Blog posts

How to download videos from Microsoft Stream without download access.

How to build add semantic search to an Astro static page with Cloudflare Vector database and cosine similarity.

Why are my typing speed and especially delete speed soo slow on my new macbook

Some notes on my journey from buying email hosting from a thrid party to hosting my own email server using mail-in-a-box.

In January 2022 it will be time to pay up, if you want to continue using Docker Desktop on Windows (and Mac) unless you are a small company or individual user. Whether the price is worth it I will let you decide, but personally I’m not going to pay so […]

Was taking a look at an old laptop today, that had been stored away for a couple of years. But the password for the local user account had in that time been completely forgotten. Luckily Windows 10 isn’t very secure, so it is quite easy to reset the password when […]

People have been arguing for a while that websites are too bloated with too much JavaScripts that slow them down. So for a while static site builders, and headless CMS has been gaining traction over traditional all in one solutions like Sitecore, and WordPress. My blog has been running on […]

Okay, time for a real world story of how big corporations in the name of security, scam customers. Microsoft will probably defend themselves by saying you are always responsible for your own cloud cost, but nevertheless judge for yourself if you think their approach is fair or a scam. A […]

So I have been running my current windows installation for a couple of years, and was starting to run out of disk space on the C-drive as one does after a while. After a quick inspection with WinDirStat, it was clear that all my space was taken up by ext4.vhdx […]

I’m a bit of an PC hardware geek, and I like to investigate how different hardware components impacts the daily tasks of a software developer. Unlike many software developers, that goes super high-end whenever they upgrade, I have always focused on buying hardware that I felt had a good price […]

In January 2022 it will be time to pay up, if you want to continue using Docker Desktop on Windows (and Mac) unless you are a small company or individual user. Whether the price is worth it I will let you decide, but personally I’m not going to pay so […]

I have had the pleasure of experiencing this error a number of times when I try to access windows subsystem for linux, and every time I end up in some google search hunt to figure out what the cause is. So this time I’m going to write it down. And […]

Considering becoming a Microsoft Security Specialist, then Az-500 is the certification for you. But if azure cloud security is not your fulltime job, then the exam can be a little challenging (and even if it is, it is probably still challenging as it covers a wide range of disciplines). I […]

Often when working with 3rd party docker images I have a desire to see what they contain. Luckily that is super doable, as you can simple unpack the images and see all the content of the different layers. In most cases that is easier than getting a bash shell into […]

This post is mostly a memo for myself, but maybe it can help you next time you need to clone a SSD or an M.2 drive and save you some time trying to find tools that works. My standard procedure for data protection is that I buy new faster and […]

Last year Microsoft apparently finally decided that maybe ARM templates is not going to catch on with the mainstream Azure community, as a result they started working on what I would describe as a spiritual successor which they have named Bicep. Bicep is a new DSL, domain specific language, that […]

The Azure Active Directory Domain Services (Azure ADDS), services enables you to run a fully Microsoft managed Active Directory in Azure, which will be populated with users and devices from your Azure Active Directory. By being a fully managed services, you don’t have direct access to the VMs that run […]

Using AI and ML Models in applications no longer requires a degree specialized in the field. There are many ready made ML models that you can just download and use. Heck, there are even SaaS solutions for many ML tasks, see e.g. https://www.customvision.ai/. But SaaS solutions typically comes with a […]

In true Christmas tradition I have to create a blog post on Christmas eve. This year I have special present prepared that I used a few weeks ago for our annual Christmas party. Of course it being 2020, nothing is how it usually it, so our Christmas party this year […]

With Azure Logic App you can build integrations with many products. One use case that I have investigating lately is to use Logic App as an API proxy for APIs where the original API needs adjustments to be consumer friend. The idea is to create a http-triggered logic app, call […]

I really like Azure Container Instances (ACI), it is the simplest way to run containers in Azure. However I find it pretty strange that it don’t have built-in scheduled start/stop of the container groups, especially considering that ACI is not really cost effective if you run the containers 24×7. If […]

It is Christmas, the time of the year where you need to be indoor and play some computer games with family and friends. And what better game to play than Minecraft? But in order to play with the extended family you want a private internet accessible server where you don’t […]

Microsoft have released their Remote Development extension for VS code that allows you to run VS Code locally, while using a remote development environment. This is particular useful if you run Windows as your host OS but are doing Linux development, and don’t fancy running Linux as your host OS. […]

This error message when I try to run a ASP.net web application have happened to me twice within a few weeks, to I thought I would add a solution to fix it. It seems to happen when you get an updated version of a project on a machine that already […]

Ever experienced having an Azure subscription that no one have access to anymore, being payed by an Azure enterprise agreement? If so, did you find the official documentation missing on how to regain control of the subscription, then you have come to the right place. This typically happens when Azure […]

Azure Container Instances (ACI) supports mounting a git repository as a volume. This is a nice way to get scripts and tools made available in a the docker container that you intend to run on ACI. Unfortunately when working on windows, file permissions is incompatible with linux file permissions, so […]

It seem that every time I need to upgrade my wordpress site that this blog runs on, I end up with the white screen of death. Basically it means that the upgrade failed somehow and the page can’t no longer render. My site run a cheap shared hosting platform from […]

In the docker ecosystem it is possible to find images for pretty much anything you can imaging. I have been investigating building a service, that would rely on web proxy technology and a custom DNS server to build a more kids friendly version of Youtube. Unfortunately, Youtube for most part […]

