getting back to SPFx dev stuff after a while and realized the first few results were useless. Of course. So how did you do this now… Turned out to be pretty easy, and borderline obvious! Still, yet another thing to document. Solution So, back to basics – how do you access the Site Collection App ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • Frequently Asked Robot Lawn Mower Questions November 4, 2020
    This article is my attempt at documenting my experiences with Worx Landroid L2000. It’s a phenomenal little helper in your garden, but it will run into issues – and it will make your work a bit in order to get it to run efficiently! This article contains all of the gotchas I’ve run into so far, wrapped in a handy FAQ format for your convenience (and mine, to be fair – I’ll be back to consult ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to inject EF Core DbContext in an Azure Function October 29, 2020
    Ah, one more on the related topics of different configurations for your Azure Function apps. In this article, I will describe how you can configure the Entity Framework Core database context to be injected into your Azure Functions App. In my experience, this is a very typical and often-needed model to structure your Azure Functions. Therefore, while tooling and templates aren’t quite there, it’s worthwhile to document how to do this somewhere – well, here. Solution I’ve ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • “Conversion overflow” when reading numeric data from MS SQL database using Entity Framework October 27, 2020
    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! No way to recover, no fallbacks, unusable callstacks. Oh, speaking of which – what was the error, exactly? Problem So when you’re trying to instantiate an entity with a ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to configure Azure Function’s startup October 21, 2020
    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 in an Azure Functions App? Problem Okay, a step back – there’s a bit of a problem that we need to resolve before we can proceed with ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to list your git stashes October 14, 2020
    Long story short, yes, I really did have to google this, and since top results seemed to give pretty unclear (or even wrong) answers, I decided to document it for myself. Maybe it’ll be helpful to someone else too! And just to state the obvious: I’m using GitHub Desktop for most of my mandatory Git stuff, but whenever I have to run any git commands, I run Windows PowerShell (git exe is added to PATH variable). Solution Well, ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to fix “System.InvalidOperationException: PowerShell Gallery is currently unavailable.” October 5, 2020
    This article explains how to fix an issue when updating a module in PowerShell. The error is something along the lines of: “System.InvalidOperationException: PowerShell Gallery is currently unavailable. Please try again later.” The whole error looks something like the one below, although you can probably get it for many different commandlets. Failed updating module 'SharePointPnPPowerShellOnline' version 3.19.2003.0. Update the module and then try again. Error Could not execute Command. The error: System.InvalidOperationException: PowerShell Gallery is currently unavailable. ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to change Microsoft Lists language? September 29, 2020
    I recently started playing around with Microsoft Lists. What a fun and friendly tool – makes SharePoint lists far more approachable offering a great editing experience, easy sharing, and hopefully in just a bit, awesome integrations and great mobile app (I mean, there’s iOS… But who has an iPhone in this day and age? 😉 However, as is usual in my tech endeavors, I immediately ran into an issue. Problem Some background: I’ve selected either EN-US or EN-CA ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • App authentication woes on SharePoint (Token request failed. The remote server returned an error: (401) Unauthorized.) September 21, 2020
    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 (it’s retired everywhere else already!) Note: This might still be an updating story, as the situation with ACS is definitely… Developing. Yeah, let’s call it that. ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to leave an Azure AD tenant? September 16, 2020
    This article explains how to fix your account, whenever it gets completely FUBAR due to your account being added as a guest in another AAD organization. And this might happen in multiple different situations – my most typical woe is Visual Studio’s Cloud Explorer, which stops showing me my subscriptions due to authentication against the other organizations failing. Add some extra difficulty by having someone in the other directory block your account from signing in, ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • Is Lifetime Spotify Premium legit? September 10, 2020
    This article describes another fishy online offering I ran into, Spotify Premium Lifetime subscription. Long story short, it’s shady, but not necessarily a scam, per se. I definitely wouldn’t call it legit either, though. Depending on the calibration of your moral compass, it might even be worth it, although definitely not recommended. But let’s take a closer look at what’s going on with this one, then! (If you’re in a hurry, skip the background explanations and jump ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • AADSTS50011 – The resource principal named was not found in the tenant | An easy fix! September 3, 2020
    Another day, another variant of AADSTS50011! With a lot of apps and web services using Azure Active Directory for authentication, you’re bound to run into issues, right? Ah well, one would hope to avoid them. But at least this one is usually easy to fix! Let’s first take a closer look at the different versions of the error you might face, and then see how we can fix or avoid them altogether! AI-powered summary: AADSTS50011 – How to ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to fix an AADSTS50196 error on Microsoft web properties? September 1, 2020
    This article explains how to fix error with error code AADSTS50196. This issue usually comes up with an error message somewhat like “The server terminated an operation because it encountered a client request loop.” The error seems to be popping up more and more often. No worries – it wasn’t caused by you! It is, in fact, an unintended side effect of a security hardening feature in some browsers, and some outdated configuration on Microsoft’s end. Obviously, ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • The MSDN Downloads / Subscriber links August 26, 2020
    This article serves as a simple glossary of important MSDN Subscriber links that I always forget – links that Microsoft keeps updating, that is! I’ll be updating the post as need be :) And yes, I do feel a little bit ridiculous about creating an actual article about something as simple as a list of links to stuff that should be easily discoverable by any search engine. But I suppose it is what it is. Anyway, it ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • Fixing WordPress “Post-processing of the image failed likely because the server is busy or does not have enough resources. Uploading a smaller image may help. Suggested maximum size is 2500 pixels.” error August 17, 2020
    This article will go through different solutions for fixing issues with uploading pictures to your WordPress Media Library. There are plenty of reasons that could cause this issue – and a couple of different ways to run into it. But fear not! I’ll be proposing a few different ways to fix the issue in your installation. And by “a few” I mean 10. Or more, if I have updated the list after writing this paragraph! Unlike ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to restore lost windows in Visual Studio? August 13, 2020
    This article explains how to restore any hidden windows in Visual Studio without resetting your whole window layout, by using a common keyboard shortcut. Problem We’ve all been there – you’re opening a new window in Visual Studio, but your keyboard shortcut or clicking the item in the menu simply seems to do nothing. The window doesn’t show up anywhere. Reason The reason for this (most of the time) is simple: you have the window popped-up and located outside ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • Worx Landroid L2000 (WR155E) – an honest review August 3, 2020
    In this article, I will be sharing my perspective and experiences with Worx Landroid L2000 – an autonomous lawn mower that I’ve had for about 2 summers now. Hopefully, I’ll be able to help someone else make an informed decision about getting a puppy like this. Anyway – a step back, the 10k-feet view first, as usual. Robot lawn mowers are slowly becoming a commodity, but choosing the right one is still tough. The models are different, ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to resolve “Microsoft.Data.SqlClient is not supported on this platform.” in an Azure Function App? July 27, 2020
    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 me, this error popped up after some house cleaning tasks – dependency updates, merging feature branches… You know the stuff. And suddenly, while the Azure Function App ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • Gotchas when configuring Home Assistant on Docker on Windows July 21, 2020
    What a nice headline, right? 😅 One day, I thought I’d give Home Assistant a try! And obviously, I couldn’t just make things easy and run it in a Linux virtual machine or my Raspberry Pi – instead, obviously, I decided to run it on Windows 10! And obviously, I’d use Docker for it. And of course, not just Docker, but docker-compose. Whatever that is. I don’t know – it’s the first time I’m trying out ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • Enabling local cache for an Azure App Service July 16, 2020
    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-brainer, I’m kind of half expecting everyone else to already have known about this, but since nobody told me about it, I’m ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to verify connection to the database in Entity Framework Core? July 8, 2020
    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: An Azure service hosting it is up and It has a connection to its SQL database This simple API would be used for monitoring purposes – simple stuff, sure, but what’s the best way to implement this without ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to resolve “Microsoft.Data.SqlClient.SqlException (0x80131904): Cannot insert explicit value for identity column in table when IDENTITY_INSERT is set to OFF” June 30, 2020
    Okay, okay – another super simple thing that I messed up, fixed, and decided to document :) This time I messed up a simple operation in Entity Framework Core operation on a simple entity, and hopefully I’ll save someone else some trouble! Onwards to the issue, then! Problem So when you’re trying to insert stuff into your database – somewhat like shown in the example below: var entity = new MyEntity(){ Id = 1337, Name = "My Entity" }; _ctx.MyEntities.Add(entity); _ctx.SaveChanges(); You ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to resolve persistent “Build started… Build failed.” when trying to run Entity Framework Core commands? June 24, 2020
    This time, I’m happy to present you perhaps the simplest way of fixing an annoying and persistent issue with a misleading error message! Wait, does that sound familiar? It’s almost like that’s what half of my articles are about… Anyway, I was happily going my way about creating a couple of new fields to an entity and then scaffolding my changes to a new migration using Entity Framework Core’s Add-Migration, but this happened: Build started... Build failed. “Oh”, I ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • SharePoint Home Sites – a Game Changer? June 16, 2020
    This topic seems to be on everyone’s mind right now: SharePoint Home Sites. They’re finally rolling out (again). Or maybe even rolled out, in case this article ends up late in my publishing queue! But what are they? How do you create SharePoint Home sites? How do you best use them in your organization? To take a step back, let’s first take a step upwards – to get the 1000-feet view! Getting the big picture – why is ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to resolve another “An error occurred while updating the entries” exception in Entity Framework Core June 10, 2020
    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 could pretty much be whatever. But in this article, I’ll go through one possibility – hopefully, it helps! Problem So I was just pushing in some new rows ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to find out the ID of your Azure AD tenant? May 28, 2020
    This article explains in extremely short way, how to fetch your Azure Active Directory tenant’s Directory ID (also known as Tenant 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 ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to resolve error “Insufficient memory to continue the execution of the program.” when debugging Azure Functions locally? May 19, 2020
    This article describes a solution to an error “Insufficient memory to continue the execution of the program.” I was debugging an Azure Function locally and ran into it – it stopped my Azure Function from starting at all. So, this is what I got: Insufficient memory to continue the execution of the program. Ohh… kay..? My development machines have plenty of RAM, surely enough to run an Azure Function! Hell, I’m sure I have enough memory to have Google ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to implement multiple Connection Strings for one DbContext in EF Core? May 12, 2020
    Recently, while building an app service to host a .NET Core API, I had to implement the logic for using both Read-Only and Read-Write Database Contexts for Entity Framework Core. In this particular case, it was the same database – just different contexts, because depending on the location of the app service the app was deployed in, read and write operations might actually go to different database instances, That’s really easy, right? Well… Yes and no. Essentially, ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to clean up duplicates from MS SQL Database? May 7, 2020
    This article explains how to query and remove duplicate entries from a Microsoft SQL database using T-SQL. The same model works both for Azure Databases (in Azure SQL Query Editor) and databases on MS SQL Server (using SSMS – SQL Server Management Studio). I had to do this a while back due to a bug in an API creating multiple entities with the same content – save for the Identity field. Fun! Background Why bother? That’s a (somewhat) valid ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to fix weird “Production Breakpoints” errors in an Azure App Service? April 30, 2020
    This article describes a curious fix I found to an issue where Application Insights (seemingly) crashes your Azure App Service, leaving behind interesting, yet non-descriptive errors in the Application Event Logs. The actual symptoms might be your Azure app service just timing out with no errors being surfaced on the front-end. Frustrating. Problem Does your Azure App Service’s event log look like this? Full of “Production Breakpoints” with weird errors about named pipes? Azure App Service diagnostic log full ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to get the EF Core Connection String? April 21, 2020
    This article describes how to access and extract the connection strings from your Entity Framework (Core) database context objects. This is quite convenient if you need to display or log the connection string used for your current DbContext for some reason – or if you somehow form your DbContext objects dynamically, and need to verify which connection string you’re using. I’m sure there are other use cases, too. You probably have an interesting one, if you ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • Tips on organizing an online conference using Microsoft Teams April 15, 2020
    Writing this in a country under lockdown, it feels like every single conference in the world has either been canceled or switched to being online-only. And right now, that’s definitely for the best! But it does pose quite a dilemma for those in charge of these events – how do you organize an event for potentially thousands of attendees, online? How do you foster great interaction between the audience and speakers? How do you encourage ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to fix a Teams team with no Owners? March 31, 2020
