Tag: Azure

This tag contains all of my blog posts that directly concern Microsoft Azure.

But what is Microsoft Azure? Microsoft themselves describe it like this:

Microsoft Azure is an ever-expanding set of cloud services to help your organization meet your business challenges. It’s the freedom to build, manage, and deploy applications on a massive, global network using your favorite tools and frameworks. (https://azure.microsoft.com/en-ca/overview/what-is-azure)

Marketing talk aside, Azure offers developers a way to get going fast, and concentrate on the functionality and added value instead of worrying about the infrastructure. Well, worrying about most of it anyway.

For IT Pros, it offers a new can of worms, a huge set of tools to squash those worms, and opportunities to offer a lot of value to their organizations.

For business people, Azure offers big potential savings. And the blockchain. And machine learning. And IoT, of course. It’s the hybrid cloud solution for your modern, blockchain-backed, machine learning -powered workloads running on the intelligent edge.

Does that sound good to you? No? Well, scratch the last paragraph – it’s true, but not as bad as it sounds!

Ignite 2018 recap: What’s new for Azure Functions?

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 was a bunch of exciting new things announced! Not all of the things in this blog post are necessarily completely new – but rather reached General Availability. Let’s go through them one by one… Posts Related to “Ignite 2018 recap: What’s new for…Continue reading Ignite 2018 recap: What’s new for Azure Functions?

The following functions are in error... And that's about it.

Fixing “The following functions are in error: Object reference not set to an instance of an object.” error in Azure Functions

Let me start this article, by reminding everyone that Azure Functions are awesome, and you should use them despite some hiccups. Having said that, let’s fix some errors! In the beginning of September 2018, Microsoft started pushing out breaking changes to Azure Functions 2.x. They had announced this a full month in advance, so they expected everyone in the world to update their Azure Functions to avoid the functions from breaking. I guess, however, that in real life, a month is not that much. Me,…Continue reading Fixing “The following functions are in error: Object reference not set to an instance of an object.” error in Azure Functions

Azure Functions SDK 2.0 settings in accessed in C# code

How to access Azure Function App’s settings from C#?

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 in different runtime versions of Azure Functions? This…Continue reading How to access Azure Function App’s settings from C#?

Fixing issue “AADSTS70005” by enabling the implicit authentication flow for your Azure AD app

This article explains the most typical reasons you might get an error with code “AADSTS70005”, 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’s this AADSTS70005 all about? While either developing or just trying to use an application that authenticates against Azure AD, you might get an error message that…Continue reading Fixing issue “AADSTS70005” by enabling the implicit authentication flow for your Azure AD app

"Publishing Failed" for an Azure Function

Fixing the error “Web Deploy cannot modify the file on the Destination because it is locked by an external process.”

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 target of your publishing being…Continue reading Fixing the error “Web Deploy cannot modify the file on the Destination because it is locked by an external process.”

AADSTS50011: The reply address ... does not match the reply addresses configured for the application.

How to fix “AADSTS50011: Reply address did not match because of case sensitivity.”

So, you got an error with a code AADSTS50011? It’s just Azure AD’s authentication acting up because of invalid reply address! here’s a bunch of different reasons that lead to this error. This post describes the variant where the URL’s case sensitivity differns 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 code that tries to authenticate against AAD (like a SharePoint Online webpart or a…Continue reading How to fix “AADSTS50011: Reply address did not match because of case sensitivity.”

"The resource you are looking for has been removed, had its name changed, or is temporarily unavailable." leads to a 404 error in jQuery.

How to fix an Azure Function (v2) failing with error “The resource you are looking for has been removed, had its name changed, or is temporarily unavailable.”

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! This time I was developing a simple Azure Function to access Microsoft Graph API. This particular issue was kind of bugging, since the error message actually had nothing to do with the actual issue and gave…Continue reading How to fix an Azure Function (v2) failing with error “The resource you are looking for has been removed, had its name changed, or is temporarily unavailable.”

Obama congratulates you on your broken apps

Fixing an unhandled exception about StructureMap configuration failing (messed up assembly bindings)

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’s 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), or after scheduling a task, or possibly after running…Continue reading Fixing an unhandled exception about StructureMap configuration failing (messed up assembly bindings)

Solving Azure Web Application’s first load perfomance issues

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 the 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 load AND sometimes even timed out (especially with…Continue reading Solving Azure Web Application’s first load perfomance issues

Hackathon win: Resolving Managed Metadata Madness

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 around with Flows and Cognitive Services before,…Continue reading Hackathon win: Resolving Managed Metadata Madness

AADSTS90013: Invalid input received from the user. (header thumbnail)

Solving error “AADSTS90013: Invalid input received from the user”

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. Okay – this is going to be extremely specific, and probably won’t solve the…Continue reading Solving error “AADSTS90013: Invalid input received from the user”

Microsoft Flow that's used in this demo - it uses an Azure Function to extract text from a doc, which is then sent to Text Analysis, and finally written back to SharePoint. In the end, it sends notifications of the status of the run.

How to Resolve Managed Metadata Madness in SharePoint?

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 a few weeks off, since I had accrued…Continue reading How to Resolve Managed Metadata Madness in SharePoint?

Call to sites Graph API requires “owner” permissions for site collection regardless of app permissions

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 my developer account, which was a global admin,…Continue reading Call to sites Graph API requires “owner” permissions for site collection regardless of app permissions

4 ways to fix error AADSTS65001 (The user or administrator has not consented to use the application)

Have you run into error AADSTS65001 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 different solutions to the issue, where granting admin consent has somehow…Continue reading 4 ways to fix error AADSTS65001 (The user or administrator has not consented to use the application)

Getting Connect-MsolService (and other Azure Active Directory PowerShell cmdlets) to work

In this post, I’ll try to archive everything 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 even exist on the machine, or it does exist but…Continue reading Getting Connect-MsolService (and other Azure Active Directory PowerShell cmdlets) to work

Applying Entity Framework’s Code-First Migrations against a Database in Azure by running Update-Database

This post describes how to run Entity Framework’s code-first migrations against a database located in the Windows Azure. This is done by running 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 long as you publish your app with that…Continue reading Applying Entity Framework’s Code-First Migrations against a Database in Azure by running Update-Database

Entity Framework's Update-Database throwing an error

Fixing “An error occurred while updating the entries” while running code-first migrations in MVC 5 app

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’s 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 running into, exactly? Below, you can find the most…Continue reading Fixing “An error occurred while updating the entries” while running code-first migrations in MVC 5 app

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

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, that 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. :) Symptoms Typically, you encounter this issue, when trying…Continue reading 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

Fixing 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.”

This post describes a few different ways of 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.” one can get encounter this issue at least 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, OR when deploying or publishing your…Continue reading Fixing 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.”

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