Been using Docker for Windows quite a lot lately. Unfortunately running docker containers on windows is still not done natively, so we have to rely on a Linux Hyper-V Virtual Machine. This VM have a tendency to grow large quite fast if you work with many images, and yesterday I […]

One of the main reasons for using cloud services is to be able to scale. Many people don’t take advantage of that which is a shame, because it can result in huge cost savings. The example I’m presenting today is how you can scale Azure SQL to maintain a low […]

In my previous blog post I demonstrated how, Azure functions together with the API of the Lets Encrypt Site Extension can be used to request SSL certificates. I also did a sloppy job in the last post to secure the secrets for the service principal and the publishing credential, so […]

In my original incarnation of Lets Encrypt Site Extension for Azure Web app, there was a very tightly coupling between web app that hosted the site extension and the site the certificate was requested for. It relied on environment variables in the Web App and it also used Azure Web […]

As the title indicates this blog post will guide you though how you can run Node Red on Azure Web apps using the node-red docker container. Node Red is IBM’s GUI based offering that makes it easy to wire APIs and devices together. It is great for IoT prototype, but […]

This is just a short blog post, to help me get back into blogging again. The Kudu site should by now be familiar with everyone who have been working a little with Azure Web Apps, it is the management portal/API that hosts a lot of the goodness that you get […]

So you decided to use my Azure Functions short code project to create your own short code service. Now you wants to see how your short codes are doing, or at least someone on github asked how to do it, so I decided why not write it once and for […]

Last week Microsoft finally released their new Azure Virtual Machine series Dv3 and Ev3, besides being based on the latest Intel hardware, these machine are also running Windows Server 2016 as the host OS which supports nested virtualization. Why is that interesting you might ask? Well, it is interesting because […]

When building Office Outlook Addins there has traditionally been three ways to install them. Installation from the Office Store Installation by a Exchange administrator uploading the manifest.xml Installation by a end-user by uploading the manifest.xml Recently Office 365 was also extended with the centralized deployment feature that allows tenant admins […]

Build is over, now it is time to play with all the new features that was announced. Microsoft teams was one of the product that got a new handful of useful features. The list of customizations options for teams are now even longer, check them out here: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-teams/ The one […]

Today’s post describes how Azure Function’s very easily can be used to build real world applications. I build the basis application on my train ride home from Azure Global Bootcamp, an hour from idea to working implementation. The application is a URL shortener, like you know from tinyurl, bit.ly or […]

So your company uses Office 365, and you are tired of constantly having to go to Microsofts login portal, maybe even decide whether to use your organizational (work or school) account or you personal account before you can log in? If your company also uses ADFS you can actually skip […]

Azure function recently added support for using it as a proxy for other APIs. The intention behind azure function proxies are that you can create a function app and use it as a proxy to hide several other function apps. But it can be used for many other interesting things. […]

The Microsoft Bot framework makes it easy to build multi platform chat bots. The framework is extensible and offers developer a quick way to get started building bots. Unfortunately, the framework is also under rapid development, so the documentation is not complete and it can be hard to find up-to-date […]

Currently I’m spending some time prototyping different bots built with the Microsoft Bot framework. The other day I was going to try out the Facebook connector that allows your bot to talk to people using Facebook messenger. But before I started coding I want to get a sense of what […]

As a true Christmas tradition I have to post a blog article during the Christmas days. This year, I will show how you can remote control the headless browser PhantomJS using the open standard protocol WebDriver (also used by the Selenium project). The PhantomJS browser will run inside a Docker […]

Everything requires you to be online nowadays, from time to time that can be pretty frustrating if you are traveling place where you know you won’t have internet. Youtube contains a lot of great content, but because they make money by showing advertisements (and a lot of them) the they […]

Today Microsoft released new connectors for Microsoft Flow. Normally I wouldn’t care about it, but today’s release contains two interesting connectors for APIs that I care about. One is the PowerBI connector that I’m sure I will find a use for. The other is the Azure Resource Manager connector. I […]

Microsoft just released the ability to schedule shutdown of Azure Resource Manager VMs. The feature has previously only been available in dev test labs, but is now also usable for stand alone VMs. Unfortunately the feature is pretty limited, it can trigger a shutdown at a specific time, and 15 […]

At today’s Connect event Microsoft revealed the option to run docker containers inside Linux Azure Web Apps. Linux Azure Web Apps are in preview and is what the name implies web apps but on a Linux host instead of Windows. A while back I participated in a Microsoft internal event […]

Microsoft Teams offers some interesting ways to customize the product. Previously I blogged about how to use the custom connectors to get content from external sources posted to your chats. Today we are going to look at how to create a custom tab. Custom tabs are a way to grant […]

In this post I will demonstrate how to assign a custom domain name for your dynamic Azure function with an ARM template. I will also show a neat trick on how using a reverse proxy you can get your Azure Functions to look like they are part of an existing […]

Today Microsoft released their new collaboration tool, Microsoft Teams. Microsoft teams is a Slack copy, build on-top of Office 365. It has very good integration with the rest of the Office 365 services, and is looking to be a very promising alternative to Slack for all those companies that have […]

If you have been playing around with deploying Azure functions with ARM templates chances are that you have run into the error “The pricing tier ‘Dynamic’ is not allowed in this resource group”. Below you can seethe full error text from a powershell deployment of an Azure Function ARM template […]

Per default Azure Functions uses the name of the function (which is in fact the directory name that contains the function files) as the http route. E.g. a function named products hosted in azure functions with the name mycompany will end up at a URL: https://mycompany.azurewebsites.net/products. That might be fine […]