    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 ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to fix “HTTP Error 500.32 – ANCM Failed to Load dll” March 25, 2020
    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? ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • Why you shouldn’t attach files from other channels in Microsoft Teams? March 19, 2020
    This article will describe a surprising issue with Microsoft Teams, and a simple workaround. 😊 Essentially, using the out-of-the-box “Attach” > “Recent” messaging extension in Teams has a couple of caveats or edge cases, that make it problematic to use. Instead, either move the file to the proper location using the “Files” tab or share a link to your file (also available under “Attach” > “Browse Teams and Channels”). This post will describe the actual solution ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • Top Tips To Survive Working From Home! March 10, 2020
    Due to the outbreak of the Coronavirus, there’s a sudden influx of people working remotely. As someone, who has only recently gone through the transformation from a regular office worker (with an assigned desk and all that classic stuff) to a full-time remote worker, I thought I could share some of my experiences on how to survive WFH (that’s Working From Home for those of you who’re even newer to this stuff than I am!) Introduction Up ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • Adding new MVC/Razor items fails throwing an error about hostpolicy.dll March 5, 2020
    This article describes how to fix the error “There was an error running the selected code generator: ‘Failed to load the dll from \bin\Debug\netcoreapp\win-x86\hostpolicy.dll, HRESULT: 0x800700C1 An error occurred while loading required library hostpolicy.dll'” when you’re adding a new scaffolded item (such as a Razor page or ASP.NET Core MVC Controller) in Visual Studio. Description Imagine this: You’re developing your run-of-the-mill, basic, everyday ASP.NET Core web application. You need to add a new scaffolded item – that ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to disable “Register” action in ASP.NET Core? February 27, 2020
    Sometimes you’ll need the default identity for your ASP.NET Core application, but want to disable the registration of new users. Sounds pretty basic, right? However, there’s actually no easy switch you can just flip to enable or disable said functionality. I went through a lot of different articles and ideas by other people. Most of them involved fiddling with IdentityController, creating new scaffolded pages, adding new Actions with redirection code, and who knows what else… But ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • Fun with Azure DevOps NuGet package versioning! February 26, 2020
    This article will briefly explain the different NuGet package versioning schemes – both automatic and manual – available. Then we’ll take a look at how to implement a nifty, and quite frankly, downright elegant automatic versioning scheme for your NuGet packages. Okay – returning from quite a trip down another rabbit hole, I think it’s a good time to document some of my findings in regards to Azure DevOps NuGet package versioning! This seems to be another ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • Adding Debug listeners to your console application fails in .NET Core February 26, 2020
    Every now and then comes the need to write your console output to a log file. There’s a simple way to do this in .NET Framework, and quite a few online articles detailing a borderline one-liner on how to do achieve it: Adding a log file listener(s) by calling Debug.Listeners – something like this: var tr1 = new TextWriterTraceListener(System.Console.Out); Debug.Listeners.Add(tr1); var tr2 = new TextWriterTraceListener(System.IO.File.CreateText("log.txt")); Debug.Listeners.Add(tr2); (Source) However, this doesn’t work in .NET Core ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to change Excel CSV delimiter? February 18, 2020
    This article will explain how you can change the Excel list delimiter for your CSV (or other) file exports. Because it isn’t always a comma. And setting the delimiter won’t escape or strip the same characters in the values, so it’ll mess up your data quite easily. Recently, I needed to find a way to import data from an old Excel file to a custom-coded system that could import CSV files. However, the data was fairly ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to connect to your local MSSQL server using SSMS? February 11, 2020
    Every now and then you run into a situation, where you really need to run some SQL against your local development database. That database, at least in my case, is hosted on your local SQL Server Express. Connecting to a local SQL Server should be a walk in a park, right? Eh, well… While using a connection string to connect to said DB is easy, you can’t do that with the SQL Server Management Studio. I wish ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • Office 365 video migration to Office Stream imminent – Get Ready! February 5, 2020
    While this post will mostly be about the highly topical migration from Office 365 Video to Microsoft Stream, there’s also a fair amount of rambling about Microsoft’s partner strategy and a bit of history included. I’m starting with the main stuff and then proceeding to the ranty parts, so just skip the last 75% of the post if you don’t care about that kind of stuff! On to the content, then! Microsoft Stream is taking the world ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to use TWRP to flash an Android device that refuses to boot to TWRP? January 29, 2020
    Last Christmas holiday I was tasked by older relatives to fix an Android tablet they had bought. One of those absolutely useless, 100€ devices that can’t really run any apps, and struggle to even start. My first proposition was to return the device – but it was already past the return window. Lenovo‘s bloated nightmare version of an Android was likely the biggest reason for slowness. My second course of action was to change the launcher ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • Azure Functions host quits with “The system cannot find the file specified” January 22, 2020
    So, another interesting issue I ran into when developing Azure Functions locally. What an endless bag of funsies! 😁 This time, the issue was simple but infuriating – my Azure Functions host would just silently close when debugging: none of the breakpoints would be hit, and no information would be logged anywhere. Azure Functions Core Tools (2.4.432 Commit hash: 3371a87e0fce2aa35986c0de8e77d5d618163b91) Function Runtime Version: 2.0.12332.0 The system cannot find the file specified Press any key to continue . . . I ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to extract more information out of your Azure Functions host failing silently? January 22, 2020
    I don’t know about you, but it’s happened to me a few times: fire up your Azure functions project, hit F5 to start debugging project builds without errors, Azure Functions host starts… And shuts down right away. This article has a few quick and simple tips on how to extract a bit more information from the Azure Functions host (func.exe), when it’s just silently failing. This means by default you won’t get any information about what’s ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • An easy fix for WordPress media uploads failing after a year/month change January 14, 2020
    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 the file (404 Not Found)”. This was peculiar, as I ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • App Service refuses connections with error: “No connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it” January 9, 2020
    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 ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • 2019 – Year Review (200th post on this blog!) December 31, 2019
    When I started this blog in 2015 as a place to stash my, eh, thoughtful workarounds, I didn’t think I’d ever hit 200 live articles (with another hundred still in draft mode). Or that I’d get half a million people reading them in a year! Man, I didn’t know either one of these things when I was writing my 2018 review, which feels like was just a moment ago. Taking a look a bit ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • Obfuscar 2.0 errors with loading types from assembly December 30, 2019
    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: https://www.koskila.net/azure-devops-how-to-package-a-simple-dll/ However, I wasn’t quite having the success I hoped for. Whilst the obfuscation was successful, ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • WordPress blog article edit mode: No Tags or Categories visible? December 26, 2019
    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 ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to resolve AADSTS90056 – “The endpoint only accepts POST requests. Received a GET request.” December 19, 2019
    This post details my very simple solution to an extremely unnecessary and kind-of simple error that 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. AI-powered summary: How to resolve AADSTS90056 error for Azure AD apps The AADSTS90056 error means that the resource principal (the app or service you’re trying to access) was not found in the Azure AD tenant. This ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • Classic SharePoint blogs are going away – what next? December 10, 2019
    So the interesting news is not over – Microsoft recently announced that their personal blogging platform for Office 365, Delve Blogs, is getting retired. Now it turns out Classic SharePoint blogs are also getting cut. This leaves some organizations in a bit of a tough spot – what to use for blogging from now on? In this article, I’m taking a look at what brought us here, and thinking about our next steps from here on ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to find out which WebDriver version is installed on an Azure DevOps build machine using YAML? December 4, 2019
    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 ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How do you migrate your Delve Blogs content to Modern SharePoint? November 28, 2019
    You might’ve heard the news – Delve Blogs are on the way out, leaving your users without a blogging platform on Office 365, and their data homeless. And by homeless, I mean deleted pretty soon. And by pretty soon I mean really soon. Might be a good time to start thinking about storing it somewhere else instead! While we’re all still waiting to see whether Microsoft sticks to their ambitious schedule (partial content freeze in December 2019, ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to export your Delve blogs content? November 27, 2019
    The news is out – Delve Blogs will be axed, leaving your users without a blogging platform on Office 365, and their data homeless. And by homeless, I mean deleted. Might be a good time to start thinking about storing it somewhere else instead! This post is the second post in my impromptu, Delve Blogs -themed blog series: Part 1: Delve Blogs getting deprecated – what do? Part 2: How to export your Delve blogs content? (this post) Part ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • Delve Blogs getting deprecated – what do? November 26, 2019
    Last week, Microsoft sent a surprise email to a number of customers. Delve blogs – the hated & loved self-serve internal blogging platform on Office 365 is getting axed. It doesn’t really come as a surprise at this point – the service was first announced in 2014, and launched to some hype and appreciation (especially due to the new CMS – authoring canvas – which was a lot of fun compared to Classic SharePoint!) but ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • “Unable to service request” when trying to log into a Microsoft website November 26, 2019
    Okay – so this one is going to be a simple blog post. I’ll be explaining an apparent fan favorite! Namely, MSDN forums, MSDN subscriber downloads or other Microsoft web properties are not letting you sign in, but rather throw the following error: Unable to service request Why do you get an error like this? How to resolve it? Background I was recently reading Joanne C. Klein’s blog, and she gave a great tip about blogging: look into the ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • Awarded MVP for Office Development November 25, 2019
    Late Friday night a couple of weeks ago, I got an interesting and a bit surprising email from Microsoft. Flabbergasted, I tweeted this right after: Wait, WHAT? First of all, when did #Microsoft learn to write proper Finnish, second of all, HOW DID THIS HAPPEN? :D I’m genuinely at a loss of words. Just… Thanks everyone for sparring and pushing me – I’ll do my best to be worthy of y’alls trust! 🤩 #MVPBuzz #MVP pic.twitter.com/wn3EMKfrvA — Antti ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to solve ‘DbContextOptionsBuilder’ does not contain a definition for ‘UseSqlServer’ error in .NET Core? November 21, 2019
    This is another, kind of a classic and simple solution to a fairly simple problem: How to fix it, when your DbContextOptionsBuilder fails to take in your connection string and complains about UseSqlServer missing or whatever? Okay – let’s take a step back. How did we end up here? So, let’s set the scene. You’re building your DbContext (called ApplicationDbContext in the example below) in a .NET Core application of some sorts. You’ll do this like shown ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • Iterating Group memberships using Claims in .NET Core November 19, 2019
    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 ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • IE11 fails to load a (server-side) Blazor web app November 13, 2019
    Welp – this was not a fun issue to run into! While nobody in this day and age should use Internet Explorer for any normal usage (occasional legacy scenarios aside), there are still some luddites who do (or whose IT department makes them to). This means it’s still useful, and sometimes even required, for a web application to work even in Internet Explorer. Description of the issue So, as shown in the article’s image, when trying to ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to create a DbContext from just a connection string? November 11, 2019
    When you’re in your .NET Core project, it’s always easy: you just register your DbContext in ConfigureServices, and then inject it into whichever Page, View or Controller you might need it in. However, when you have another project or solution you’re working on and you’d still like to use the same DbContext and your entity classes in it, you have to find another way to do it! What should we do, then? Description Let’s first take a ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • Another year, another Hacktoberfest (2019)! November 1, 2019
    As a lot of the more frequent readers of this blog know, I generally work on proprietary – that is, non-open-source – projects. Whenever I do have some time to dabble in OSS, it’s usually for a hobby. This time around, I’ve been really struggling to find the time to contribute to open-source projects. Last year I had just had a baby – so it’s not like I was sleeping anyway. I was able to submit ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to resolve “refusing to allow an integration to create or update .github/workflows/main.yml” on GitHub Desktop? October 29, 2019
    This article explains how to fix a weird and surprising error about GitHub Actions workflow file thrown at you when you try to push your changes using GitHub Desktop. The odd part is that you had no changes to the workflow file at all. Problem Ran into this one when trying to push my merge from upstream. I was adhering to my own instructions (see below for a link), but got the error (further below) that stopped ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to use the right version of the WebDriver on hosted agents in Azure DevOps? October 25, 2019
    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 could 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 ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • EF Core fails to load hostpolicy.dll when RuntimeIdentifier is win-x86 October 24, 2019
