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[Azure] News for Developers, the readme!

May 27, 2020May 28, 2020 Jasper Siegmund 1 Comment

This entry is part 1 of 37 in the series Azure news for Developers

I’ve been keeping up my Azure News for Developers series on my blog for quite some time now. And even though each post contains a little introduction, I thought it might be nice to include a separate post to detail what you can expect from this series.

I started writing these blogs mainly to force myself to keep up with things. There’s a lot going on in the Azure space each week (well each day probably) and sometimes it’s easy so miss out on stuff. So I devised this method for myself mainly, and why not share it so that others can benefit as well? So first thing to know is that I’m writing these posts out of my own personal perspective, although I do try to not have that interfere with picking the right news items to include.

So how do I decide what’s in and what’s not? Here goes:

I curate each post myself, manually. So there series are not automatically generated posts like there are a lot
The news items will be interesting for developers. So things more towards infrastructure or specialist roles like AI and big data will usually not make the cut. Sometimes there’s news that might be interesting for developers as well, in which case I try to determine if “a large part” of my target audience would benefit from reading about this news.
The new features I list are mostly things that are generally available, I normally exclude features in preview. This is because not everyone might be able to use these features and these features are not to be used in production scenarios yet. So if you want the really cutting edge stuff you should probably not solely rely on my updates.
I summarize all the news by keeping track of some Microsoft curated news feeds. I try to paint the full picture, but I might miss a thing or two. And sometimes, especially around the big conferences, there’s just too much to summarize in one post.
There will probably be occasions in which I omit news that you find interesting, or include things that you do not care about. That’s a given. If you should not like that, I always try to include all of the feeds I used so you’re of course free to follow those yourself 🙂

So that’s a little sneak peak behind the scenes! A new post is coming up in 5 days, packed with news from the online Build conference. Hope you enjoy!

[Office365] Outlook keeps asking for credentials, network-style

May 6, 2020May 6, 2020 Jasper Siegmund Leave a comment

Please note that the solution below might not apply to your situation, as there are a multitude of reasons why Outlook might keep prompting you for credentials. But I’ve found the following to work for to separate organizations now so I though it would be worth sharing.

The issue is caused by Microsoft rolling out new policies which require the use of two factor authentication. But at the same time, your Exchange tenant is not set-up to allow the modern-style authentication. This throws users into an authentication loop which they cannot get out of without changing the Exchange configuration. So what do you need to do?

Use the PowerShell Exchange cmdlets to connect to Exchange Online. The details for doing so can be found here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/exchange/exchange-online/connect-to-exchange-online-powershell/connect-to-exchange-online-powershell?redirectedfrom=MSDN&view=exchange-ps.
Note that you’ll need to connect with a user which has both administrative privileges over Exchange Online, as well as Azure Active Directory. Either one of those is not sufficient!
Run the following cmdlet:

PowerShell

Get-OrganizationConfig

1

Get-OrganizationConfig

And look for the setting named “OAuth2ClientProfileEnabled“. Chances are that lists as “False”, being disabled.
Run

PowerShell

Set-OrganizationConfig -OAuth2ClientProfileEnabled $true

1

Set-OrganizationConfig -OAuth2ClientProfileEnabled $true

To enable this setting for your organization.

This setting affects the ability to use the modern OAuth authentication pop-up (the one you know from the browser with the nice background) instead of the old-fashioned network-style login. And when using two-factor authentication, the modern pop-up is the only one which is compatible.

I found that after enabling the setting it’s sometimes necessary to close Outlook and reopen it for the prompt to appear. In rare cases we needed to remove the account and re-add it to Outlook. But from that point on things usually started to work.

Oh, and when you’re at it; enforce multi-factor authentication! Most users are used to it by now from consumer products / applications and it really boosts your level of security by a lot. Hope this helps!

[Azure] News for Developers, April 2020

May 2, 2020May 2, 2020 Jasper Siegmund Leave a comment

This entry is part 35 of 37 in the series Azure news for Developers

Are you having trouble keeping track of everything that’s going around in Azure? You’re not alone! In an effort to do so myself, I’m starting a monthly series called “News for developers” which is exactly that: a summary of all of the Azure flavored news specifically for software developers.

This is based on my personal feeds and my personal opinion, so you might miss things or see things which in your opinion do not matter. Feel free to comment below and I’ll see what I can do for the next edition. And honestly, this is more a personal reference than anything else so having actual readers would already be awesome 🙂 Enjoy!

[Azure] News for Developers, March 2020

April 1, 2020April 1, 2020 Jasper Siegmund Leave a comment

This entry is part 34 of 37 in the series Azure news for Developers

[Azure] News for Developers, February 2020

March 1, 2020March 1, 2020 Jasper Siegmund Leave a comment

This entry is part 33 of 37 in the series Azure news for Developers

[Azure] News for Developers, January 2020

January 31, 2020January 30, 2020 Jasper Siegmund 2 Comments

This entry is part 32 of 37 in the series Azure news for Developers

[Azure] News for Developers, December 2019

January 4, 2020January 4, 2020 Jasper Siegmund Leave a comment

This entry is part 31 of 37 in the series Azure news for Developers

[Azure] News for Developers, November 2019

December 3, 2019December 3, 2019 Jasper Siegmund Leave a comment

This entry is part 30 of 37 in the series Azure news for Developers

[Office365] Can’t add a new account to Outlook

November 12, 2019November 12, 2019 Jasper Siegmund Leave a comment

I helped out a colleague today with this little hack. On a new laptop he installed Outlook, but couldn’t get his Office365 account to work. No matter how often he tried adding a new account, Outlook would spend a few seconds “connecting…” and then came back with “Cannot connect” and some useful tips like “Is this your account” (right, thanks). Important thing to note: Outlook did not re-request any credentials for new attempts… hmmm…

So what’s the trick?

Make sure that Outlook is completely closed.
Open up Credential Manager, which you can find using the search bar or through Control Panel > User Accounts
Click the “Windows Credentials” option
Now within that list, find all options related to Outlook, Office365 or Azure AD. Delete them.
Don’t worry about deleting too much. You might be prompted to login to certain stuff again, as long as you can do that: you’re good.
Now open up Outlook and try again… it might just work now 😉

If this did work, here’s what might have happened:

The credential box shown is a network-credential style dialog, in which most users type their account + password
If your organisation is using multi factor authentication, this might not work. You need to enter an app password instead, which you can get here: https://account.activedirectory.windowsazure.com/AppPasswords.aspx
But in this case, the user password was being stored in the Windows Credentials manager, which was causing Outlook to retry that same password over and over again even though it did not work.
Clearing the stored credential will reprompt for a new one, and now you can enter the correct app password and things will be glorious again.

I’m not entirely sure when Outlook chooses to show that network style dialog, I’m pretty sure that newer versions (which this was) can also cope with Azure AD authentication and multi factor logins. Maybe not, who knows. At least the above helped him and if it doesn’t work for you: keep on searching, the answer is bound to be out there somewhere! (or just contact support…)

[Azure] News for Developers, October 2019

November 1, 2019November 1, 2019 Jasper Siegmund Leave a comment

This entry is part 29 of 37 in the series Azure news for Developers