For a while it has been possible to create custom dashboards in the new azure portal (portal.azure.com). This feature is pretty useful if you want to get a quick overview from a single page. It can also be used to build big screen dashboards for IT operations. A simple example […]

Microsoft recently introduced a dynamic pricing model for the Azure App Service Plan. The app service plan is the infrastructure that hosts your Web App, Function Apps or Logic Apps. Currently the dynamic service plan is only available for function and logic apps. In fact going forward from the 1st […]

Build servers are a must, and so is fast build times, especially if you practice continues integration and maybe even continues delivery. So what do you do when npm install takes too long to complete? Buy more bandwidth or faster CPU. Well there is something you can do before that […]

Having a proxy in another country is useful for a lot of things. My specific reason to investigate it was to be able to watch american TV shows online (I had also planned to use it for US Netflix, little was I aware that Netflix since July 2016, have proxy […]

Every now and then I need to use openssl on windows, and I always struggle finding a good set of prebuilt binaries. For a long time I have been fine with a very old version of openssl built back in 2008 – but recently I needed to use some newer […]

I got a request on email, whether or not it is possible to create Event Hub with Azure Resource Manager templates (ARM). And yes of course it is – but yet again Microsofts documentation is lacking, so instead of just replying to the email I decided to post the answer […]

I have been testing out the new Microsoft Graph Subscriptions API that allows you to get notified when, e.g. mails are received in Exchange online. To use this API you have to setup a webhook that gets called by the exchange servers. The requirement to this webhook is that it […]

I have before blogged about my work on a plugin for letsencrypt-win-simple, that eased the installation of Lets Encrypt Certificates on Azure Web Apps. That project was mostly a trial run to see if it was possible to get it to work, and it is now abandoned. But fear not, […]

This weeks ARM challenge was to provision an Azure Notification hub, with client credentials for Google Cloud Messaging (GCM) as part of a larger ARM template. Unfortunately how to do so is not documented, but we are not completely out of luck because the schema for the notification hub is […]

In Azure AD a tenant is uniquely identified by a tenant ID which is a guid. Unfortunately guids are not very user friendly, so most users remembers their AD tenants by the domain name, it could e.g. be sjkp.onmicrosoft.com. If you are working with the Azure management api, you can […]

Let’s Encrypt is a new free to use Certificate Authority, in public beta, that is on a mission to provide free SSL certificates to all web sites. Obviously, that requires some rethinking of how certificates are issues, as it otherwise would be impossible to accomplish their goal of HTTPS to […]

Previously I posted about how to create Azure Service Bus topics with ARM templates. This post is a follow up where I show how to create Service Bus queues (in case you didn’t figure it out already). In addition I will also, by popular demand, show how to create Shared […]

I love Azure resource manager and especially ARM templates for deploying a full resource group. Unfortunately the documentation on how to author the templates still have a long way to come. Recently I have been doing some IoT work, where we are using Service Bus and Event Hub. How to […]

For the last few months I have been playing around with PowerBI.com quite a lot, because I have been doing some IoT demos. I really like the product, and honestly believe that it is the best that has come out of Microsoft in many years. So I was happy when […]

Azure Site Extensions is a way to add extra functionality to an azure web app. Currently the number of extensions are rather limited, but yet there are a few interesting ones, e.g. the Visual Studio Online extensions that lets you edit your code directly in the Azure Web Site. If […]

Just a quick reminder to myself. In order to set the “always on” property on a Azure Web App when provisioned from an ARM template, the resource should look like this [javascript] { "apiVersion": "2015-06-01", "name": "[parameters(‘siteName’)]", "type": "Microsoft.Web/Sites", "location": "[parameters(‘siteLocation’)]", "dependsOn": [ "[concat(‘Microsoft.Web/serverFarms/’, parameters(‘hostingPlanName’))]" ], "tags": { "[concat(‘hidden-related:’, resourceGroup().id, […]

This is a short article about a few tricks that can help you build Azure Resource Manager templates. Most templates are quite easy to get started with, because there already is a lot of ready made templates out there e.g. in the https://github.com/Azure/azure-quickstart-templates, that can be used as inspiration. The […]

Sometimes you come across a service or a system, that you want to send a lot of requests to, and your system is able to send requests faster than the receiving system can handle, or maybe you just don’t want to max out the system that you are calling. In […]

I have been slow at picking up the Azure Resource Manager templates, mostly because I don’t deploy that many identical solutions to Azure, but also because I for a long time didn’t find the json template language very intuitive. Attending Build 2015 and seeing it in use during several sessions […]

I just returned from a hackathon arranged by Dreamhack, it was a great event, well planned out with nice people, so I will definitely try to go next time too. In this blog post I will explain what I built and my thought process behind it. Before going to the […]

Site provisioning engines are a very hot topic in the SharePoint community at the moment. To be honest with you I feel really sad about it being such a hot topic, because it basically means that Microsoft failed to deliver the correct solution, and now everyone is trying to build […]

It’s pretty straight forward to setup debuggin of your android wear device via Bluetooth, until it’s not. Under normal circumstances you can follow this guide and it will work: https://developer.android.com/training/wearables/apps/bt-debugging.html But then sometime when you run, adb forward tcp:4444 localabstract:/adb-hub adb connect localhost:4444 You get the following error: adb server […]

This year I was fortunate enough to have the company I work for sponsor a trip to Build. It was a nice conference, but as always not all the sessions were equally good. I want to highlight 3 must see sessions, that in my opinion didn’t get the attention they […]