    I ran into another interesting one when working with a .NET Core 3.0 project and Entity Framework Core – this time, RuntimeIdentifier configuration causing trouble. In short, running Update-Database (to apply code-first migrations to your local database) locally would return this, annoying error: Failed to load the dll from [runtimepath]\win-x86\hostpolicy.dll], HRESULT: 0x800700C1 An error occurred while loading required library hostpolicy.dll from [runtimepath]\win-x86\] I suspect this can happen with any x86 runtimeIdentifier, but the one I had specified in ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to fix “The type or namespace name ‘Services’ does not exist in the namespace ‘Microsoft.AspNetCore.Components’ (are you missing an assembly reference?)” October 22, 2019
    I have just resolved a random issue that’s difficult enough to google so I thought it would be worth documenting! These seem to be popping up whenever you work with anything that’s fairly fresh out of the oven… This particular case revolves around Visual Studio being incredibly obnoxious and starting to throw a ton of errors on code that worked five minutes prior. In my case, the error happened after updates to Visual Studio. Always fun. Symptoms The errors ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • Azure DevOps – how to package a single DLL? October 17, 2019
    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 ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to use UriHelper or NavigationManager in .NET Core 3.0 & Blazor? October 17, 2019
    Just a quick piece of documentation, as this piece of code, has changed in different versions of .NET Core 3.0 so far a few times. Need to have things like this written down somewhere! UriHelper / NavigationManager with .NET Core 3.0 Both of these helper libraries do essentially the same thing: navigate/browse/redirect the user to a different address, component, page or view in or by your web app. What you normally use this library for is exactly ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • Azure DevOps build fails with “The nuget command failed with exit code(1) and error(Cannot determine the packages folder to restore NuGet packages.” October 16, 2019
    This was another peculiar one – something, that didn’t bring up too many results on Google. Always fun trying to figure out those! So, when configuring an Azure DevOps pipeline (build) for a .NET project, you might run into this annoying error: ##The nuget command failed with exit code(1) and error(Cannot determine the packages folder to restore NuGet packages. Please specify either -PackagesDirectory or -SolutionDirectory. Job: "The nuget command failed with exit code(1) and error(Cannot determine the ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • HttpClient in Blazor October 9, 2019
    Blazor is a new (ish) framework for building web UIs with C#. It either uses SignalR to manage connections between your client-side and server-side code or even compiles directly to WebAssembly, in both cases cutting out the need to write any pesky JavaScript yourself – pretty neat, if you ask me! However, developing your web apps with Blazor is a bit different from using ASP.NET MVC, for example. Other people have written great introductions to the ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • List of Azure Regions, where Application Insights is available September 10, 2019
    This article describes the Azure regions, where Azure Monitor Application Insights is available. Azure regions A region is a set of data centres 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 ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to get the Description for a property in ASP.NET MVC 5? September 4, 2019
    This post describes the easiest way to show description texts for properties in ASP.NET MVC 5. Sounds simple, right? We can use something like @Html.DescriptionFor(x => x.Property), right? Alas, it’s not that straightforward. A bit surprisingly, there’s no ready-made helper function for this. I’m saying “surprisingly”, because I feel like MVC 5 really already has all the bells and whistles – AND the kitchen sink. But no, it does not have a helper for ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to add creator/modified info to all of your EF models at once in .NET Core August 27, 2019
    This is a tip that should often be the first thing you do in your projects with database backend, no matter which technology you use: Add some basic info about modified and created times, and the user information – so that if something happens, everyone will know who to blame 😉 There are a lot of great blog articles describing how to do this in .NET Framework, but not that many for .NET Core. It’s very ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • EF Core returns null for a Navigation property August 23, 2019
    This article describes how to fix a situation, where you can’t use any of the navigation properties of your Entity Framework Core entities, since they are all null, despite data being in the database for sure. So, another day, another error. This time I can’t blame SharePoint, since I just messed up with ASP.NET Core and Entity Framework Core. :) Symptoms No matter what I’d do, I was getting null values for my navigation properties on my ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • ‘__generated__Index.OnInitAsync()’: no suitable method found to override August 19, 2019
    Welp – just ran into this one, and as I expect others to encounter the same issue, I’d better document it right away! So in Blazor, I was crafting a simple component that’d display some data in a nice way. Being lazy and crafty, I thought I’d copy-paste some similar code from an earlier POC I had built since I knew it worked. The component was overriding a method called “OnInitAsync”, and it just nicely fetched ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • Au revoir Canada, bonjour Finland.. Eh? August 16, 2019
    Is this seriously my first ACTUAL post about Canada? What a major gap in my content! However, living in Canada has been fairly hectic (with the work, family and trips), so I haven’t been able to write much about our life here – unlike when we were living in the States. Which, conveniently, brings me to the main point of this rambling – This post works as an announcement of sorts: I’m wrapping up my ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • SharePoint Home, Hub, Sites, Start… What? August 13, 2019
    This article explains the current terminology that Microsoft uses around your different pages in SharePoint. Or at least tries to – and do that in a way that’s faithful to the current, flat & Modern world. Microsoft has been known for its less-than-stellar track record of figuring out easy and descriptive names for their products. Let me introduce 2 cases in point: Microsoft® WinFX™ Software Development Kit for Microsoft® Pre-Release Windows Operating System Code-Named “Longhorn”, Beta ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • Thanks for coming to my session at SPS Charlotte 8/10/2019! August 11, 2019
    This is just a quick update to share my materials from my SharePoint Saturday Charlotte 2019 session. What a fun event – and a cool city! It was a pleasure getting to know the local community and visiting a new state. Thanks to the local user group (and the conference organizers) for having me! Charlotte – what a beautiful city! Charlotte seems like a really lively city. And what an active audience – a long day, but ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to Teamsify an SPFx solution? August 10, 2019
    This post describes how you can modify your SPFx webparts to make them compatible with usage in Microsoft Teams. I’m also showing some basic ideas of what you can do in the code to make the integration more useful! Why would we do this? Who wouldn’t want to just develop once and then run their code everywhere? Now with SPFx (SharePoint Framework), 1.8 being out (and 1.9 being out for a while before being pulled!), we’re getting ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to solve the error “Property ‘microsoftTeams’ does not exist on type ‘WebPartContext’.” August 6, 2019
    This article explains how to fix an issue where you’re just minding your own business, trying to access the Microsoft Teams context in your SPFx webpart’s WebPartContext via the built-in property microsoftTeams, but you run into an issue. Simple stuff, but it’s still easy to run into this one, so I think it’s worthwhile to document the solution somewhere. Problem Most likely, the line causing you issues looks something like this: this.context.microsoftTeams. Of like shown below in Visual ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • Speaking at SPS Charlotte 8/10/2019! August 2, 2019
    I got an awesome, (kind of) last-minute opportunity to join a crew of awesome speakers at SharePoint Saturday Charlotte (NC) on the 10th of August, 2019, and I was super happy to jump on it! I’ll be presenting about extending Microsoft Teams with some SPFx goodness. Last time, the session spurred so many questions I had trouble keeping up – pretty awesome! Having never been to Charlotte, I’m super excited about this trip. If you’re from ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to resolve build failing with .NET Core 3 and Microsoft.AspNetCore.Mvc.Versioning August 2, 2019
    Whilst building a proof-of-concept on .NET Core 3.0 preview 7 I ran into issues when developing web APIs. This release is production-ready (according to Microsoft -see below), but every now and then you run into really unintuitive and sometimes surprising issues. Go LiveNET Core 3.0 Preview 7 is supported by Microsoft and can be used in production. We strongly recommend that you test your app running on Preview 7 before deploying Preview 7 into production. If ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to resolve issues when loading DLLs in PowerShell? July 23, 2019
    This post describes a few different things that can (and will) go wrong when you’re trying to load DLLs in PowerShell, and a couple of ways you can try to fix them. Typically, you’d run into an error message like “Exception calling LoadFrom with 1 argument(s): Could not load file or assembly…. “ These issues most typically arise when you’re running a PowerShell script that depends on certain DLLs to be loaded (to then execute some ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to update SharePoint Framework for an SPFx webpart? July 18, 2019
    Instead of being stuck on whatever version your SPFx project was originally created with, it’s possible and sometimes required to upgrade it afterward to gain access to newer functionalities like integration with Microsoft Teams. This process, to me, is comparable to updating the .NET Framework version in your classic web application projects – while it’s sometimes a matter of simple configuration change and a rebuild, most of the time there are a bunch of steps ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to resolve the error “The alias is being used by another group in your organization” July 16, 2019
    Okay – another simple one. When you’re creating a new Office Group (or “Unified Group”, as they’re called as well), you might get an error for the alias already being used. Pretty simple, but still – let’s see how to fix it. Problem So, this error pops up, while you’re trying to create a new Office Group: The alias is being used by another group in your organization. Please try a different alias. An example script & output is ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to fix Microsoft.AspNetCore.Mvc.TagHelpers not being rendered! July 10, 2019
    Ha – another one, that ended up being a simple fix, but since nobody actually explains it well, took me an hour to figure out. This post ended up being another example of my “I’m going to document every single fix that took me more than 10 minutes to figure out, since that’ll help me (and others) the next time the same issue arises.” blogging strategy. Snappy name, right? 😅 Ah, well, naming things is really, really ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • Sync local repo with the original on GitHub (Git merge upstream) July 9, 2019
    This is one of those “note to self” -kinds of entries. This workflow is probably so natural to a lot of you all, that you won’t need to ever google it – but since I don’t do that much development using git with the full “fork – clone – branch – submit pull request” -process (which is really typical with GitHub – and I guess Open Source in general), I always need to look up ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to fix “AADSTS700054: response_type ‘id_token’ is not enabled for the application” error July 3, 2019
    Another day, another unsuccessful authentication attempt, and another cool error code. I encountered his one whilst building a little POC that was supposed to authenticate against Graph API. This time, I was thrown an “AADSTS700054” error… But no worries! This article will explain to you how to fix it, at least in a couple of different cases! :) Problem When developing your client-side solution (an SPFx web part, React app, ASP.NET MVC application with some client-side components… ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to fix an “AADSTS500113: No reply address is registered for the application” error? July 1, 2019
    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, ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to enable verbose logging for Azure Functions? June 26, 2019
    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 are different methods available for Azure and your local development environment. Problem Azure Functions are awesome. But by default, your tools for gathering information without some additional configuration are not that great. The “monitor” view of the function doesn’t give you more than an ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • SPFx webpart fails with “Failed to load component – – There was a network error.” June 19, 2019
    SPFx development is a bottomless bag of funsies! This article describes yet another way how to fix the error with your SPFx webpart failing to load a module. In this case, you’ll get an error that starts with the generic “Failed to load component” -part, but contains “There was a network error” later in the stack. I’ve written about this before, but I keep running into new ways to mess up, so I’ll keep documenting the ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • Thanks for coming to my session at SPS Nashville 2019! June 17, 2019
    I had the honor of speaking at SharePoint Saturday Nashville 2019 again, and it was a lot of fun! I had the chance to meet a lot of new (and some “old”) people. And what a crowd – so many (difficult) questions about SPFx & Teams development… 😬😂 (Don’t want to crawl through the jabbering? Just here for the materials? Well, they are here: SPS Nashville 2019 materials . Thanks for your interest!) SPS Nashville 2019 from ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • The boring version of browser wars is upon us June 13, 2019
    The next browser war is upon us, and this time it isn’t fought on the battlefield of proprietary API implementations and badly implemented CSS and JavaScript standards, but rather it’s different ecosystems battling it out with their respective variants of Blink, which itself is a part of open source Chromium. Sounds boring, right? And to some extent it really is. No Firefox fanboys, no Opera elitists and Internet explorer normies keeping to their respective corners of ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • Extending Microsoft Teams is now officially awesome June 12, 2019
    This article is something of a combination of a technology overview and an opinion piece, detailing my thoughts about extending Microsoft Teams. To me, extending Microsoft Teams has pretty much only now become relevant. Before, the palette was still quite unfinished, but now we’re definitely getting to a point where there are meaningful and cost-effective extension scenarios to cover most of the relevant use cases for most organizations. Don’t take this for an inflammatory or disrespectful ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to resolve “Error initializing application. Error: ***Manifest not found for component id [guid].” when adding an SPFx webpart to Teams? June 4, 2019
