One of the cool things about Azure Functions is that they are very easy to get started. You create a new function, type some code and you’re off. This is very nice from a getting started point of view, but once you’re considering to use them for more than just playing around, other things come into play. For instance, you might want to actually test what you’re doing. You might want to reference projects, you might want to reuse some of the code you (or your company) already has. Now there’s all kinds of ways of doing this, but just recently the Function teams introduced another very interesting possibility: the use of precompiled DLL’s. (more…)
Author: Jasper Siegmund
[Azure] From Function to SharePoint List Item
This article describes how to insert an item into a SharePoint list using an Azure Function written in C#. Might seem like a trivial task, but there are some caveats you might want to take notice of before you start.
[Azure] Debugging Azure Functions: could not register URL
It’s still in the works, but the Azure Functions team released a preview version of the “Visual Studio Tools for Azure Functions”. At this time, you’ll need VS2015 Update 3 installed to get this to work, check out https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/webdev/2016/12/01/visual-studio-tools-for-azure-functions/ for further instructions.
So all excited I downloaded the tools, installed them and created my first local Function to debug from Studio. Unfortunately, it didn’t work. I got two command prompt windows which disappeared after a short while. No error, no debug, nothing. Hmmm….
A good next step is to run the functions CLI locally. You’ll need to have the CLI installed for this. Simply head over to the folder where you’ve just created your project and run “func host start”. In my case, this resulted in the following error:
“HTTP could not register URL http://+:7071/. Your process does not have access rights to this namespace”
You can assume that Visual Studio is facing the same issue, as it is also using the CLI underwater to host the functions. So what now? I found that the following command will list all of the registered http services:
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netsh http show urlacl > c:\http.txt |
Check that http.txt file and you’ll see there probably is an entry for http://+:7071/ in there. I had nothing running on that port as far as I was aware so I decided to simply delete the reservation:
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netsh http delete urlacl https://+:7071/ |
And there you go, the port is now freed up and both the CLI as well as debugging from Visual Studio (not at the same time, obviously) started working! 🙂
[Azure] Using an Azure Function to create custom Flow actions
If you’re working with Microsoft Flow, chances are that on some point in time you’ll run into a situation where the action you need simply doesn’t exist. If you’re a developer with skills to write C#, PowerShell, Node or even batch code, you’re in luck! Cause why not create that action yourself in the form of an Azure Function? Here’s how to do it. (more…)
[Azure] Using multiple accounts side-by-side with Chrome
If you’re in the Microsoft Azure or Office365 space, chances are that you have a couple of accounts that you use to access these services. Your company account, MSDN subscription, maybe some customer accounts, a couple of demo tenants, etc. You’ll also know that switching between account is quite a bitch. You need to log out, log in again, lose all of your session cookies and automatically log out from other services as well. Pretty annoying.
If you’ve got Chrome installed, you’ve got the answer sitting right there on your desktop already. Open up the settings window and find the “People” section. This allows you to create multiple profiles for different users. The nice thing is that these users do not share any cookies or other session data. So a Chrome instance for user A does not interfere with a second instance for user B. It’s like running InPrivate mode, but without the need to log in again each time you fire it up.
Super simple trick, but a real time saver so I thought I’d share. Enjoy!
[IoT] How Azure IoT would have prevented a DDoS
Two weeks ago, parts of the Internet came to a halt due to a DDoS attack. DDoS attacks have become pretty common these last few years, but usually target a specific website. For instance, attackers might target microsoft.com and start firing enormous amounts of requests to it. Due to the load, the website will eventually choke and stop responding to both the malicious as to normal requests, with the result that the website is “down”.
There were two things that made this DDoS attack a bit different:
- This attack was not targeting a website or webservers, but instead DNS servers. DNS is used for address resolution, which comes down to translating a normal URL (like www.repsaj.nl) to an IP address. By targeting DNS servers, the attackers managed to bring down lots of sites at once, with your PC left unable to find the correct IP address for the website you requested. So in this case, the webservers were fine but the clients didn’t have a way to reach them.
- The attack was largely carried out using IoT devices. This included IP-connected webcams for instance, which many people have at home.
