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 further back, year 2017 living, working and traveling in the United…Continue reading 2019 – Year Review (200th post on this blog!)
Azure Functions host quits with “The system cannot find the file specified”
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, 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 first encountered this by the Azure…Continue reading Azure Functions host quits with “The system cannot find the file specified”
How to extract more information out of your Azure Functions host failing silently?
I dont’ 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 Azure Functions host (func.exe), when it’s just silently failing. This means by default you won’t get any information about what’s going wrong. However, a couple of steps should get you…Continue reading How to extract more information out of your Azure Functions host failing silently?
WordPress media uploads failing after year/month change? Easy fix :)
Oh, WordPress just keeps on giving! 😂 So it’s another year, and it’s time for some Y2k20-issues! I was too young to fix any Y2K-issues myself, so I guess it’s just fitting something breaks now. This article explains one possible fix to a situation, where your pictures in WordPress fail to show up. Symptoms So this was a fairly random WordPress-issue I encountered. It goes something like this: Suddenly each and every uploaded picture on your WordPress site fails to display. It’s available and editable…Continue reading WordPress media uploads failing after year/month change? Easy fix :)
App Service refuses connections with error: “No connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it”
This blog post describes a very specific fix to a very specific issue. In a software project that consisted of a desktop client application and some APIs hosted on Azure, we ran into an error where some connections to APIs would fail with an error like this: No connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it. What gives? Description Imagine this: You’re connecting to an API hosted by an Azure App Service (“Web App”, if you wish) using an application or a…Continue reading App Service refuses connections with error: “No connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it”
Obfuscar 2.0 errors with loading types from assembly
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, this is what I was working towards: However, I wasn’t quite having the success I hoped for. Whilst the obfuscation was successful, and I could even reference the obfuscated DLL and use…Continue reading Obfuscar 2.0 errors with loading types from assembly
WordPress blog article edit mode: No Tags or Categories visible?
This post describes a couple of useful solutions or workarounds for an awkward situation, where you can’t manage the metadata of your articles on WordPress. This hampers greatly your ability to organize your posts – and if you’re using WordPress like I’m using, also lowers the visibility of your new articles (I’m using the tags as hashtags when sharing to social channels)! We don’t want that. But what’s actually causing it? Description of the issue So you know that little panel on the right hand…Continue reading WordPress blog article edit mode: No Tags or Categories visible?
Resolving error AADSTS90056
This post details my very simple solution to an extremely unnecessary and kind of a simple error I encountered when logging into SharePoint. However, you could run into the same error after configuring Azure Active Directory authentication to a custom web application. The error message is as such: AADSTS90056: This endpoint only accepts POST, OPTIONS requests. Received a GET request. I’ve seen another version of the same error, where the endpoint announces it only accepts POST requests, not even OPTIONS. And definitely not GET :)…Continue reading Resolving error AADSTS90056
Classic SharePoint blogs are going away – what next?
So the interesting news are 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 forward. Background Table of Contents BackgroundRetirement of SharePoint classic…Continue reading Classic SharePoint blogs are going away – what next?
How to find out which WebDriver version is installed on an Azure DevOps build machine using YAML?
Uh, okay, well. So this is where you should just RTFM (that’s along the lines of “check the documentation” for those uninitiated in the world of unnecessary abbreviations). But as we’ve found out before, Microsoft’s documentation on the agent’s installed software isn’t always up-to-date. That’s why I added this simple snippet on my pipeline to figure out which version of the browser AND the webdriver are installed on the machine. The snippets below can be combined with logic to install different versions of Chrome and…Continue reading How to find out which WebDriver version is installed on an Azure DevOps build machine using YAML?
How to migrate your Delve Blogs content to Modern SharePoint?
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, total content freeze in January 2020, and finally,…Continue reading How to migrate your Delve Blogs content to Modern SharePoint?
How to export your Delve blogs content?
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 3: How to migrate your Delve…Continue reading How to export your Delve blogs content?
Delve Blogs getting deprecated – what do?
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, 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 has pretty much faded away after that. Microsoft describes the feature…Continue reading Delve Blogs getting deprecated – what do?
Microsoft website fails to log you in with an error: “Unable to service request”
Okay – so this one is going to be a simple blog post. I’ll be explaining an apparent fan favorite – 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
Awarded MVP for Office Development
Late Friday night a couple of weeks ago, I got an interesting and a bit of a 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 K. Koskela #MVPBuzz (@koskila) November…Continue reading Awarded MVP for Office Development
Solving: ‘DbContextOptionsBuilder’ does not contain a definition for ‘UseSqlServer’
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 UseSeqlServer ? 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 below: using Microsoft.EntityFrameworkCore; using System; namespace YourNamespace { public class YourClass { private string _connectionString = "This comes from your configuration file";…Continue reading Solving: ‘DbContextOptionsBuilder’ does not contain a definition for ‘UseSqlServer’
Iterating Group memberships using Claims in .NET Core
Another case, where there’s plenty of documentation, but it just doesn’t seem to be comprehensive enough or just doesn’t apply for any of the cases that I have – for whatever reason. Maybe my cases are wrong, or I’m just bad at googling, but I’ve struggled to find a good page documenting this. Perfect case for another blog post about the topic, then – perhaps someone else will find it useful! This post answers the question: How to get Claims for a user in .NET…Continue reading Iterating Group memberships using Claims in .NET Core
IE11 fails to load a (server-side) Blazor web app
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 Table of Contents Description of the issueSolution So, like shown in the article’s image, when trying to access…Continue reading IE11 fails to load a (server-side) Blazor web app
How to instantiate your DbContext outside your Data project?
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 Table of Contents DescriptionWhy would you need your DbContext outside your original…Continue reading How to instantiate your DbContext outside your Data project?
Another year, another Hacktoberfest (2019)!
Like a lot of the more frequent readers of this blog know, I generally work in 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 a few useful scripts, bugfixes and documentation improvements during…Continue reading Another year, another Hacktoberfest (2019)!