    This article describes one way to fix the issue, where uploading and sideloading an SPFx webpart in Microsoft Teams just brickwalls you with a fairly non-descriptive error, and no way to proceed. Luckily, this is usually simple to fix – I’ll describe 2 different solutions I’ve found so far! Problem You’ve got a SPFx webpart, that you’ve packaged as a Teams extension. You can even find it from Teams extensions, but while adding it as a tab, you ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • Enter the BRAVE new world of Chromium forks! June 3, 2019
    I’m trying out new, more long-form content on this blog – tell me what you think about it in the comments section below! This article explains one of the only cryptocurrency initiatives I find to be kind of level-headed – Basic Attention Token – and the browser that’s pretty tightly coupled with it, Brave. Note: If you just want to skip all the banter and download the hecking browser, click this. Preface As far as different cryptocurrencies go, ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • SPFx | Failed to load component. May 15, 2019
    This post describes the typical reasons why one might encounter the following error, and the ways I’ve found to fix them: “Failed to load component. Original error: ***Failed to load path dependency ContosoSPFxWebPartLocalization from component (ContosoSPFxWebPart)“. The error typically looks something like this in the screenshot below: “Something went wrong” when loading your SPFx webpart. What do? Problem This error can be thrown for a lot of different reasons. I’m trying to describe the variants I’ve run ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to resolve the “You cannot edit this page”-error in Modern SharePoint May 6, 2019
    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 ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • “Connecting to site failed: ‘.’, hexadecimal value 0x00, is an invalid character.”, when trying to connect to SharePoint Online May 2, 2019
    This was a peculiar case! A cloud-based “service account” (in quotes, since it’s really just a non-personal user account) on a tenant with ADFS enabled started suddenly getting this error while running console programs configured as scheduled tasks. Connecting to site failed: '.', hexadecimal value 0x00, is an invalid character. Cause of the error Okay – so I found a reason for the issue and a solution, but I’m not sure about the underlying cause for the ridiculous ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • Speaking at SPS Nashville 6/15/2019 April 29, 2019
    Exciting news to share again! My session on using SPFx to extend Microsoft Teams got accepted to SharePoint Saturday Nashville next June. I’m excited to return to the Music City – it was a lot of fun last time, and I have a new session to present this time! Correction: The title has been fixed – it used to say 6/16, but the event is on 15. SharePoint Saturdays are typically on Saturday 😁 Thanks for ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to add multiple aliases to a Managed Property in SharePoint Search? April 25, 2019
    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 ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to fix “Access denied” errors when running “Set-PnPAvailablePageLayouts”? April 23, 2019
    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 ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to access Entity Framework Core’s DbContext in an Azure Function? April 15, 2019
    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 v2 (but it should work the same in v3 !) Another easy one, that I was unable to find much guidance on! But first, let’s start ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • Another fix to the “Connect-PnPOnline : The sign-in name or password does not match one in the Microsoft account system.” error. April 11, 2019
    This post describes a simple way to get around the following error while running Connect-PnPOnline: “The sign-in name or password does not match one in the Microsoft account system.” Truthfully, this one is kind of simple and stupid – but as I’ve seen before, it’s surely worth documenting anyway! Below is an example of such an error. PS C:\> Connect-PnPOnline https://contoso.sharepoint.com/sites/CommunicationSite/ Connect-PnPOnline : The sign-in name or password does not match one in the Microsoft account system. At line:1 ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • Sudden “Function compilation error” for an Azure Function April 2, 2019
    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(Int32 attemptCount) ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • Current User in ASP.NET Core March 28, 2019
    This post describes how to get the currently logged-in user using ASP.NET Core. This is compared with how it’s done in ASP.NET Framework. Background In ASP.NET Core (and .NET Core in general), a lot of things are done a bit differently than what you might be used to if you’re coming from the .NET Framework world. That’s what I’ve been learning building more and more stuff with it, instead of good old .NET Framework. The learning curve ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to disable the footer in Modern SharePoint? March 27, 2019
    Modern SharePoint Online recently got a new, super useful and much-requested new feature: a site footer. This little buddy now makes it possible to create informative, stylish and useful footer areas for 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 ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to revert Modern view back to Classic for SharePoint libraries using PowerShell March 27, 2019
    If your customers are anything like ours, some of them love the new modern library view, some will adjust and some just hate it and want to get as far away from it as possible. While embracing the new stuff is usually smart, there’s some value to sticking to what works as well. The Modern view is going to be the superior choice of the two (if it isn’t already!), but there are a multitude of ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • SharePoint linguistic search features March 20, 2019
    I’ve been posting about different localization/globalization / multilingual options of SharePoint for quite some time. It’s a topic that’s kind of close to my heart, being a non-English speaker with a really difficult native language – one, that Microsoft always gets wrong even though it’s not for the lack of trying! Weirdly enough, while Microsoft messes up the Finnish translation and localization all the time, they do detect and recognize the language surprisingly well. Enough chitchat, though. ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to remove Azure Functions without deleting the Functions App? March 20, 2019
    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 ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • EntityFramework Core – Update-Database error “The EntityFramework package is not installed” March 19, 2019
    Another weird, but simple issue I ran into when building a simple .NET Core application. The article should apply to pretty much any .NET Core version, but the version I was on was 2.2. I was just minding my own business, crafting bits of code into something remotely functional, when I ran into an issue. While trying to apply my changes to the database using .NET Core Entity Framework, executing Update-Database simply failed with the following ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to fix “AADSTS90008: The user or administrator has not consented to use the application”? March 11, 2019
    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 ‘’. 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 ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to format DateTimes in ASP.NET Core? March 6, 2019
    Have you ever struggled 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 myself (just 6 months earlier) and someone else. .NET Date/DateTime formatting is an endless bag of funsies in general. So I thought I’d finally document the different ways one can set up the formatting of DateTime fields in ASP.NET Core projects specifically. Or at ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • SharePoint Search Console – Now available inside Chrome SP Editor! February 27, 2019
    This post is about two of my favorite tools: Chrome SP Editor, and SharePoint Search Query tool. Or maybe better yet, an amalgamation of the two! Description I’ve mentioned the Chrome SP Editor before, and for a good reason. It’s a great tool for any IT Pro or Dev working with SharePoint on a daily basis. It’s maintained by a very talented developer, one of the people behind Valo Intranet, Tomi Tavela. If you’re using the tool, let ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • Resolving the Version conflicts for a downgraded .NET Core 2.1/2.2 web app project February 21, 2019
    I ran into compatibility issues with .NET Core 2.2 on my Azure Functions projects, so I downgraded my whole solution (an Azure Functions project, a helpers library, and a web application project) to 2.1, and got rid of that particular nuisance. This introduced a few new issues, though – namely, I started getting this error whenever trying to restore nuget packages or build the project: NU1107 Version conflict detected for Microsoft.AspNetCore.Razor.Language. Install/reference Microsoft.AspNetCore.Razor.Language 2.2.0 directly to project ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • Easily querying all the database and log file sizes on SQL Server February 20, 2019
    Quite often you get the need to simply quickly query all the database sizes on MS SQL Server. Most typically, for me, this need arises when a development machine gets low on disk space, and I need to check if some database’s log size has been growing, or if something else is wrong. In my daily work, I rarely encounter this requirement anymore. Azure has almost entirely obliterated the need for such diagnostics, since it’s so ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • Fixing “An assembly specified in the application dependencies manifest [projectname].deps.json was not found” February 13, 2019
    This post describes one no-brainer fix to the error “An assembly specified in the application dependencies manifest .deps.json was not found.” I ran into this while running Update-Database for my ASP.NET Core web project, that’s using EntityFrameworkCore 2.1.1. I hadn’t seen this one before, but the error was quite interesting: Error: An assembly specified in the application dependencies manifest (Koskila..AzureFunctions.deps.json) was not found: package: 'Koskila..AzureFunctions', version: '1.0.0' ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • What is “fp.js” – and why is it snooping on your SharePoint usage? February 6, 2019
    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 and gathering data. It loads on pretty much every single page request, so it’s something you’ll bump into any time you open your developer tools! Your customer’s IT might even inquire about it – perhaps wanting to disable it for performance or information security gains. But what is fp.js ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • Google Plus is shutting down – fix your .NET OAuth flow! February 4, 2019
    Google is shutting down their Facebook killer, Google+. While I’m sure there are at least 10 end-users that are sad to see the ill-fated not-that-social-medium go, the implications for Software Developers actually could be far more far-reaching. A lot of implementations of Google’s OAuth seem to rely on Google Plus’s APIs to get gather information about the user. When Google Plus goes down, so will the APIs. Their apparently unsafe implementation seems to be a major ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • Solving yet another “Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.ServerException: Unknown Error” January 29, 2019
    There are a thousand possible things that can throw a “Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.ServerException”, but fewer things, that are ambiguous enough to be called “Unknown error”. This post describes one fairly usual fix for this issue! But let’s get back to the beginning for a second – you get what and when now? When running any code, that provisions new sites (much like https://www.koskila.net/new-pnpsite-fails-with-sitestatus3/), you get an error like this almost immediately: Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.ServerException: Unknown Error at Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.ClientRequest.ProcessResponseStream(Stream responseStream) at Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.ClientRequest.ProcessResponse() at ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • #Hacktoberfest 2018 – a fun way to encourage Open Source contributions! January 28, 2019
    This post is about the Hacktoberfest event in 2018. I contributed to Microsoft’s repositories and a couple of other ones – and it was a lot of fun! Wow – I’m quite behind on this post, but thought it’s worthwhile to give credit where credit is due. Even if that credit comes woefully slowly! In 2018, Microsoft took part in DigitalOcean’s Hacktoberfest-challenge. Designed to encourage Open Source -contributions in a playful and gamified manner (in addition to being ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • Oh no! PowerShell cached my Azure credentials and I messed up wrong customer’s environment! January 24, 2019
    Whoops. This could happen to anyone since the Azure PowerShell (approximately) version 6.3.0 will cache your credentials between sessions without warning you. It’s really easy to run your commands with cached accounts and end up executing your scripts against the wrong environment. In less serious cases, this means that you’ll end up running commandlets twice against the test environment, while you think you’re running them first against the test, and then production. In more serious cases, you’ll deploy ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • Fixing “-2147024891, System.UnauthorizedAccessException” when accessing SharePoint SOAP Web Services January 17, 2019
    This article explains how to fix error 2147024891 (or sometimes -2147024891), “System.UnauthorizedAccessException” when accessing functionality in SharePoint that’s built on top of SOAP Web Services. In a sense, we’re delving into some legacy stuff – Microsoft has still kept SOAP-based SharePoint Web Services included in the product, since a lot of functionality has been built on top of them. We encountered the issue where you suddenly started getting exceptions for Unauthorized Access (-2147024891, System.UnauthorizedAccessException) for ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • “500 Internal Server Error” after updating a WordPress site to PHP 7.3 January 15, 2019
    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 ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • Azure Functions failing on “OPTIONS” call? Quick fix! January 9, 2019
    I recently ran into an issue when developing Azure Functions locally. My SPFx webpart was configured to request information from my locally running Azure Function but suddenly started ending up in error. Browser only showed 404 for the first request (OPTIONS) the SPFx webpart was sending – although I knew the function was up and running! So what to do? Looking at the Azure Functions CLI, this is what it had to say: Executed HTTP request: { "requestId": ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • Thanks for an amazing 2018! December 28, 2018
    The year 2018 is drawing to an end, and it’s a good time for some reflection on what an interesting year it’s been! Personally, quite a few things have happened in the last 12 months – I moved to Canada, started a new/old job, became a father, spoke at awesome events, and met a lot of cool people – just tons of awesome stuff. But personal things aside, 2018 has been an interesting and rewarding ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • The Scary Anatomy of a Microsoft License Fraud December 18, 2018
    Note: While this was originally posted around the Christmas of 2018, and some company or seller names might not be relevant as scammers come and go, the principles in this blog post seem to be valid from the early 2000s to probably until 2038 (when the Internet ends due to the Epochalypse). For those of you, who don’t want to read any extra fluff, let me just offer you this extra-short version of my article in ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to fix Add-PnPApp failing with an Access Denied error December 11, 2018