Last Saturday the company I work for was hosting the Copenhagen edition of the Global Azure Bootcamp. Our day in Copenhagen, were focused around three sessions, one session about Recommendation engines with Hadoop by Sebastian Brandes, and an intro to docker containers by Morten Christensen. I was fortunate enough to […]

It’s possible to deploy SharePoint 2013 custom workflow actions from a sandbox solution. If you want to deploy them with a SharePoint App, then you will run into a few obstacles. Firstly you might get an error like this when you try to package your app. Project file must include […]

Azure Search has just reached general availability, and with that, they announced a few new nice features. One of the new features are a .net library that makes it super easy to work with Azure Search. The library can be downloaded with nuget. Install-Package Microsoft.Azure.Search -IncludePrerelease I have used the […]

Sometimes you come across an exception, that at first seems strange but when you figure out what caused it you feel like an idiot. Last week I was creating a sync job as part of an Azure Web Job, I was just doing some SharePoint integration with the client side […]

Azure Hybrid Connection is a really easy way to implement a hybrid solution were you keep some of your data onpremise while still hosting your website in the cloud. In a recent project I had to connect an MVC application hosted in Azure Web Sites to an onpremise database storing […]

Last week the Azure Key Vault went into preview. The Azure Key Vault is a service for securely saving passwords and certificate for use in your applications. By using Azure Key Vault, you can avoid having e.g. username and passwords written directly in your configuration files, that way you can […]

The Office 365 App Launcher was introduced in October 2014, with the idea of making it easier for people to navigate to the app they use most. Only problem, it only support links to Azure AD Apps and the Office 365 applications that you have access to. But what if […]

The year 2014 was a good year in terms of how much programming I was able to do. This post is a listing of some of my accomplishments. Programming Languages and Frameworks In 2014, I was able to get a better understanding of F# and was actually able to use […]

Just watched a session on Chrome Developer tools, Shay Friedman from NDC London. Even though I use the Chrome Developer tools quite a lot, there was still a few new things to me. I took some quick notes while watching the video, so you don’t have to spend an hour […]

When you want to use the CSOM (Client Side Object Model) with SharePoint Online, you currently have quite a few options on how to authenticate. For a SharePoint newcomer or even experienced SharePoint developers, it can be quite tricky to know when to use what, this post is an attempt […]

Sure everyone have seen url short codes before, and it’s not really rocket science how to generate them. Regardless, I decided to write my own library for it because I had a specific requirement that I have not seen covered by any other url short code algorithm. The two requirements […]

Apps for Office whether it is for Outlook, Excel, Word or PowerPoint are all standard HTML pages with JavaScript. I just finished building an app where I wanted some of my app pages to be accessible from a web browser outside the Office context. Apparently that is a very uncommon […]

This post is sparked from a twitter dialog. Initially I didn’t feel like I had anything meaningful to add to the discussion since I’m not a full time JavaScript developer by profession. In fact, I’m quite the opposite, for the last year, this is the kind of projects I have […]

IIS Express is designed to be able to support all web development tasks without admin privileges. But that design comes with some limitations, e.g. you are not able to use any other hostname than localhost and only ports between 44300 and 44399 supports SSL. Those limitation can be a little […]

SharePoint projects have a tradition for being tested in a test environment and being deployed to one ore more staging environments before hitting production. I have never been a huge fan of this approach, as it is time consuming and in many cases doesn’t improve the quality of the project […]

Here is my quick take on the announcements made at the VSConnect conference. Microsoft is providing the full .NET server stack in open source, including ASP.NET, the .NET compiler, the .NET Core Runtime. Very cool direction that Microsoft is taking. But in reality it’s not g have a big impact […]

This is a little memo to myself, as I can’t always remember all the useful properties of the Uri class.

This is just a quick post about how to use OpenSSL to create certificates that you can use with IIS or Microsoft Azure. Of course you could use makecert.exe, but I generally prefer openssl, since I occasionally do Node.js and IOS development. The information can be found elsewhere on the […]

This blog post is about one of those questions you get asked where you wonder is that possible? It’s pretty useless, and your time would probably have been spent better than trying to figure out if it’s possible, but nevertheless you end up investigating it to prove to yourself that […]

Earlier this year I wrote about how to mimic the “always-on” feature even in a free Azure Website, by running a custom webjob that periodically would request the site, thus keeping it in memory and always fast and responsive. A friendly reader noticed me last week that my original solution […]

Over the last couple of weeks I have been spending my free time working on a small web application for running code challenges, that we are going to use when we visit universities to attract new candidates. I had three main objectives with the solution: The code challenges should be […]

With the release of the dependency framework Unity 3.0, it was finally made possible to do convention-based registrations. It been a while since I have worked with Unity, so bear in mind that version 3.0 have since been surpassed by a version 3.5, but nevertheless convention based registration is still […]

In this blog post I will describe how you can leverage SendGrids WebHooks to send email messages to an azure queue. You might ask, why do I need that? Well, I can’t answer that, but my use case was to parse an email I recieve on daily basis which contains […]

I am constantly on the look out for places where F# is a good fit, and I believe that I found one, Azure WebJobs programmed in F#. Azure WebJobs can be built as console jobs that are scheduled by the Azure WebSite runtime to either run on a predefined schedule […]

Last year I posted an article about how to use LightSwitch to display data from Microsoft Dynamics CRM. A handfull of people commented on that article and asked how to do the same with Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online. I have had a idea on how to do that for a […]