This uncovers a large security issue with lots of IoT devices, which could have been easily prevented (or at least a lot better secured) using a back-end like Azure. Let’s find out how… (more…)
[SPO] Creating a ‘modern’ homepage on an old team site
If you’re an Office365 user, you will probably have noticed by now that the new look & feel dubbed ‘modern’ (which is a stupid name, but aight…) is slowly but steadily making it’s way into more and more parts of the overall experience. I like the modern look. It’s crispy fresh, more in-line with modern UI’s like Googles Material and Microsofts Metro Modern UI. As an added benefit, the new look should play well with the SharePoint mobile app, bringing responsive design to the table so pages remain usable on mobile devices.
But what about legacy sites?
[Azure] AAD “You do not have permission to view this directory or page.”
I ran into this error debugging my Cordova app from Visual Studio, running the debugger locally instead of on my device. After logging into Azure Active Directory with valid credentials, the page would display this error:
“You do not have permission to view this directory or page.”
As this was the second time I had to figure out how to solve it, thought I’d do a quick post on it for my own future reference 🙂 (more…)
[IoT] Limiting per device messaging & auto reset
In my aquarium monitor series I showed how to build an application to monitor a fish tank. The use of the Azure IoT components allow us to easily build these kinds of solutions based on generic components. It also allows us to scale, which makes it very suitable for scenarios with lots of devices or data.
Should you want to make your application multi-tenant, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t… or is there? What if you don’t have complete control over the clients and someone starts to send way more data then expected? Hmm… (more…)
[O365] Using SharePoint boolean fields with Microsoft Flow
My previous post just now was on the topic of Microsoft Flow, the workflow-style application that allows you to perform “if this, than that” type logic linking different applications together. Basically, Flow provides you a way of automating actions by having a set of triggers, some logic and using API’s to perform actions. It wraps all of this in a nice and easy to use user interface, making this functionality that pretty much everyone can leverage. Power to the business!
In this post I want to show how I created a real-life flow to automate a process for expense declarations. The process is a really simple one:
- We’ve created an Expense Declarations library on SharePoint.
- We added a new Expense Declaration content type which has an Excel template for the declaration.
- We also added a boolean field “Ready” which signals the expense form is ready for processing.
- The form should now be sent to the person handling the declarations. Of course it would be even better to send it directly into an API, but unfortunately that’s not available for us.
As said, the basic elements of a flow are a trigger, some logic (conditions) and actions. Let’s go!
Defining the trigger
To create the flow, we head over to flow.microsoft.com and after signing in (or up), we begin with a blank flow. The first action we add is “When an existing item is modified”. This is because:
- The “created” action will fire off immediately after the form was created and is probably still empty.
- The action for a modified document will not contain the correct information, our Ready field will not be present. This is supposed to be changed in the future though.
So we set up the existing item modified trigger:
Note: because your library is a library, it might not show up in the suggestions. That doesn’t mean you cannot use it though, just type in the name and you should be good to go.
Creating a condition
Next, we need to set-up the condition. We want the declaration to be sent only when the Ready field is set to Yes. Because the value is stored as a boolean, the field value sent to flow will be “true”. You can check that by running your flow (trigger it from SharePoint after saving) and clicking the trigger to inspect the values coming in:
Check out the value for Ready:
So now the most straightforward thing to do would be to set up the condition like this:
But this does not work. I suspect the engine will handle “true” as a string which would give a comparison of “true == ‘true'” which is false. To fix this, put the editor in advanced mode and use the following expression: @equals(triggerBody()?[‘Ready’], bool(1)).
bool(1) will convert to ‘true’ so our comparison should now be “true == true” whenever the Ready field is set to Yes in SharePoint.
Setting up the action
Lastly, I created a simple e-mail action to send out a notification to the correct user. Ideally I wanted to add the file contents to that e-mail but that isn’t possible (yet) due to the “item modified” trigger which is not aware of a file. I tried several ways to get around this but didn’t succeed. You can probably get there with something customized like an Azure Function, but for now the plain old e-mail will do. Simply set-up an Office365 e-mail action to send out a mail to inform the correct user a new declaration has been added, paste in the link to the library and you’re set.
When I find a way to attach the file to the e-mail or send a direct link to the file, I’ll update this post!