    This was a peculiar case! An issue I hadn’t run into before, and luckily a disturbingly simple fix. But first, let’s set up the scene: We were running a long-ish PowerShell script using a Global Administrator account. One part of the script was supposed to add and deploy a couple of SharePoint apps. But while running Add-PnPApp, we ran into errors: Add-PnPApp -Path $path -Scope $app.Scope -ErrorAc… , Error: {"error":{"code":"-2147024891, System.UnauthorizedAccessException","message":{"lang":"en-US","value":"Access denied. You do not have ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • Subsite creation in SharePoint fails with error 0x80070005 for any user (even global/farm admins!) December 4, 2018
    This issue seems to pop up bafflingly often, so I thought that it was finally time to document it for future generations. Granted, it mainly considers Classic SharePoint (which is very tightly built around Publishing features) – but Classic is going to be part of our lives for quite a while still, especially for those of us still primarily on SharePoint Server! While trying to provision subsites to your SharePoint Publishing intranet you encounter either a ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • New-PnPSite fails with “SiteStatus” : 3? November 29, 2018
    While running “New-PnPSite” (or actually any other site creation method in PowerShell or programmatically), the site creation fails, and instead you get back an error like the one below: New-PnPSite : {"d":{"Create":{"__metadata":{"type":"SP.Publishing.CommunicationSiteCreationResponse"}, "SiteStatus":3, "SiteUrl":""}}} Ouch! Where does this come from? In the code of New-PnPSite, the actual function call is shown below: var results = ClientContext.CreateSiteAsync(creationInformation); var returnedContext = results.GetAwaiter().GetResult(); (Source) So, the error is not thrown by a PnP cmdlet, but rather comes from SharePoint CSOM. This is pretty normal ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • Issues with User Profile Property visibility in Search-powered functionalities November 27, 2018
    This article applies to a lot of different issues you might be having with your SharePoint-powered site or even custom functionality like mobile apps using SharePoint’s search index. I’ll list a few of the situations, which could be caused by these issues, below: You’re using Search to show a list of User Profiles with their properties, but it’s showing outdated or missing information Your intranet has the classic “Upcoming Birthdays” -webpart (only weather and lunch lists are ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • Bug: “PictureThumbnailURL” always null in SharePoint Online Search results November 21, 2018
    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 ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to fix an Office Group with no Owners November 14, 2018
    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. ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • Help! My “Content and Structure” page in SharePoint Online is gone! November 7, 2018
    First of all: you’re right and your eyes are serving you well. It has indeed disappeared. Starting in October, it’ll be hidden from end users. Microsoft is retiring the “Site Content and Structure” tool in SharePoint Online. Which kind of makes sense, since it’s quite an old feature – albeit, a very useful one. This is where it used to be at: “Content and Structure” under “Site Administration” of SharePoint Site Settings How to access “Content and Structure”? Even ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • Thanks for coming to my session at SPS New England, 10/20! October 20, 2018
    I had the privilege of speaking at SharePoint Saturday New England in Burlington (near Boston) on the 20th of October. Thanks for the super-active crowd! A lot of difficult (e.g. good) questions and great conversations. #Roadtrip’ping to Boston for @SPSNewEngland with the one and only @baywet who just landed from his trip to #MWCP18 – what a champ! Really looking forward to the awesome sessions and meeting all the people at #SPSNE tomorrow! 😁 Session Materials Generic stuff: Useful documentation: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/campaigns/developer-guide/ Code is ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • Speaking at SPS New England on 10/20/2018! October 17, 2018
    I have another exciting announcement to make – I’ll be speaking at SharePoint Saturday New England on 20. of October in Boston!  My session about Microsoft Flow, Azure Functions, and a bit of Cognitive Services was accepted for the developer track. I’ll be presenting at 9:00 – 10:15 AM in room Cranmore. There are a lot of awesome sessions and other awesome speakers, and I’m honored to share with the community what I’ve learned lately while ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • Ignite 2018 recap: What’s new for Azure Functions? October 16, 2018
    Ignite 2018 is done and dusted, and it’s a good time to quickly recap what’s new for Azure Functions in the coming months. They’ve certainly been getting a lot of love from Microsoft, which is GREAT! New features for Azure Functions There were a bunch of exciting new things announced! Not all of the things in this blog post are necessarily completely new – but instead reached General Availability. Let’s go through them one by one… New “Premium ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • Problematic behavior of web.AddSupportedUILanguage(int lcid) in SharePoint 2013 and 2016 October 10, 2018
    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 In SharePoint 2013, web.AddSupportedUILanguage doesn’t actually add new languages This is a known bug in SharePoint 2013. Adding a new language using just this method call doesn’t work unless the targeted web already has one ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • Fixing the “The following functions are in error: Object reference not set to an instance of an object.” error in Azure Functions October 2, 2018
    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! At 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 ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to get application settings for your Azure Function App using C#? September 26, 2018
    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, but this page should explain the easiest way to get your application setting values for each Azure Functions version! While this is something I need often, it has been another little thing, that I always forget – so better document it somewhere. How to get application settings ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to interpret SharePoint’s view count managed properties (like “ViewsLast1Days”)? September 18, 2018
    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 of how you can use them in programmatic scenarios. Read on… Update 12.3.2019: I’ve updated the ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • Properly checking if an item in a folder is a Directory or not in PowerShell September 5, 2018
    I got a great tip from a colleague on how to properly check if an item is a file or a directory. In one case we weren’t really ever sure if another script had finished its running and unzipped a certain zip package into a folder, and we had to verify it had, before continuing the execution. Our initial implementation worked most of the time… But not quite always. The purpose of this blog post ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • Disabling requests to WsaUpload.ashx (Customer Experience Improvement Program) August 28, 2018
    So, I’ve gotten this question from a lot of customers and partners, and I thought it would be 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! Note: If you’re not THAT interested in ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • Subscribe to changes on a SharePoint list August 22, 2018
    SharePoint List Alerts. That magnificent functionality in SharePoint gives you a heads-up anytime someone touches your precious documents (so you can go and revert the changes) or changes files in Style Library (so you can go and remove that pink custom CSS they tried to add). Very useful for a lot of scenarios! The functionality is ancient, quite cumbersome, and CERTAINLY not pretty, but it’s straightforward and quite reliable. On SharePoint Online, the notifications/alerts seem to ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • The fastest way to verify your Client Id and Client Secret are valid with PowerShell August 9, 2018
    So, you have a Client Id and a Client Secret, but don’t know if they work anymore? Maybe they are expired? Maybe someone removed them? Maybe you copy-pasted them from the wrong Key Vault and they belong to another tenant? No worries! We can use PowerShell to validate them. This article explains a simple way to validate and debug your client id and client secret using PowerShell. Solution By using PowerShell, it’s fairly straightforward to verify, that your ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to get the user count for Azure AD Enterprise Application August 1, 2018
    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 the organization’s members are actually using it, or maybe you just want to know about ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • Solving the “Tenant app deployment is only supported in the app catalog site.” error July 31, 2018
    I got an error stating that the “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 ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • Solving “Sorry, your files couldn’t be uploaded. The upload might be too large or the server might be experiencing high network traffic.” in SharePoint July 24, 2018
    This is one of the weird issues that you don’t really run into in your own development environments, but that you more often run into when you actually have non-godlike permissions. Oh, the woes of trying to use SharePoint with anything less than farm/global administrator… :) Anyway, in this post, I’ll describe a couple of solutions to an error: “Sorry, your files couldn’t be uploaded. The upload might be too large or the server might be ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • SharePoint Localization – a (somewhat) comprehensive how-to! July 18, 2018
    This article describes the localization/multilingual capabilities of SharePoint, and your options as an organization using it to achieve a seamless and user-friendly experience for your end-users and content editors. SharePoint’s definitely a powerful platform, but its multilingual features might leave a bit to be desired – and using them successfully requires some understanding of the platform! Background of Multilingual SharePoint Localization – or showing users with different language preferences content in their preferred language – is not ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • 5 ways to enable Custom Scripts for a SharePoint site collection July 16, 2018
    This article explains how to enable custom scripting for any SharePoint site collection. This is functionally equivalent to setting setting “-DenyAddAndCustomizePages 0” or disabling the NoScript feature. Different instructions and solutions apply to SharePoint Online, and on-premises scenarios (SharePoint Server 2013, 2016, and probably 2019) – so see below for all of them. Different solutions are required to resolve the issue for different target sites: Modern SharePoint Team Sites (attached to Office Groups if on SharePoint Online, ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • Fixing an “AADSTS70005” issue by enabling the implicit authentication flow for your Azure AD app July 11, 2018
    This article explains the most typical reasons why you might get an error with an “AADSTS70005” code, and how to fix it. Spoiler alert – it usually just requires enabling Azure AD implicit grant flow for authentication! And let me show you – step by step – how to do that. Reason Another day, another Azure Active Directory error! So what exactly is this AADSTS70005 all about? While either developing or just trying to use an application that ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to show more than 30 categories on Classic SharePoint blog/news sites? July 9, 2018
    Imagine this: you’re using a good old SharePoint blog site, and have a bunch of categories in use. That’s nice and easy – SharePoint offers the categorization functionality natively, and it works decently. Problems arise when you have a lot of categories, though – not all of them will be shown. Even if you tweak the web part to show more items on a page, this isn’t reflected on the whole blog site! This article explains ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • Fixing the error “Web Deploy cannot modify the file on the Destination because it is locked by an external process.” July 6, 2018
    This post describes how to fix the error, where when publishing Azure Functions or Azure App Services you get an error like this: “Web Deploy cannot modify the file on the Destination because it is locked by an external process.” This is luckily another straightforward fix!  Problem Azure Function Publish fails with a message: “Web Deploy cannot modify the file on the Destination because it is locked by an external process.” It is, indeed, caused by some of your files at the ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to fix “AADSTS50011: Reply address did not match because of case sensitivity.” June 26, 2018
    So, you got an AADSTS50011 error code? It’s just Azure AD’s authentication acting up because of an invalid reply address! Here are a bunch of different reasons that could have led to this error. This post describes the variant where the URL’s case sensitivity differs from what’s configured. For me, the most typical scenario where I run into this error is accessing the app from SharePoint. Problem In short: When trying to run a code that ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to fix an Azure Function failing with error “The resource you are looking for has been removed, had its name changed, or is temporarily unavailable.” June 19, 2018
    This post describes one way to resolve a problem, where you receive an error like “The resource you are looking for has been removed, had its name changed, or is temporarily unavailable.” when calling your Azure Functions. Problem Another day, another simple, yet kind of weird issue to solve! I was developing a simple Azure Function to access Microsoft Graph API this time. This particular issue was kind of bugging me since the error message actually had ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to fix “AADSTS50011: The reply address does not match the reply addresses configured” -error June 11, 2018
    So, you have an error with the code AADSTS50011? That’s ok – it’s just Azure AD‘s authentication acting up because of invalid reply URLs! Most of the time, it’s a simple configuration issue. Since there might be a couple of different reasons for this error, this post also describes a couple of different solutions, that might help you overcome the issues. Read on to find out if one of them can help you! Problem So, you’re getting an ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to log in to Microsoft’s websites (MSDN forums, Azure Portal, SharePoint Online) when you get a “Bad Request” error? May 24, 2018
    Every now and then, something like half of Microsoft’s websites will suddenly stop working – this applies to at least Azure Portal, SharePoint Online sites, MSDN forums, Office Online, and probably a thousand other sites. The error is most of the time something like this: Bad Request - Request Too Long HTTP Error 400. The size of the request headers is too long. Or like shown below: Azure Portal throwing an error: “Bad Request – Request Too Long ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • A cautionary tale of relying on the automatic backups in SharePoint Online May 21, 2018
    Microsoft keeps 14-day rolling backups of your SharePoint Online sites. That’s awesome – no need to take backups anymore, right? Not so fast. It’s not always so easy, and by just relying on these backups, you risk losing your data. Forever, I might add. This cautionary tale is about SharePoint Online, but I’d say you’ll need to take caution anytime you’re dealing with Microsoft’s automatic backups. The story starts with the client doing something unwise – a ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to fix Twitter embed in SharePoint May 18, 2018
    Twitter embed has a stupid, built-in failure condition: if the User Agent contains IE10 or older, the embed script will not load. This causes SharePoint embeds to fail. This post describes how to fix that.