It’s really nice to see the cadence Microsoft is getting up to with their release cycle. Yesterday a new version of the Office 365 API Tools (1.1.728) was release that improves on the previous releases (not so much if you are using it in a web application, it seems like […]

Todays adventure in SharePoint land was a strange one. The client I’m working for at the moment are having webs created from both English and Danish webtemplates in the same site collection. They also have some custom page layouts and custom code that lets the user decide if they want […]

The 5-star rating feature for list and libraries was introduced in SharePoint 2010 and by using the AverageRatingFieldControl is was easy to enable users to rate and see the current rating on custom page layouts. Unfortunately this corner of SharePoint has been overlooked in SharePoint 2013, so now the AverageRatingFieldControl […]

Creating a SharePoint farm in windows azure just got a whole lot easier. During WPC 2014 Microsoft released an update to the preview portal (http://portal.azure.com) that makes it possible to configure a SharePoint farm entirely from the portal. Needless to say I had to try it out. The first step […]

Why would you ever do that you might ask. My use case was to create an admin tool as a webpage with the Office 365 API tools, that would allow the administrator to see statistics for all exchange mailboxes. Statistics that could could be days with most booked meetings, or […]

This is not my first post about the Office 365 API tools extension for Visual Studio. But in this post I want to highlight how to fix a few bugs that are present in the current version 1.1.512. The content in this post was part of my preperation for a […]

Working with Business Data Connectivity Service in SharePoint have always been a bit of an authorization nightmare, as there is quite a few ways to do it. Today we had an interesting issue at work in our upgraded SharePoint 2013 Farm. The application that was having issues connecting to BDC […]

One of the new features that was release for public preview during TechEd 2014, was the Microsoft Azure File Service. The file service enables multiple virtual machines hosted in the same Azure Region to connect to a network share that lives in Azure storage. This is nice feature as previously […]

If you from a site within a web application running with classic mode authentication try to create e.g. a team site and your mysite web application are running with claims authentication you will see the following error in your ULS Log. System.UnauthorizedAccessException: Access is denied. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80070005 (E_ACCESSDENIED)), […]

As I have mentioned before I really like the app concept introduced with Office 2013. Today I’m going to show my latest creation which is a Mail App for Outlook that lets you access files in your OneDrive and upload new files, manage their permissions and insert links to them […]

In my first two posts about the Mobile Services .NET backend, I didn’t talk about the publishing process to Microsoft Azure, because I thought there was nothing to talk about. It turns out that I missed a very important thing, which is how to add new connection strings to your […]

If anyone have visited my blog on the root url from a mobile device recently then you might have had a pleasant or unpleasant surprise depending on how you view it, of being redirected to some porn network. Obviously this is not something I did myself, unfortunately someone highjacked my […]

A few weeks ago I posted an article on how to generate C# classes from a odata rest endpoint, with a visual studio extension. In that example I used the Exchange REST endpoints, that is based on OData v4. But if you like me try to use the same tool […]

My first article on Azure Mobile using Azure Table Storage, recieved a fair amount of feedback because not much other documentation can be found on how to use it. Due to that I feel like it is due for a revisit, because afterall the first post was a little rushed […]

If I’m not posting as many interesting Azure posts for the comming weeks, then it’s due to the fact that I’m currently in the process of doing a large upgrade of an SharePoint 2010 environment, and thus my focus is on this until it is complete. On that note I […]

This is not the first time I promote the Web Job feature of Azure Web Sites, but they recently added some new features that I feel a lot of people haven’t noticed yet, so I in this post I show how they make working with Web Jobs even better. Updated […]

I’m a big fan of dependency injection, and after starting to work on a project using the Azure Mobile Services .NET Backend I quickly found myself looking for a solution on how to do DI like I’m used to in my other WebAPI projects. My DI framework of choice have […]

Maybe you attended the Build 2014 Conference or maybe you just watched some of the sessions/keynote and was impressed with the new .NET backend for Azure Mobile Services. I was very impressed by what I saw in Kirill Gavrylyuk and Yavor Georgiev session on Powerful Mobile Apps with Mobile Services […]

I just started working with the Office 365 OData API and was a little fustrated with the samples because all the strongly typed classes they provide for using the OData APIs contains nowhere near all of properties the odata returns. So I looked around for some way to generate the […]

The Office 365 product suite (SharePoint, Exchange, Onedrive and the Office package), is moving in an interesting direction. Instead of being products, it starting to become more of a service platform that you can use for whatever you see fit. One of the recently released tools, that really makes this […]

For a while I have been looking for a reason to use the new Windows Azure Caching service, an in memory cache hosted by Microsoft. Unfortunately, due to its price point starting at 100 dkk/month, for 128 MB it is not really feasible to use for my small private projects. […]

A very likely feature request of any Outlook app would be automatic creation of calendar items, e.g. appointments. Unfortunately the MSDN documentation does not exactly specify how you do that, but it is simple when you know how, let me show you. The JavaScript API unfortunately offers no direct way […]

So, you finished building that beautiful Office app of yours, and now you want to share it with the world? No problem you think I just go to the Office store and publish it, how hard can it be? From my experience, it was more difficult than I expected, so […]

The 2013 wave of Microsoft products introduced a brand new app concept that received a lot of attention during the launch. Now more than a year later it might be time to look back at how the app model have done. The First Year with the App Model For SharePoint […]

Last week SP1 for the Office 2013 product line up was released (more info). Included in the service pack was improvements to the Office App model. Highlighting a few of the new features: PowerPoint task pane apps Outlook task pane apps (shown when editing/reading mails) More features to the Office […]

