All Posts

All Posts (529)

• 

  Published on

  2021-11-09 3:21 a.m.

  Authors

  koskila

  Tags

  gitgithub

  How to nuke your Git(Hub) commit history?

  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 forget, pray you're not committing to a public repository!

  Read more →
• 

  Published on

  2021-11-02 6:48 a.m.

  Authors

  koskila

  Tags

  asp-netazurefunctions

  How to fix "Unable to cast object of type 'System.Net.Http.HttpRequestMessage' to type 'Microsoft.AspNetCore.Http.HttpRequest'."

  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 receiving POST requests with payload!

  Read more →
• 

  Published on

  2021-10-26 5:16 a.m.

  Authors

  koskila

  Tags

  azurekeyvaultvisual-studio

  How to authenticate against Azure Key Vault both in Azure and local development environment?

  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 is!

  Read more →
• 

  Published on

  2021-10-19 8:12 p.m.

  Authors

  koskila

  Tags

  cosmosdbdotnet5

  System.Text.Json.JsonPropertyName not working for CosmosDb in .NET Core/5/6?

  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.

  Read more →
• 

  Published on

  2021-10-12 4:28 a.m.

  Authors

  koskila

  Tags

  assemblygraph-api

  Errors loading an assembly that's using Microsoft Graph API

  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!

  Read more →
• 

  Published on

  2021-10-05 3:12 a.m.

  Authors

  koskila

  Tags

  azurefunctionscosmosdb

  ILogger binding suddenly failing for Azure Functions - what to do?

  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 useful, good for you! 😉 Problem So what is it that is failing?

  Read more →
• 

  Published on

  2021-09-28 6:57 a.m.

  Authors

  koskila

  Tags

  code-firstentityframeworkcore

  "dotnet ef script" or "Script-Migration" producing empty .sql files?

  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.

  Read more →
• 

  Published on

  2021-09-20 10:41 a.m.

  Authors

  koskila

  Tags

  iison-premisesreactwebconfig

  How to fix a 403.18 in a virtual application?

  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.

  Read more →
• 

  Published on

  2021-09-15 4:22 a.m.

  Authors

  koskila

  Tags

  github

  GitHub Action fails with "The GITHUB_TOKEN environment variable was not set"

  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".

  Read more →
• 

  Published on

  2021-09-07 5:53 a.m.

  Authors

  koskila

  Tags

  youtubedl

  How to download audio files from Vidyard

  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 I want to achieve, in order to need... This?

  Read more →
• 

  Published on

  2021-08-31 6:44 p.m.

  Authors

  koskila

  Tags

  gitvscode

  Visual Studio Code fails when running "git pull" for a new project

  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 following a guide on docs.microsoft.com.

  Read more →
• 

  Published on

  2021-08-24 4:11 a.m.

  Authors

  koskila

  Tags

  ms-sql-serversqlsql-query

  How to form a parameterized SQL query to find duplicates in a table.

  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 ([row count]).

  Read more →
• 

  Published on

  2021-08-17 4:25 a.m.

  Authors

  koskila

  Tags

  aspnetcorejsonnetcore

  How to serialize to JSON in camelCase using .NET Core?

  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 at the actual issue at hand, shall we?

  Read more →
• 

  Published on

  2021-08-12 4:29 a.m.

  Authors

  koskila

  Tags

  homeassistantlovelace

  Home Assistant - Quick and dirty fixes

  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!

  Read more →
• 

  Published on

  2021-08-10 3:58 a.m.

  Authors

  koskila

  Tags

  asp-netdotnetwebsockets

  How to secure your WebSocket connection using .NET Core?

  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 UI.

  Read more →
• 

  Published on

  2021-08-05 2:07 a.m.

  Authors

  koskila

  Tags

  climacellhomeassistant

  No way to renew a ClimaCell API subscription - what to do?

  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 suddenly and without warning, it just stopped working.

  Read more →
• 

  Published on

  2021-07-27 4:51 a.m.

  Authors

  koskila

  Tags

  aspnetcorenetcorewebsockets

  HttpContext.WebSockets.IsWebSocketRequest always null in .NET Core?

  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 always be null in the code.

  Read more →
• 

  Published on

  2021-07-20 5:11 a.m.

  Authors

  koskila

  Tags

  docker

  Docker-compose fails on Windows with "Error while fetching server API version: (2, 'CreateFile', 'The system cannot find the file specified.')"

  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 angrily hiss at you if bothered.

  Read more →
• 

  Published on

  2021-07-13 4:44 a.m.

  Authors

  koskila

  Tags

  azuredevopsdevops

  Azure DevOps suddenly 404s for your project? Easy fix!

  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 the screenshots anyway. Solution Ok, so this is a pretty easy one.

  Read more →
• 

  Published on

  2021-07-05 5:08 a.m.

  Authors

  koskila

  Tags

  gutenbergphpmyadminwordpressyoast

  How to fix "Cannot read property 'map' of undefined (structured-data-blocks)"

  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 we'll see. We'll see. Anyway, this time I had 2 issues with WordPress - both related to Yoast!

  Read more →
• 

  Published on

  2021-06-29 2:47 a.m.

  Authors

  koskila

  Tags

  azuredevopsazurefunctionsdevops

  How to update application settings of an Azure Functions App in Azure DevOps Pipeline

  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 appsettings.

  Read more →
• 

  Published on

  2021-06-22 5:13 a.m.

  Authors

  koskila

  Tags

  javascriptwebsockets

  How to test a WebSocket connection in browser?

  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!

  Read more →
• 

  Published on

  2021-06-17 6:28 a.m.

  Authors

  koskila

  Tags

  azuredevops

  Azure DevOps throwing "Unexpected token < in JSON at position 4"

  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...

  Read more →
• 

  Published on

  2021-06-15 4:04 a.m.

  Authors

  koskila

  Tags

  microsoftofficemicrosoftword

  How to copy a table in Microsoft Word (Office app)?

  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 a table. That's just weirdly spaced text in neat-ish columns.

  Read more →
• 

  Published on

  2021-06-08 6:25 a.m.

  Authors

  koskila

  Tags

  azuresqlsqlservermanagementstudiossms

  How to (easily) move data between SQL databases

  Every now and then, you will run into a situation where you need to overwrite a database's contents with those of another database. Maybe you'll need to update a staging environment with a partial data import from production, or perhaps you have a new developer coming in who needs some data - I don't know. But this should be a run-of-the-mill action. Something you can do in a minute. The bottom line is - this shouldn't be complicated. And it should be documented really well.

  Read more →