    Read more!<br><br>
  • Fixing an unhandled exception about StructureMap configuration failing (messed up assembly bindings) May 17, 2018
    So, you’re running a console program, but while you try running it, you get an error like this: “StructureMap.Exceptions.StructureMapConfigurationException“, with a message like this: “Unable to find the exported Type’s in assembly” (the typo done by Microsoft, not me). There are a number of reasons for this error, but for a fair share of the time, that’s just your assembly bindings being messed up. Luckily, that’s another easy fix!  Problem When running the executable (probably an .exe), ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to fix AADSTS50059: No tenant-identifying information found in either the request or implied by any provided credentials. May 14, 2018
    Have you run into the cryptical “AADSTS50059: No tenant-identifying information found in either the request or implied by any provided credentials.” error? I have. This post will tell you how to fix it. How to fix AADSTS50059? I encountered this error while trying to reload a page with some JavaScript that authenticates against Graph API. It completely blocks the functionality, as it redirects the user to the login page, but instead of successfully logging in (and perhaps ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to show a pop-up in SharePoint May 9, 2018
    This ages-old trick deserves to be published – since it makes it easy to quickly show info from pretty much any other page on pretty much any Classic SharePoint page (in a SharePoint-compatible pop-up). So, here goes: Using SharePoint’s JavaScript library to open an arbitrary pop-up Yes – SharePoint contains all the functionality out-of-the-box, and you almost don’t have to do anything yourself! Let’s see how this works. Okay – long story short. On all Classic SharePoint pages, ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • Thanks for coming to my session in SPS Nashville! May 7, 2018
    I was at Cloud Friday and SharePoint Saturday Nashville 2018 (SPSNash18), and had my session on Saturday – that was a lot of fun! I had the chance to meet a lot of new (and some “old”) people, and I think the community liked my session about Citizen Development tools (for “actual developers”) quite well! Don’t want to crawl through the jabbering? Just the materials are here. Thanks for your interest! Nashville seems to have quite an active ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • Speaking at SPS Nashville on 5/5/18! May 4, 2018
    This Spring is crazy – so many cool announcements to make! I’ll be speaking at SharePoint Saturday in Nashville on 5.5.2018. This one’s a completely new SPS event for me, and I’m honored that my session was accepted on the developer track! Based on the feedback from earlier sessions, I’m really excited to speak to the community about the cool new toys Microsoft is giving us! :) Never been to Nashville – excited to see what the city is like! I’m enjoying ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • Thanks for coming to SPS Houston! Check out the slides and demos :) May 3, 2018
    I had an awesome time at SharePoint Saturday in Houston! I had a lot of fun meeting a lot of new people, and I think the community liked my session about Citizen Development tools quite well! Don’t want to crawl through the jabbering? Just the materials are here. Thanks for your interest! My first time in Houston… And hopefully not last! Everyone knows something about Houston. It’s in the news because of the weather and NASA – the former ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • Speaking at SPS Houston 4/28/18! April 27, 2018
    I have another exciting announcement to make – I’ll be speaking at SharePoint Saturday in Houston on 28.4.2018! It’s a completely new SPS event for me, and I’m honored my session was accepted on the developer track with some other really professional speakers. I’m really hyped to share more of the cool stuff I’ve been working on!  Looking forward to seeing what Houston is like! Since I haven’t been to Houston before, let alone attended a SharePoint Saturday there, I’m really looking forward to ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • Materials for my SPS TC session: “Citizen Developer Tools are not just for Citizen Developers” now available! April 27, 2018
    Whoops – this post comes quite late, as the session was a couple of weeks ago already.  I recently had a session at SharePoint Saturday Twin Cities (SPS TC for short) and thought I’d share my materials and document my experiences. Oh, and do the shout-outs, since I referenced some materials and tools by some extremely talented people! Don’t want to crawl through the jabbering? Just the materials are here. Thanks for your interest, and you’re welcome! What ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • Solving Azure Web Application’s first load performance issues April 22, 2018
    Is your Azure Web Application suffering from absolutely horrible load times every time someone accesses it for the first time every 15 minutes or so? Mine was. It was pitiful. I was developing a web-based service using EF6 and ASP.NET MVC 5, where all the assets were hosted in Azure. Even though the app was reasonably lightweight and usually responded very fast, the first time someone accessed it in a while it took 20-60 seconds to ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • Speaking at SPS Twin Cities on 4/14/2018! April 9, 2018
    Exciting announcement to make – I’ll be speaking at SharePoint Saturday in Twin Cities (SPS TC for short) on 4/14/42018! It’s one of the biggest SPS events worldwide, and I’m honored my session was accepted on the developer track. I’m really hyped to share some of the cool stuff I’ve been working on! Looking forward to an awesome SPS TC again! I have attended SharePoint Saturday Twin Cities once before, in 2017, while living in Wisconsin. ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • Opening a web part page in maintenance mode March 27, 2018
    Can’t access a web part page because of a broken web part? Yeah, that’s a classic issue – and it’s nicely ported into the Modern world, too! In these cases, web part page maintenance mode comes in handy! There’s a query parameter available for accessing it. For whatever reason, it’s different for Classic and Modern mode, though. Why make things easy if you can make them difficult, right? :) Instructions for Modern Mode Modern SharePoint is a ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • Troubleshooting: Anonymous access failing for a SharePoint site collection March 22, 2018
    Debugging SharePoint On-Premises configuration issues is the best thing since sliced bread, right? This post is about allowing/enabling Anonymous Access to a site collection – a simple configuration, that “simply works” like once every ten times you try it.
    Read more!<br><br>
  • Hackathon win: Resolving Managed Metadata Madness March 20, 2018
    I won a hackathon! They had fun topics, it was a cool challenge, a well-organized event, and had cool prizes. Since this is the first hackathon I ever took part in, I thought I’d post something about my experience and the solution(s) I figured out. Description I recently took part in a fun hackathon organized by DevPost for Microsoft. Earlier, I posted some info about my hackathon entry, How to Resolve Managed Metadata Madness in SharePoint? I had played ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to show a Classic SharePoint page in dialog mode (without SharePoint’s full-blown chrome) March 12, 2018
    Classic SharePoint actually has a very handy piece of functionality, using which you can hide most of the SharePoint chrome (like header and navigation), and hence make the page a lot sleeker. This is especially useful for showing the contents in a dialog window – which SharePoint also supports natively through JavaScript! This post describes how. How to show any (classic) SharePoint page in dialog mode? Pretty easy – it’s handled via a URL parameter! Yeah, weirdly ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to remove Foxit Drive in Foxit Reader? March 2, 2018
    If you’re like me, you’re not using Adobe Reader, but rather switched to Foxit Reader years ago, and never looked back. Foxit has a great PDF printer, it’s sleek and for the most part a pleasure to use – in other words, it’s a great reader. But it’s not perfect. See, the default save location is “Foxit Drive”, and it pops up any time you try to save your document, and at least for me ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • Solving error “AADSTS90013: Invalid input received from the user” March 1, 2018
    I stumbled upon a customer that complained about some pages in their intranet throwing weird errors with authentication. Those pages seemed to have one thing in common – there was a Yammer embed (or a SharePoint script webpart with Yammer embed script in it, to be precise) there. The error code they got was “AADSTS90013: Invalid input received from the user”. Below, you can see an example of the error screen. AADSTS90013: Invalid input received from the ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • Don’t remove the root web of your classic SharePoint Site Collection! February 27, 2018
    A quick heads-up – if you remove the root site (or RootWeb, like it’s called in the code) of your classic SharePoint Site Collection, that’s going to cause you some grey hairs. It might even, in some rare cases, be unrecoverable! The following post describes what kind of issues you might run into, if you remove the root web instead of the whole site collection, and how to remove the site collection instead. Update 13.7.2019:SharePoint Online ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to output console or PowerShell transcript to a file in Windows February 1, 2018
    Every now and then, you will run into a situation, where you will need to somehow dump the console output (or transcript) of running a console application. I’m actually going to argue it happens a lot more often than one would think – in my case, any time a customer requires a webjob or a function, that one would normally deploy to Azure, being run on the servers of the customer. You’ll need a way ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to solve the “Unified Groups aren’t supported.” -error January 16, 2018
    When trying to use some functionality, that relies on Unified Groups, you’re getting errors in the console, similar to this: “Unified Groups aren’t supported.” In truth, this most likely means, that Unified Groups (that’s the internal/technical name for Office 365 Groups) is not enabled for this particular user. That breaks a bunch of different features for them since the Graph API for Groups of course won’t work. This post describes one way to fix this issue! How to solve ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to Resolve Managed Metadata Madness in SharePoint? January 12, 2018
    Using Azure Functions and Cognitive Services Text API to enrich a Flow that fills Metadata for new items in a Modern SharePoint Team Site. That’s, in a nutshell, the solution I submitted to a recent online hackathon. Quite a mouthful, isn’t it? The whole solution (and a public vote, if you’re interested!) is available here: https://devpost.com/software/resolving-managed-metadata-madness-in-sharepoint – this blog post will describe the solution and the reasoning behind it. Preface Some time ago my manager asked me to take ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • Using “DetectedLanguage” to return only localized results from SharePoint Search index January 9, 2018
    Localization and targeting of content in multilingual SharePoint installations is always an issue. SharePoint offers a multitude of ways to profile content based on user language (or other properties), but none of the solutions are foolproof. This post describes how to fetch only localized results from the SharePoint Search index, which solves at least some of the issues. Description SharePoint Search index can be used in quite a few different ways. Probably the most typical way is ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to form links to Planner tasks January 7, 2018
    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 ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • Call to sites Graph API requires “owner” permissions for site collection regardless of app permissions December 19, 2017
    Okay – yet another weird issue, and a hacky workaround. I was developing an app that was calling a SharePoint site through Graph API, using jQuery $.ajax call (developed in TypeScript), and ran into surprising 401 errors. I did find a workaround but am also working on an actual fix. Description To get SharePoint site ID, which is needed when accessing SharePoint lists, the calls seemed to fail for my test accounts. Everything was working fine for ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to fix the “The SPListItem being updated was not retrieved with all taxonomy fields” error December 12, 2017
    Are you getting an error like “The SPListItem being updated was not retrieved with all taxonomy fields” when you try adding or modifying values in a TaxonomyField of a list item in SharePoint, either using the GUI or with PowerShell or even programmatically? Then read ahead, I’ve got a quick and dirty solution! Reason After quick googling and some frustration, I figured out the probable reason for the issue; SharePoint went and broke the link between the ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • Alternative Languages in SharePoint forcing the (cumbersome) use of localized Managed Properties December 7, 2017
    Localization and multilingual environments in SharePoint are an endless source of interesting issues and blog post topics. In one case, we had a tenant created originally in English, and a site collection created in Finnish. In this particular case, SharePoint somehow messed up the language settings and ended up requiring the use of localized managed property names on the search center of that site collection. Nowhere else, though. That ended up being unexpected, unintuitive, and ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to resolve Webpart title changes not reflecting for some users? December 5, 2017
    This article describes an interesting feature of the Multilingual User Interface in Classic SharePoint. So, in short, I encountered another, very interesting feature of Classic SharePoint Publishing sites, where multiple display languages were in use. When changing the web part title on a web part on a Classic SharePoint page, it seems like SharePoint saves the changes for you. In reality, only some users see the changes. So, in short: Some other users, on some devices, see ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • 4 ways to fix error AADSTS65001 (The user or administrator has not consented to use the application) November 20, 2017
    Have you run into an AADSTS65001 error with your application, that tries to authenticate against Azure AD? I sure have – seems to happen at least every other time when I’m building something that uses AAD to authenticate against SharePoint. Fixing issues with Azure AD authentication for Enterprise applications can be tricky. But a lot of the time, this is just another Azure Active Directory error that we can fix easily. This article contains multiple solutions ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to use the Azure AD associated with your SharePoint Online November 3, 2017
    With the usual configuration of Office 365 and Azure, there might be multiple Azure AD (AAD) instances associated with your subscription. When creating registrations to whatever SharePoint-related apps that you might be using, if you create the registration to the wrong Azure AD, it can’t access the data in your SharePoint. Or at least without further configurations, it probably won’t get any data from your Office Graph API or whatever else you might want to ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • New version of Microsoft.IdentityModel.Clients.ActiveDirectory (ADAL.NET) is out – good time to update! October 27, 2017