I have been building a small App for Office during the weekend. My App is a MailApp for outlook and it was super easy to build, as it is all html and javascript and a few calls to a rest service. But man getting the App production ready and publish […]

The default configuration for windows azure websites and cloud services is to unload your application if it have not been access for a certain amount of time. It makes a lot of sense for Microsoft to do this, as they save resources on by stopping infrequently accessed sites. As an […]

Did you ever had the urge or need to get an overview of documents uploaded to your SharePoint installation. One of our customers asked us to give them an overview of Microsoft Office files (xlsx, xls, doc, docx, ppt, pptx and pdf), and they were pretty surprised by the result, […]

Are you are lead developer or in some other way responsible for more than just your own code? Do you find yourself creating the same code structures so often that you start to see repeating patterns? Then maybe it is time to look into Visual Studio Extensions to help improve […]

You are building a MVC5 application, and suddenly the amount of data you show in your views are no long just ten or twenty items and you want to introduce paging, but how exactly do you do that? This post will tell you. It’s not rocket science, but I’m sure […]

During my Christmas vacation I have been preparing for the Windows Communication Foundation Development with Microsoft .NET Framework 4, as part of a quest at work to have four people obtain the Windows Azure Developer title, which in return will grant us some partner benefits. I have previously been preparing […]

Many of Microsoft’s data centric APIs (WebAPI.OData, WindowsAzure.Storage, etc) rely on the Microsoft.Data.OData library (ODataLib) and its dependencies, Microsoft.Data.Edm, Microsoft.Data.OData, and System.Spatial. To install the ODataLib simply run “Install-Package Microsoft.Data.OData” in the package manager window. Unfortunately because of seperate release cycles of Microsofts libraries not all of their libraries rely […]

Currently I’m working on a project where we are developing a custom claims provider, by inheriting from the SPClaimProvider class and installing it with a farm feature that inherits from SPClaimProviderFeatureReceiver. This worked great until we did some refactoring of the code when moving it from a prototype to production […]

If you ever tried to deploy your a SharePoint app to a SharePoint online team site from Visual Studio, there is a chance that you have seen the following error: “Sideloading of apps is not enabled on this site”. This happens, because in order to deploy apps to a site-collection […]

A colleague of mine asked me the other day if it was possible for him to access his Microsoft Dynamics CRM data directly from inside SharePoint by using the OData service that CRM exposes. Of course, this is possible the question is how to go around doing it. He was […]

I’m doing some testing of the LightSwitch product that is shipped in a brand new version with Visual Studio 2013 for building data-centric apps. The good news is that LightSwitch no longer depend on Silverlight, but now supports HTML5 and jQuery for the client side rendering, which is a big […]

Today I wanted to try out the newest release of Windows Server 2012 R2, primarily because I’m interested in taking a look at the on-prem version of Windows Azure, Windows Azure Pack. As I’m running Windows 7 Ultimate on my personal development computer, my hypervisor of choice is VirtualBox. Before […]

Today we discovered another strange SharePoint 2013 error. Some users were unable to create new publishing sites, instead they were greeted by the famous yellow screen of death. The special thing about the users that had the issue are that they have full-control to a sub site but they only […]

If you have a SharePoint online site one of the best features is the ability to invite external users to collaborate with you, or simple just access your data. To invite external users is super simple compared to the traditional on-premise extranet scenario. Investing in SharePoint online as a replacement […]

I’m working on a mobile app for the moment and decided it was a good opportunity to look into the Windows Azure Mobile Services. During my investigation I have found the following articles particular usefull. Client side query syntax: http://www.c-sharpcorner.com/UploadFile/0926bc/crud-operation-in-htmljavascript-using-windows-azure-mobile/ If you need to query for all items in an […]

I really like the .NET WebAPI, it is a simple and lightweight way to create REST services, and it is proving to be pretty powerful if you, like me, like heavy client side applications that communicate with the server through a public API. This post is a walkthrough on how […]

Here is a follow up to last weeks reviews, where I review a few more sessions that I have watched recently.

With SharePoint 2013, a lot of things are now possible through the REST API. This is nice for web developers, and it’s nice for quick solutions directly in the browser, e.g. against Office 365. The following code sniplets require jquery, which is not installed per default in Office 365, but […]

In late June Microsoft had their European TechEd conference in Madrid. I was not fortunate enough to go, but it does not really matter since all the sessions were recorded and now I watching the most interesting ones during my 2 hour commute to work at my own pace. To […]

If you have worked with the Azure Mobile Services, you have probably used the data features as it’s one of the main selling points, if not you should give it a try. One thing that pretty quickly gets dirty is writing the code for the insert, read, delete and update […]

The other day I copied a couple of hyper-v images off my work laptop, onto my home computer so that I could work on it on my faster desktop computer. Copy Virtual Machines from Hyper-V to VirtualBox My first challenge was that I use hyper-v on my laptop and VirtualBox […]

This guide describes how to create the developer certificates needed for publishing Iphone apps on a windows machine. http://www.iandevlin.com/blog/2012/11/phonegap/building-an-ios-signing-key-for-phonegap-in-windows To run a IOS machine with virtualbox check out this tutorial: http://www.macbreaker.com/2013/01/iatkos-ml2-mountain-lion-virtualbox.html To distribute your app for beta testing, this guide will help: http://3qilabs.com/2012/07/how-to-ad-hoc-distribute-your-ios-app-via-a-website-and-ota/

In SharePoint 2013 the rating functionality that can be enabled on all libraries, have been extended with a simple like/unlike functionality in addition to the 5 star rating from SP2010. Obviously this is something the customers love, as it reminds them of their well-known facebook like functionality. Unfortunately Microsoft for some reason decided to only enable the functionality directly from the page library list view, where most end users will never end up when working with publishing sites. In this post I present some javascript that can be included on a page layout to enable users to like/unlike the page directly from the page.

Running your SharePoint dev environment as a domain user is pretty much a requirement. But running a SharePoint dev environment without being local administrator is also a pain. To grant your domain user the appropriate rights for being a local admin and being able to run everything as administrator without […]

Yesterday it was #GlobalWindowsAzure bootcamp day, and lots of attendees all over the world spent a day getting to know windows azure or improving their existing azure skills. I attended the bootcamp in Copenhagen, and had a fun and inspiring day. I spent the day working with some topics I […]

If you experience problems with your Windows Azure development fabric (the compute emulator) that gets really slow at opening new outbound TCP connections, then it might be because the TCP connection pool are getting filled with TCP connections stuck in the TIME_WAIT state. TCP connections are a limited resource so […]

This is a collection of useful articles about SharePoint branding: How to use CssRegistration

If you want to test that you worker role can recycle correctly when the configuration settings are changed, it’s possible to do so on your local developer machine, if you do the following. First you role can’t be running with debugger attached since it will put the role in an […]

At the moment I’m working on a Windows Azure project, which I hope to reveal soon. In my quest to make it as cheap as possible to run my application, I have decided to replace my queue polling with a pub-sub pattern instead, so I saving money on queue transactions […]

Today I digged up one of my old Azure projects that I used for practice while I took the certification nearly two years ago. Unfortunately I haven’t had many opportunities to work with Azure in the mean time so my Azure skills are a little rusty, hence this brush up. […]

This is a list of good articles I have come across, that can help me an others pass the SP2013 certifications. At first the list might be rather short, but I will try to collect as much useful information here as possible: Shredded Storage This is one of my favorite […]

Today I had one of the usual SharePoint guessing games with their little too generic exceptions. I had some code, in a common library that tried to access the data of a field of the the type SPFieldType.User on a SPListItem. This worked fine when logged in as farm administrator, […]

I’m using the android emulator that comes with the Android SDK, to do some testing of mobile webpages. Here’s a few tips that makes that a better experience. First off, don’t use any emulator that runs on the ARM(armeabi-v7a) CPU, they are insanely slow. Instead setup an emulator running on […]

I’m working on a spare time project where I’m using node.js and mongodb to get more familiar with the whole nosql movement. It is an interesting adventure, but it requires a little rethinking on how to model your database, I found this good podcast on how typical relational database design […]

A month ago I passed the 70-576 certification, and only a few days later Microsoft was giving away vouchers for a free 70-480 certification, which obviously was impossible for me to resist. So now, I’m reading up on some HTML5, Javascript, and CSS to prepared for the test. I have […]

I just recently stumbled upon a series of Mircosoft documents/presentations describing different aspects of SharePoint 2013. I will definitely use them in my preparations for the SharePoint 2013 certifications, and they will serve as some interesting reading material on my daily commute to work. The documents can be downloaded here. […]

This weekend I’m trying to do some serious Android development for the first time. It’s been a while since I last done mobile development, infact more than 3 years. This series of blog post is gonna cover my experiences with it. Setting up environment I got a HTC one S […]

Today I had time to boot up my Virtual Box image with Windows 2012 Server for some SharePoint 2012 action. And after only a few minutes I was very frustrated with how often Internet Explorer 10 crashed just to reopen the pages again. The solution to the problem was to […]

Microsoft is preparing for a new line of certification for the release of SharePoint 2013. So far not much information have been revealed, but on this page more will probably come in a near future. http://www.microsoft.com/learning/en/us/certification/cert-sharepoint-server.aspx Note that the links to the actual certifications are broken, they should have been: […]

This is some xslt I have been fiddling with in order to calculate the age of persons in a list from their birthday (or in fact their CPR number, the danish social security number). Unfortunately calculated columns in SharePoint doesn’t support getting today’s date, this is because their values are […]

I quite often use virtual machines, especially for SharePoint development as it just tends to bloat down the host machine, when it is used for other purposes too. On my private developer machine I use Sun’s VirtualBox, a good alternative to VMWare. Unfortunately I have a stupid habit of underestimating […]

Yesterday I discovered that if you use private accessors to unit test private methods, then this will make your unit test fail in AppHarbor. This article describe how to solve this issue.

I just wanted to share a list of useful powershell commands that I use every once in a while, the list will most likely keep growing. I have divided it into two sections one for SharePoint related commands and one for just plain old ps commands. Powershall Commands Add-PSSnapin “Microsoft.SharePoint.Powershell” […]

I just installed the preview of the new Windows Server 2012, and as with all server versions of Windows it comes with some annoying security features (at least if you are a developer). The first thing to disable was the Internet Explorer Enhanced Security Configuration. It has been moved a […]

I needed some xlst (1.0) that could split a comma separated list of urls and output them as a-tags. This was the code I ended up with.