    There’s now a new version of the assembly Microsoft.IdentityModel.Clients.ActiveDirectory available – plenty of reasons to update right away! Let me offer you one hot take on the matter since the earlier 3.x -versions of the package had some issues. Why bother updating? In an earlier post, I described an issue I had with Microsoft.IdentityModel.Clients.ActiveDirectory.Platform not getting copied during the build in a referencing project. In 3.17.0, which the developers published this month, they fixed the issue! The new package ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • A quick (and handy!) hack to force referenced assembly to getting copied to a project October 23, 2017
    Visual Studio failing to copy a referenced assembly to a project in build might lead to surprising runtime errors. This post will explain one method of fixing these issues, using Microsoft.IdentityModel.Clients.ActiveDirectory as the example – as earlier versions of that assembly had this issue! Problem After the build, you might get this kind of error: Could not load file or assembly 'Microsoft.IdentityModel.Clients.ActiveDirectory.Platform, Version=3.13.1.846, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35' or one of its dependencies. The system cannot find the file specified. System.IO.FileNotFoundException at ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • The effect of using Managed Navigation instead of Structural on SharePoint Online September 22, 2017
    Have you ever noticed that your SharePoint site just gets slower and slower? That’s probably because the performance of Structural Navigation is absolutely horrible, especially vs. Managed Navigation. This blog post includes our findings about the issue, and I also include some explanation of the reasons behind the difference and a simple comparison to Search-based navigation. Structural Navigation The first option would be structural navigation, which is more or less the traditional, easy solution. Without anything else ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • Solving Microsoft Teams Licensing Error “errorCodeTeamsDisabledForTenantForbidden” September 13, 2017
    This post explains how to fix the “errorCodeTeamsDisabledForTenantForbidden” error when trying to add guest users to the Microsoft Teams channel. This issue might arise when a user is invited to a channel in your organization’s Microsoft Teams for the first time. Fixing it usually just requires just a flip of a switch, but might also include some waiting. Symptoms You get an error screen like this when trying to join a Teams channel as a guest user. Teams ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • SharePoint-Teams -integration using a tab September 11, 2017
    This post describes one possible scenario for SharePoint-Teams -integration, how to achieve that, and what kind of issues there might be. Teams? What’s that? At Blue Meteorite, we at the Valo team have been leveraging Teams since early 2017 as our main communications channel. For us, it complements Yammer, email, and Skype for Business quite nicely, although to be fair, it’s not always 100% clear which channel would be optimal for a certain piece of communication… :) The ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to solve errors about missing PnP Cmdlets on PowerShell September 10, 2017
    This blog post briefly describes how to solve some of the most typical errors about missing PnP Cmdlets when using Windows Powershell (or SharePoint Online Management Shell). Symptoms When trying to run some PnP-related cmdlet, you get an error similar to the ones below: Connect-PnPOnline : The term 'Connect-PnPOnline' is not recognized as the name of a cmdlet, function, script file, or o perable program. Check the spelling of the name, or if a path was included, verify that ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • Fixing the “For security reasons DTD is prohibited in this XML document.” issue July 14, 2017
    This post describes a couple of ways to fix the issue “For security reasons DTD is prohibited in this XML document”. At least for me, it appeared when trying to access SharePoint Online using Powershell or a console program using OfficeDev.PnP (which in turn uses CSOM). Error When running any piece of code, whether in PowerShell, .exe console, or anything else than the code behind relies on .NET Framework, you get an error like this: For security reasons DTD ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • Unorthodox configuration: How to use VLK and Click-to-run Office Apps side-by-side (Visio and Office 2016 as an example) July 4, 2017
    Ever had issues with different versions of Office programs not living in harmony together? Me too! This post describes how I was able to fix the issue and get Visio and Office 2016 of different installation types to play well together. Preface This blog post was inspired by my need to have Office 365 ProPlus (2016 versions) and Visio running side-by-side on my laptop. That turned out to be a lot more complicated than it arguably should ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to prevent Outlook and other programs from stealing focus April 24, 2017
    Imagine being deeply focused on a very important and time-sensitive task and, all of a sudden, an incoming email throws you off by jumping into focus. I am sure you don’t need to imagine too hard as this has likely annoyed you in the recent past too, right? Here is a guide to help you make sure that no piece of software has the ability to “jump to the top” and activate your cursor on it, ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • USA 5: Working for Valo Intranet – and what’ve I been up to last few months April 12, 2017
    I haven’t actually written that much about my daily work on this blog. I’m currently most involved with Blue Meteorite’s North America team and specialized in partner acquisition and support. Most of my time is spent either onboarding new partners or supporting the old ones in their Valo Intranet deployments. And boy, is that not a lot of fun to do! Never before have I been able to work with so many talented people from ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • Using SharePoint Search Query Tool March 13, 2017
    If you’re working on SharePoint deployments, and aren’t familiar with the SharePoint Search Query Tool, you’re probably doing something wrong. Or you’ve got a really troublefree tenant and simple requirements.. :) At least for technical issues, it’s the #1 tool for debugging what’s in the index and what isn’t. This blog post describes how to use it to investigate SharePoint Online Search index issues. First of all, you can get the tool from here: https://github.com/pnp/PnP-Tools/releases. Logging in ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • EIG / Site5 review – Part 2, the Aftermath March 9, 2017
    This is part 2 in my “One web developer’s story about the downfall of web hosting” series – a frustrating firsthand experience with a formerly-great web hosting provider taken over by EIG (Endurance International Group). You can find the first post here:EIG/Site5 review – Part 1, experience with Site5 before and after EIG takeover I was able to actually get most of the money EIG got from me back from them by opening a Visa claim. ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • The easiest way to debug Seed-method in Code-first migrations in Entity Framework March 7, 2017
    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 ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • Using Google Analytics with SharePoint February 21, 2017
    This post describes why it’s beneficial to use a user analytics tool in your intranet. I use Google Analytics as an example of such a tool, and different deployment options for SharePoint intranets are covered briefly. Why would I use Google Analytics with my SharePoint intranet? In general, it’s absolutely necessary for you to know your users if you want to deliver an enjoyable user experience. One key aspect of knowing them is knowing what they do, ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • Fixing the “Could not load file or assembly or one of its dependencies” error February 15, 2017
    This post describes how to fix the “Could not load file or assembly ‘’ or one of its dependencies. An attempt was made to load a program with an incorrect format.” error.  The solution described in this post shows you how to resolve the issue when you’re deploying from Visual Studio but get an error somewhat like the above when deploying to IIS or when opening your website after the deployment. This applies to your local development ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • Site Mailboxes deprecated on SharePoint Online – use Office Groups instead February 6, 2017
    Microsoft is deprecating, or even removing one of the most widely used features in SharePoint sites – Site Mailboxes. For the end-user, this might not mean much but still requires some additional work from the administration side. In this post, I’m trying to give a rough outline, of what you (as an administrator/content producer) should do. So, what exactly is happening? I just noticed the following in our SharePoint Online tenant administration: We're removing Site Mailboxes in SharePoint ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • USA, 4: You really, REALLY need a car to get around. Hence, Cadillac! February 5, 2017
    This is the fourth post depicting my and my wife’s excursion to the USA. We are in the country to study, travel, business and leisure. The short version of the post: we went and got a car because we didn’t have any other options. So, what’s up? We’ve been in the country for a couple of weeks. If there’s one thing, that’s become painfully clear, it’s the fact that you really need a car to get anywhere ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • USA, 3: Epic and local IT industry excursions January 27, 2017
    This post is about our first excursion with the international student group to see Epic System’s HQ. During the first days, I also walked around the town a bit in search of wall plug adapters and accidentally made contact with the local IT industry. Getting my weird EU tech working in the States I took some tech with me to the States – namely a laptop, its dock, and a couple of mobile phones. I didn’t want ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • Fixing Lenovo T460S Wifi connectivity issues (removing the evil versions of Intel Dual Bank Wireless-AC 8260 driver) January 24, 2017
    I recently received a new work laptop – Lenovo T460S. A cute little thing with impressive performance and reasonably good battery life. However, what people frequently complain about online in regards to this laptop, is its absolutely, horribly awful wifi. This, in turn, is probably caused by its bad wifi chip, Intel Dual Band Wireless-AC 8260. And they’re right – it’s a load of crap. The laptop out-of-the-box, at least for me, requires a very strong ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • USA, 2: Traveling to Chicago O’Hare for Business and Leisure January 24, 2017
    This is the second post about my and my wife’s excursion to the USA and all the traveling we have done. We’ll be spending 6 months in the country, to study, attend conferences, travel, and compare the culture to Finland. Hopefully, we will learn something about ourselves and the world along the way! Transatlantic flight The trip from Kangasala to Whitewater was definitely not a fast one. Driving from Kangasala to Helsinki-Vantaa Airport in Finland took a ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • Getting Connect-MsolService (and other Azure Active Directory PowerShell cmdlets) to work January 20, 2017
    In this post, I’ll try to archive everything that you need to download and install to get commandlets like Connect-MsolService working. I’ve had to do it a couple of times when changing laptops, so it’s good to document them somewhere! :) So, when would you need to follow this guide and install the modules described here? Mostly this comes to play, when you’re switching machines, try to run the SharePoint Online Management shell but it doesn’t ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • USA, 1: Initial Thoughts January 20, 2017
    I’m staying in the United States of America for the first 6 months of 2017 for both work and leisure. In case you’d need to contact me during that time, that’s doable by normal means (Twitter/email). Just the timeframe’s a tad different due to my location being 8 hours from Finland (-6 UTC time zone). This blog post kind of sets the initial mood and expectations for the trip. Excuse me – who’s doing what? So – ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • EIG/Site5 review – Part 1, experience with Site5 before and after EIG takeover December 30, 2016
    This article is part 1 in my “One web developer’s story about the downfall of web hosting” series; a frustrating firsthand experience with a formerly-great web hosting provider taken over by EIG (Endurance International Group). You can find the second post here:EIG / Site5 review – Part 2, the Aftermath Okay, so this is going to be a bloggish rant about EIG – Endurance International – a web “hosting” company that’s ruining the web for everyone. ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • Remove-SPODeletedSite – Actually removing a SharePoint Online Site Collection December 2, 2016
    This post describes the actual, working, and the fast process of removing a site collection in SharePoint Online using the Remove-SPODeletedSite commandlet in SharePoint Online Management Shell (a flavor of PowerShell). Description Sometimes you need to get rid of a site collection you’ve created in SharePoint Online. The most typical example perhaps is removing the team site created for a group of people working together. That’s pretty simple and there are a few ways of doing that. For example, ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • Launching a new debugger instance from code in Visual Studio November 16, 2016
    This post describes a quick solution to launching a new Visual Studio instance for debugging the code. There are 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 (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 ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • Fixing the “No Entity Framework provider found for the ADO.NET provider with invariant name ‘System.Data.SqlClient'” error November 12, 2016
    This post describes the fix to THE “No Entity Framework provider found for the ADO.NET provider with invariant name ‘System.Data.SqlClient’” error, which Visual Studio throws at your face when you try to run an application on any Windows-based system (or which you’ve dug out of event logs). Also, your application is probably built on .NET Framework and Entity Framework. Let’s get into it! Error When debugging/running your code, somewhere in your code where you’re supposed to access the database ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • Using Dispatcher to update values in GUI elements from a background thread October 13, 2016
    If you’re developing something like a WPF app and you 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 probably need to use Dispatcher, or otherwise, you’ll run into issues with the GUI elements being owned by another thread, and ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • Disabling Delve/MySite redirection from SharePoint Site Collections October 4, 2016
    In this post, I outline 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 aren’t willing to ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • Applying Entity Framework’s Code-First Migrations against a Database in Azure by running Update-Database September 16, 2016