I run some wordpress sites for myself, but I also help some of my friends hosting theirs. Like everybody I care that the sites I manage don’t get hacked or defaced. For a long time my experiences with wordpress in this regard have been very good, it is a mature […]

I’m currently working on a spare time project that is gonna involve quite a bit of image generation and manipulation, so I was doing a brief survey on available libraries to see if there was something more suited than System.Drawing for my purpose. In the process I stumbled upon a […]

The following powershell sniplet can do exactly that. $Account = “ADACCOUNT” #Change this Write-Host Looking up SID for account $Account $AdObj = New-Object System.Security.Principal.NTAccount($Account) $strSID = $AdObj.Translate([System.Security.Principal.SecurityIdentifier]) Write-Host Found SID for account $strSID.Value $w = wevtutil gl application Write-Host $w $channelAccess = $w[5] if ($channelAccess.Contains(“channelAccess:”)) { $str = $channelAccess.Replace(“channelAccess: “,””) […]

On a recent project I taking part in I was authoring some Excel workbooks that were to be hosted in a SharePoint 2010 portal and display with Excel Services. Our development machines were running Windows Server 2008 R2, as I’m sure many SharePoint development machines are. The gave a few […]

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/sharepointdev/archive/2012/02/09/how-to-programmatically-update-an-odc-file-shubh-raj-singh.aspx

This article describes how to do so, it got the Guid you need. http://spandothers.wordpress.com/2009/01/17/renaming-the-title-column-in-a-sharepoint-list/

Converting week number + year to a datetime object, showing datetime as week numbers.

I’m currently preparing for the SharePoint 2010 certification, about configuring the platform, TS 70-667. As part of this preparation i have collected the following links that I hope will help me pass with ease. For the other certifications I have taken I have prepared by reading books, but since this […]

To show the file content of the GAC, you can use the following trick. All you have to do is to mount the c:\windows\assembly folder (the GAC folder) to a drive letter, then you will be able to browse all its content. To mount it type: subst x: c:\windows\assembly

I just completed uploading my latest video to youtube. It’s about The video about GN-Crews Battlefield 1942 adventures at BasseLan in Skagen 2004.. You can see it here:

Use the SPPersistedObject class if you want to save serialized object data in the configuration database.

Here’s a good resource on how to use the ItemUpdating and ItemUpdated events. http://www.synergyonline.com/blog/blog-moss/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=25

SPUtility.GetLocalizedString(“$Resources:List_Pages_UrlName”, “cmscore”, SPContext.Current.RegionalSettings.LocaleId);

This article has some code for a control adapter that can be used for just that. http://blog.sharepoint.ch/2007/12/webpartzone-adapter.html I does however not wrap webparts in divs, it only renders the webpart contents, which means any Chrom will be gone, as will those pesky tables that you might dislike. If you like […]

I just recently returned from a trip to California. We spent two days in Solvang, wonderful area with a really beautiful nature. On our way back we stopped by Lake Cachuma here I quickly took 8 pictures with my quite crappy Cannon SD1300 SI camera while standing and rotation rotating […]

This is the magic javascript you need to include: Explanation is here: http://www.ajaxprojects.com/ajax/tutorialdetails.php?itemid=323

Changes to the QueryOverride must be made before CreateChildControls is called. Thus it can either be done on databinding or in an override of CreateChildControls before base.CreateChildControls is called.

Grabbed from: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/mcsnoiwb/archive/2008/05/28/site-provisioning-order.aspx If you ever have gotten stumbled over your features not activating as expected or dependencies not working, that might have to do with site provisioning order. SharePoint provisions in the following order: 1.global onet.xml 2.SPSite scoped features defined in onet.xml, in the order they are defined in […]

When a WSP package is deployed it installs all features of the package to the desired web-application, but beside that it also installs them to the web-application that hosts the central administration (CA). This can cause problems, if the feature isn’t uninstalled correctly from all web-apps including CA. The problem […]

To remove mouse pointer corruption on a multi monitor setup, run the windows magnify tool at 100 %.

http://www.hezser.de/blog/archive/2007/04/29/how-to-use-the-sharepoint-web-controls.aspx http://www.wisdom-soft.com/downloads/downloadfiles.htm http://www.brsreddy.com/2009/05/edit-dispform-editform-or-newform-in.html http://blog.thekid.me.uk/archive/2007/02/15/a-solution-to-quot-an-unexpected-error-has-occurred-quot-in-wss-v3.aspx http://weblogs.asp.net/bsimser/archive/2006/09/25/Enabling-anonymous-access-in-SharePoint-2007.aspx

With fourteen days left before the grand Eurovision final 2010 in Oslo on May the 28th, I finally found some time to listen to this years contestants. Here is my nine picks.

Uninstalling applications that use unnecessary network socket resources.

This is just a short collection of useful links for stock trading. http://preview.bloomberg.com http://finance.yahoo.com http://reuters.com http://www.kurstarget.dk http://www.euroinvestor.dk

You have a large set of data and is only interested in a subset of it. But the subset is not easily defined, it could be a list of IDs or something similar what do you do? In SQL you could write a SELECT * FROM Items WHERE itemId IN […]

OpenGL shader programming in your browser. One of the most talented guys from the demo scene, Inigo Quilez, decided that making awesome 4k demos wasnt challenging enough so he set out to make a shader programming environment for WebGL enabled browsers (Web-kit browsers, Firefox 3.7 and Chrome). To enable WebGL […]

I had some SQL trouble selecting  distinct values from a single column while also selecting the remaining columns from the table. After trying  without any real breakthrough I turn to stackoverflow and luckily Peter Lang was the man with an fast answer. The question was (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2052158/ordered-sql-select-columnwise-distinct-but-return-of-all-columns) I have a little […]