    This post describes how to run Entity Framework’s code-first migrations against a database located in Windows Azure. This is done by running the Update-Database commandlet with suitable switches, see below. The problem and symptoms Okay, so you’re developing your MVC+EF cool web app with a database in Azure, and you’re using code-first migrations. Cool! What’s nice with code-first-migrations is the fact they are run automatically even in the cloud the next time your app is running (as ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • Updating files in an App Part (SharePoint Add-in) September 12, 2016
    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 ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • Fixing “Connect-SPOService : Identity Client Runtime Library (IDCRL) could not look up the realm information for a federated sign-in.” -error September 2, 2016
    This post describes my super-simple fix to a weird error about “Identity Client Runtime Library (IDCRL)” failing with federated sign-in when running PowerShell scripts against SharePoint Online. One typical form of the error might be something along the lines of “Identity Client Runtime Library (IDCRL) could not look up the realm information for a federated sign-in.” coming up. This could happen for example, when Connect-SPOService is called, but it’s probably not exclusively associated with that ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • Exception of type ‘System.OutOfMemoryException’ was thrown. August 25, 2016
    This post describes one of the more no-brainerish ways of fixing a ‘System.OutOfMemoryException’ exception being thrown in your ASP.Net MVC application using C# and Entity Framework. Problem While developing a web project, for example, an ASP.NET MVC web application that is using EF, sometimes when handling a lot of data or complex entities on your dev machine, you encounter this error: OutOfMemoryException: Exception of type 'System.OutOfMemoryException' was thrown.] System.Text.StringBuilder.ToString() +35 System.IO.StreamReader.ReadToEnd() +123 ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • Fixed: Cannot use JSX unless the ‘–jsx’ flag is provided August 2, 2016
    This blog post is about fixing issues related to building a project with TypeScript files. Basically, if your jsx or tsx -files are not getting built to js-files (which is what the browser understands) in Visual Studio’s build, this post might solve the issue for you. Description Whilst converting a project using React.js to TypeScript (and, hence, to use .ts and .tsx files instead of .js and .jsx) I stumbled upon this error: Cannot use JSX unless the ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • Tip: Scroll Solution Explorer to current file in Visual Studio 2012, 2013, 2015 and 2017 July 25, 2016
    This quick post describes how to get the Solution Explorer to actually track your currently open file. For some reason, this extremely useful feature is disabled by default in Visual Studio. Enabling it helps you to better conserve your context, and see which part of your solution you’re in, while you’re developing a complex piece of software. Give it a try, in case you haven’t already! It’s great and extremely useful! :) How to enable the Solution ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • Solving the “Spatial types and functions are not available …” -problem June 7, 2016
    This page describes multiple ways to fix the  ‘Spatial types and functions are not available for this provider because the assembly ‘Microsoft.SqlServer.Types’ version 10 or higher could not be found.‘ exception which comes up during debugging or publishing your program, app or service using DbGeography. Symptoms While running a console program or perhaps installing an ASP.NET MVC website on a machine, where SQL Server (apart from the one that comes with the Visual Studio) has not been ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • 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.” May 29, 2016
    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 a 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: public int AreaId { get; set; } public string EstateId { get; set; } (example stripped of extra code and other columns for clarity) And after adding the ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • RefinableString -managed property in SharePoint Online not populating for all items April 5, 2016
    This post describes a peculiar problem that a customer had. In their intranet, all of their employees had a managed metadata -typed managed property in SharePoint User Profile Service and a mapping from that property to RefinableString31. RefinableString31, in turn, was used on Search DisplayTemplates to show the textual value of the managed metadata field. Symptoms The mapping and displaying of the values worked beautifully – except for one user. Her people search results profile wouldn’t show ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • Tweaking the SharePoint list view search box to filter on managed metadata fields March 17, 2016
    This post contains a really small, but nifty tweak to the search box in SharePoint list views. Applies to 2013, and Office 365 (for now). Pretty basic stuff, but had to figure this out for a customer so can just as well document it here :) Okay – so a customer needed to be able to filter view items in a SharePoint list by values in a keyword field (managed metadata, with values added by editor ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • Duplicate object values in ASP.NET MVC Display Templates? Easy fix! February 14, 2016
    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 ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • Fixing “An error occurred while updating the entries” while running code-first migrations in MVC 5 app February 7, 2016
    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 is 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 ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • Fixing error “Cannot open server – – requested by the login. Client with IP address – – is not allowed to access the server.” in Azure deployments from Visual Studio January 30, 2016
    This article explains how to work your way around the exception ‘Cannot open server – requested by login…’ The issue is caused by Azure’s firewall logic, which might sometimes appear a little bit overzealous for simple development workloads, and might stop you from accessing your databases from your development machine. But just as everything else in Azure, the firewall exists for a reason, and working with it just requires a couple of extra clicks, is all. ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • Using PowerShell to set ULS logging level to “extra verbose” to catch all the events in the logs January 21, 2016
    This blog post describes how to set SharePoint’s ULS level to “Extra Verbose” (VerboseEx) using PowerShell. This is not possible using the browser UI, so some POSH magic is required! Luckily, it’s quite straightforward, but to avoid filling your hard drive(s) with huge log files, you should reset the level when you’re done debugging! Description of the solution By default, ULS logging is somewhat non-detailed. This means that a lot of data that could be used to ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • Using PowerShell to modify anonymous access permissions on SharePoint On-Premises January 5, 2016
    This post is about managing Anonymous Access on a SharePoint site (SPWeb) using PowerShell commandlets. It’s often a lot more feasible and even easier than using the browser interface! In some cases, it’s borderline impossible to avoid it anyway – since accessing the GUI switch might not be possible. Description Assume you have a site collection that you have published to the whole world. You’ll have anonymous access enabled at both web application and site collection levels, ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • Powershell Error: Cannot uninstall the LanguagePack 0 because it is not deployed. November 17, 2015
    Have you ever run into this, very non-descriptive and weird SharePoint error message “Cannot uninstall the LanguagePack 0 because it is not deployed”? You could encounter it while running some PowerShell scripts – most typically when trying to update a wsp solution. I have, and luckily often easily solved! Symptoms Assume you’re trying to install, update or uninstall a SharePoint solution (.wsp package) using PowerShell-commands Install-SPSolution, Update-SPSolution, or Uninstall-SPSolution (respectively). The operation fails with the following (or similar) error: Error: ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • “Server Error in ‘/’ Application” or “Parser Error” – it’s actually a malformed web.config killing your ASP.NET-application or SharePoint October 20, 2015
    This post describes how to resolve a kind of cryptic and oddly misdescriptive error message about Parser Error on your ASP.NET application or (an On-Premises) SharePoint site. I ran into this after deploying wsp-packages to a SharePoint farm, but you can apparently get this on ASP.NET MVC sites, too. The error doesn’t actually tell you what’s wrong, so figuring it out took a while. Though hopefully, it helps you! Symptoms: Parser Error from a random-looking location Once you navigate to ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • Visual Studio 2010 fails to show the design view of an aspx-page October 1, 2015
    This post is about solving the issue with Visual Studio 2010 failing to show the design view of an .aspx-page. Luckily, it’s an easy and pretty classical fix. Symptoms Whilst trying to view or edit an aspx-page in design mode within Visual Studio 2010, the window is just plain empty and there’s little you can do about it – selecting view markup or hitting F7 may not do anything, and restarting the Visual Studio doesn’t help. Design view ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • The quickest way to download all the wsp-packages in a SharePoint farm September 21, 2015
    Sometimes – pretty often in the good old on-premises world, actually – you’ll need to have a copy of all the packages that are deployed to a certain farm. So – how to download all of the deployed farm solutions (essentially, cabinet files renamed to .wsp) from a farm? Luckily, it’s quite easy! Solution To download all deployed farm solutions (wsp-packages) from a SharePoint farm is pretty simple using PowerShell. No need to download individual packages through cumbersome ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • Fixing the error: “The specified path, file name, or both are too long. The fully qualified file name must be less than 260 characters, and the directory name must be less than 248 characters.” September 3, 2015
    This post describes a few different ways of fixing the “The specified path, file name, or both are too long. The fully qualified file name must be less than 260 characters, and the directory name must be less than 248 characters.” error. One can encounter this issue when trying to package/publish a SharePoint solution, web site, or an Azure Webjob. Symptoms Visual Studio throws the following error when packaging a SharePoint solution to a .wsp file when ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to log into SharePoint as a different user August 7, 2015
    SharePoint Server 2013, 2016, and 2019 versions don’t have that old and familiar “sign in as a different user” option in the site menu, and for the time being, nor does SharePoint Online. However, sometimes it’s very useful functionality to have, so it’s a bit weird Microsoft chose to get rid of the option. This post outlines a method that I’ve found to work quite well for making SharePoint ask for credentials so that you can ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • Identifying IE11 compatibility mode in SharePoint July 22, 2015
    In this post, I describe how you can figure out if IE11 (Internet Explorer 11) has jumped into compatibility mode. You will run into this requirement every now and then when trying to figure out some SharePoint browser compatibility mess-up. This is quite frequent because in compatibility mode IE does its best to screw up your CSS. Compatibility view now and before Microsoft has been pretty keen on introducing new ways to handle browser compatibility and making ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • The simplest way to create a thread on SharePoint July 2, 2015
    This post describes the easiest (probably) and most straightforward way of creating a new Thread in your SharePoint (or any other .NET) server-side/desktop code. Solution Let’s face it – one should not create new Threads lightly when developing SharePoint solutions, but sometimes it is difficult to avoid. Or sometimes it’s just the simplest way to get around weird framework limitations. This one time we were developing a pretty simple functionality, where we needed to create a few fields ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • How to properly use SPWeb.AllowUnsafeUpdates June 27, 2015
    At times you may need to allow unsafe updates for SPWeb objects in order 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 is good practice to limit the change to as small a scope as possible. This is true even though the setting only persisted for the ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • “File not found”error when trying to activate a custom feature on SharePoint June 20, 2015
    This post is about fixing one of the most annoyingly unspecific errors that you can get when activating (Feature Framework) features on SharePoint – “File not found”. Whatever that might mean, right? Problem Ugh. A plain and simple “File not found” is one of the more annoying errors one can stumble upon when trying to activate a feature. It usually gets thrown at you quite quickly after hitting the activation button on your feature management page – ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • Attaching the Visual Studio debugger to the right IIS worker process June 13, 2015
    Every now and then comes the time when you’d actually need to debug something, and then you’ll likely be using your Visual Studio to attach the debugger to one or more processes. Using CKSDev to attach to all IIS worker processes (w3wp.exe), or if you don’t use CKSDev, just pressing ctrl+p and selecting the processes from the list, is often a good enough solution. However, sometimes that makes your dev box sluggish, or maybe catches exceptions ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • Programmatically creating readable internal names for new SharePoint fields June 5, 2015
    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 they should appreciate it at the very least! In short, I’ll show you how to avoid SharePoint’s dirty encoding (like replacing a space with “_x0020_”). This applies when you’re using server-side code to generate fields. Problem: non-readable internal names for ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • Troubleshooting guide for Windows hosts file May 31, 2015
    This post describes how to fix possible issues with the Windows hosts file. I’ll first document how to find the damn file, and then go through a bunch of options on what to check and how to fix different possible issues. Opening the hosts -file First of all, the host’s file location is usually: C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts (link may or may not work depending on your security settings and browser version, but you can always copy-paste it to your ...
    Read more!<br><br>
  • Windows Authentication fails on SharePoint for all hostnames (other than localhost) May 28, 2015
    This post describes how to fix Windows Authentication on a SharePoint server that is failing on other local addresses other than localhost. Symptoms You get the standard Windows/Basic Authentication prompt when accessing your SharePoint site, but the site won’t accept your credentials when you are accessing the site using an address like http://website. However, using an address like http://localhost works fine (but of course may cause other problems). You also get event log entries like this (most likely in ...
    Read more!<br><br>
5 12 votes
Article Rating
Subscribe
Notify of
guest

0 Comments
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments